On Tuesday, a trio of CoinDesk writers had a good laugh at the Trump family’s clownish rush to cash in on the crypto-craze, Inside the Trump Crypto Project Linked to a $2M DeFi Hack and Former Pick-Up Artist. Señor T and his greed obsessed sons (operating under the name “The DeFiant Ones”) have for weeks teased an upcoming cryptocurrency project, but they've been light on details in public” while shopping around a white paper for what they’ve named “World Liberty Financial.” Basically, it’s “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… [T]he 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.”
They either put together a team of notorious crypto-scam artists— or were sold a bill of goods by said team of swindlers and flimflam men (Zachary Folkman, Chase Herro, Octavian Lojnita and Boga (AKA, 0xboga)— and Trump undoubtedly sees this as a new iteration of a building name licensing scheme like the one that failed so spectacularly in Baku, Azerbaijan when the Trumps hooked up with that country’s very own Mafia to put up a skyscraper that failed and that mysteriously burned down.
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.
…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.
…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.
The project's figurehead is Donald J. Trump, who has taken the title of "Chief Crypto Advocate." His sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.— who seem to be the driving force behind the project – are also involved as "Web3 Ambassadors."
The project's leadership team also includes people who aren't in Trump's family. In addition to Folkman, Herro, Lojnita and Boga, the project's leadership includes long-time Trump friend and well-known property developer Steve Witkoff ("Institutional Investment") and his son Zach Witkoff ("Intelligence") and Alex Golubitsky ("Legal Counsel").
Golubitsky and his legal partner, Gabriel Shapiro, run the crypto governance advisory MetaleX Pro. The firm has disclosed it is receiving 1.3% of World Financial Liberty's upcoming token $WLFI.
Folkman and Herro, who also goes by "Chase Hero," are longtime friends and business partners. In addition to their work with Subify, Herro and Folkman have operated so-called "mastermind groups”— essentially, private networking clubs with a steep price of entry— and sold online e-commerce courses.
Herro has appeared as a guest on popular podcasts including YouTuber Logan Paul’s podcast “Implausible.” where he has discussed his past stints in prison for drug-related charges, and how he got rich as a "self-made businessman." Paul is currently being sued in a class action lawsuit accusing him of orchestrating a run-pull with his failed CryptoZoo project.
Court records show Herro owns a 34-foot boat called "Clickbait."
According to data from Open Corporates, Folkman, under the alias Zack Bauer, formerly operated the pick-up artist advice platform "Date Hotter Girls" with another individual, Rob Judge. During his work with Date Hotter Girls, Folkman taught "masterclasses," including one on how to "Become the Ultimate Alpha Male."
Beginning in 2015, Herro and Folkman started "The Watchers," a Facebook page and YouTube channel with 2,280 subscribers dedicated to providing information about cryptocurrency and advice about entrepreneurship. The last video was uploaded four years ago. Herro formerly operated a crypto trading firm called "Pacer Capital," which appears to no longer exist.
The initiative is part of a significant shift for Trump, who during his presidency expressed skepticism toward digital assets and derided Bitcoin as "based on thin air." Now, with a campaign promise to make the United States the "crypto capital of the planet," the former president is aiming to solidify his appeal with an industry that has accounted for more than half of all corporate campaign spending in this election cycle.
It comes after the former president sold multiple waves of Trump-themed non-fungible tokens (NFTs), some of which gave purchasers raffle tickets to attend a dinner with him or similar rewards. He just released the fourth batch.
Cryptocurrency companies have dumped $119 million into the 2024 election cycle, outspent only by the fossil fuel industry. Two of the top-10 corporate spenders in this election are Coinbase and Ripple, with Coinbase securing the No. 1 spot.
The crypto industry has also made itself felt through targeted funding spent by Fairshake, a super political action committee, and its affiliated PACs, claiming 26 wins in the 2024 primaries.
Trump and other Republicans have sought to argue that they will nurture the crypto industry, replacing unpopular regulators and allowing entrepreneurs to launch products without fear of lawsuits or subpoenas from agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission. Democrats have been more split on the issue, with some prominent lawmakers like Sen. Chuck Schumer promising legislation to clarify the rules of the road but others remain hostile to digital assets. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has not said anything publicly about crypto or how she views the issue.
As Andrew Egger assessed for Bulwark readers on Wednesday. “The only difference between Trump’s ‘official’ crypto rackets and the scams that imitate them is who gets the profits.” Egger informed his readers that in recent weeks MAGA Internet has become even more of a scam-Fest than usual— and the scams are “getting harder to distinguish from reality. [Tuesday] night, Lara and Tiffany Trump seemingly shared a big announcement: The official Trump-sanctioned crypto project was live! Their posts pledged to ‘take power away from the centralized banks’ and to allow ‘the average person to thrive on taking charge of their own finances.’ The average person’s ticket to such flourishing: the new ‘World Liberty’ cryptocurrency, trading on the platform Solana as $WL. But no, Lara’s husband Eric Trump scurried to write: These posts were fakes! Lara and Tiffany had been hacked! As it turned out, $WL was an impostor— a Trump-branded crypto token someone had minted without the Trumps’ consent. The whole thing was over in about an hour, but hundreds of thousands of dollars had already changed hands.”
Perhaps unkindly, Eggers noted that “It’s no wonder rackets like these proliferate. Sifting truth and lies is an incredibly difficult task online these days, and that’s especially true on the astroturf get-rich-quick playground of crypto. And MAGA foot soldiers, known more for their devotion to the cause than their deductive reasoning abilities, make for excellent marks. But there’s another reason these rackets work, too: Donald Trump is running crypto grifts of his own all the time.”
[Tuesday’s] scam was straightforwardly a scam. But was it a worse scam than slapping a MAGA coat of paint on a sputtering crypto app to bring in a more credulous clientele? Was the Trump family’s primary concern with Lara and Tiffany’s accounts being hacked that it funneled the profits to persons unknown, rather than to the family?
…“You know, they call me the crypto president,” Trump said in a video last month. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but many people are saying that.”
And then yesterday, Politico wondered aloud whether the Trumpanzee foray into crypto isn’t a huge cringy mistake. Jasper Goodman’s perspective begins with the crooked sons wanting “to turn their father’s growing bromance with the cryptocurrency industry into the new family business. So far, the project’s troubled rollout has succeeded in creating only one thing: a potential political liability for the former president.” Some of Trump’s allies within the crypto world are “warning that his family should shelve a project that they say creates unnecessary political risks and reflects poorly on the industry. ‘This is a huge mistake,’ said Nic Carter, a Trump supporter who is a founding partner at the crypto-focused venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures. ‘It looks like Trump’s inner circle is just cashing in on his recent embrace of crypto in a kind of naive way, and frankly it looks like they’re burning a lot of the good will that’s been built with the industry so far.’ The drama illustrates the risks associated with Trump’s growing embrace of the crypto community, which he’s promised to give a sweeping set of supportive policies if elected. Government watchdogs have also warned the intertwining of politics, policy and the Trump family business poses new conflict of interest concerns as Democrats try to paint him as a ‘con artist’ in the home stretch of the presidential campaign. It comes as major crypto firms face ongoing criticism that the market is rife with scams and consumer abuse.”
Now why, oh why, would anyone label Señor T a “con artist?”
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