Trump’s WLFI Contracts See Trading Spike Ahead of Unlock

Open interest in contracts for the Trump family-tied World Liberty Financial token neared $1 billion just hours ahead of a partial token unlock.

Open interest on derivative contracts for the World Liberty Financial (WLFI) token neared $950 million in early trading on Monday, before cooling to $887 million, still up 45% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass.

The trading volume on WLFI derivatives has jumped over 535% in the past day to $4.54 billion and is the fifth-most traded crypto derivative in the past 24 hours.

The token is trading at around 34 cents on most exchanges, down from a peak of over 40 cents a week ago.

Open interest is the number of active, outstanding contracts not yet settled and shows that WLFI is seeing strong interest ahead of an unlock of around 5% of the token supply due in a few hours.

WLFI value could be among crypto top 10

If the price of WLFI continues to trade at around 34 cents, the token could have a fully diluted market value of $34 billion, based on its total supply of 100 billion tokens.

Its total market value would make it the ninth-largest cryptocurrency, replacing Tron (TRX) and pushing Dogecoin (DOGE) out of the top 10, both of which have full market values under $32 billion.

If its price holds, WLFI’s market capitalization will be around $1.7 billion, based on the around 5 billion tokens that are set to be unlocked.

Binance sees lion’s share of WLFI trades

CoinGlass data shows crypto exchange Binance has seen the largest share of WLFI derivatives trading, taking in about half of the total 24-hour trading volume at $2.22 billion with over 10.5 million trades.

Binance has also taken in the lion’s share of open interest, with about half of the total open interest, or $436.5 million, being sent through the platform.

OKX saw the next largest number of trades and volume, with nearly 1.1 million trades putting up $917.5 million in the past day.

Tokens to unlock on Monday

World Liberty said on Aug. 22 that it was unlocking 20% of the tokens purchased by its early supporters on Sept. 1 at 8 am New York time (12 pm UTC) after its community voted in mid-July to allow WLFI to trade.

Many large exchanges, including Kraken and Binance, have said they’d list the token for trading. Originally, the tokens were to serve only as a governance token for its upcoming Ethereum-based exchange and lending platform.

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The firm raised $550 million through token sales, which are now set to unlock. In October, it opened a sale of 20 billion tokens for 1.5 cents each to net $300 million, which it eventually sold all of in late January as the tokens were only available to accredited investors in the US.

It then immediately opened another round of token sales after its first sale was completed, putting up 5 billion tokens at $0.05 each — a 230% markup from the first sale, which was completed in mid-March and raised $250 million.

US President Donald Trump is listed as World Liberty’s “Chief Crypto Advocate” while sons, Barron, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are listed as “Web3 Ambassadors.” A company tied to the family earns 75% of the protocol’s revenues.

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