Four team members listed in World Liberty Financial’s white paper previously worked on Dough Finance, which was drained of $2 million in July. One also founded Date Hotter Girls LLC.
Donald Trump and his sons have for weeks teased an upcoming cryptocurrency project, but they’ve been light on details in public.
Privately, though, the former U.S. president’s inner circle has been quietly shopping around a white paper for World Liberty Financial – and CoinDesk has obtained excerpts.
The document and other reporting describe a borrowing and lending service strikingly similar to Dough Finance, a recently hacked blockchain app built by four people listed as World Liberty Financial team members. Other participants include all three of Trump’s sons (including 18-year-old Barron, who is identified as the project’s “DeFi visionary”), financiers and e-commerce influencers.
According to a person familiar with the plans, the project will also include a new cryptocurrency: WLFI, a non-transferable governance token. A transfer restriction could make the asset difficult for speculators to trade.
World Liberty Financial “highlights the power of blockchain in an accessible way,” according to the white paper. Though the app isn’t ready for prime time, a review of a since-deleted codebase on GitHub shows that the project – at least in its early stages – appears to have lifted code directly from Dough Finance, which lost $2 million in July’s hack. It has not been confirmed whether later iterations of the app contain such earlier code, and there is no indication that any vulnerabilities in the Dough Finance code appear in the new project’s code.
Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro – listed in the white paper as World Liberty Financial’s head of operations and its data and strategies lead, respectively – built Dough Finance, a person familiar with the matter said. (Herro used to link to Dough Finance’s Telegram group in his bio on the messaging app, according to a screenshot reviewed by CoinDesk.) Octavian Lojnita, the project’s smart contracts lead, also previously worked on Dough Finance, according to his online resume. Boga, World Liberty Financial’s pseudonymous front-end developer, is listed as an author (under 0xboga) in Dough Finance’s source code.
A limited liability corporation for World Liberty Financial is registered to Folkman, who, along with Herro, is the co-creator of Subify, which bills itself as a censorship-free competitor to both Patreon and OnlyFans – both services that let customers pay content creators, with the latter skewing toward explicit content. Folkman previously registered a company called Date Hotter Girls LLC and posted seminars on YouTube on how to pick up women.
Herro, Folkman, World Liberty Financial and the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Details about Trump’s foray into decentralized finance have been scarce up until now. Members of the Trump family teased that it was coming on social media, but they revealed little beyond the project’s name. When it was first announced last month, it was called The DeFiant Ones.
According to the white paper for the rebranded World Liberty Financial, the project will include a “credit account system” – built on decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Aave and the Ethereum blockchain – to facilitate decentralized borrowing and lending.
Governance tokens like WLFI generally allow their owners to participate in the management of the crypto project. In this case, the platform’s users “can suggest and vote on adding new DeFi lending markets or integrating new blockchains,” according to the white paper.
The white paper also says the product will feature an “easy-to-use interface for accessing WLFI as a ‘smart account’ or a brokerage.”
Previous efforts to create crypto brokerage services have seen mixed results. Companies like Voyager Digital, which offered brokerage services, fell into bankruptcy in 2022, costing customers significant chunks of money. More traditional financial firms have also made moves toward offering brokerage services to crypto clients, though they’ve so far refrained from getting deep into DeFi specifically.
