Trump's coin sale misses early targets as crypto project's website crashes

Donald Trump’s new crypto project is off to a rough start.

World Liberty Financial, which aspires to be a sort of crypto bank, launched its token sale on Tuesday, a day after project co-founder Zachary Folkman said “well over 100,000 people” are on the whitelist to invest.

But WLF’s website suffered regular and lengthy outages for much of the morning and early afternoon, contributing to a limited number of sales. Only about 4,300 unique wallet addresses hold the token as of Tuesday afternoon, according to blockchain data tracked by Etherscan, representing roughly 4% of the total number of people who registered.

The platform says it has sold more than 532 million tokens at 15 cents per token. That is less than 3% of the 20 billion tokens made available for public sale.

Over the course of the day, the website frequently showed a page saying, “We are under maintenance.”

WLF did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The glitchy launch is a potential setback to the Republican presidential nominee with just three weeks until the election. Trump and his family have been touting the project since August, branding it as “The DeFiant Ones,” a play on DeFi, which is short for decentralized finance.

In a roadmap given to prospective investors that was first viewed by The Block, the WLF proposal says the coin is looking to raise $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in its initial sale. Folkman, who previously had a company called Date Hotter Girls and reportedly helped develop crypto project Dough Finance, has said 20% of WLF’s tokens would be allotted to the founding team, which includes the Trump family.

The digital coin WLFI will be a Regulation D token offering, following a provision that makes it possible to raise capital without first registering a security with the SEC. Certain conditions must be met, such as limiting the size of the sale and restricting it to accredited investors, defined in part as having a net worth of more than $1 million.

While few details have been announced about the project’s aspirations, people involved with WLF have said customers will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in crypto. No official white paper or formal business plan has been released to the public, and about all that has been disclosed is that investing in the project will give users voting rights over the yet-to-be-launched WLF platform.

Last week, WLF began the process of getting its crypto bank approved by the DeFi ecosystem known as Aave.

Aave is open source and, in DeFi, is one of the longest-running and most-trusted crypto lending platforms.

Crypto was not the only dark spot for Trump-related investments on Tuesday.

Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of social media platform Truth Social, plunged nearly 10% at the close after trading was briefly halted when the stock suddenly plummeted.

— CNBC’s Kaan Oguz and Jordan Smith contributed to this report.