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Trump-backed World Liberty says “we are nowhere near liquidation” as token slips to all-time low

The team borrowed stablecoins by leveraging $5 billion worth of WLFI as collateral, igniting skepticism among those in crypto whether World Liberty would repay its debt.

Sage D. Young

WLFI, the token that aims to provide holders governance rights of the President Trump-backed World Liberty Financial, dropped to an all-time low on Friday. 

The price action comes after the World Liberty team borrowed $75 million in USDC by using $5 billion worth of WLFI as collateral on crypto lending protocol Dolomite, exposing the latter to potential bad debt, CoinDesk reports. 

“By being the anchor borrower, we’re generating the yield that makes WLFI Markets compelling for everyone else,” World Liberty Financial posted on X Thursday night. “We are nowhere near liquidation — and frankly, even if markets moved dramatically against us, we’d simply supply more collateral. That’s not a risk,” the team said.

However, the assurance to supply additional WLFI as collateral has not eased concerns among some in the crypto ecosystem, who have expressed skepticism World Liberty will repay its stablecoin debt. On-chain data shows that World Liberty has already sent over $40 million to Coinbase Prime.

Corey Chaplan, Dolomite cofounder and adviser to World Liberty Financial, did not respond to Sherwood News’ request for comment by publication. 

Out of Dolomite’s total supply liquidity of $794 million, more than 74% stems from World Liberty’s governance token, WLFI, and its stablecoin, USD1, the platform’s web interface shows

“WLFI trades with limited market depth relative to the size of the position. If the token moves sharply lower and Dolomite’s liquidation mechanism triggers, the forced sale would crash the price before the collateral could be unwound, leaving the protocol holding bad debt,” CoinDesk reported. 

The World Liberty team also announced an upcoming governance proposal to unlock tokens. “The vote will be on a long-term vesting and unlock schedule for retail early purchasers — a structured, phased approach designed with the long-term health of the ecosystem in mind,” the World Liberty team said on X. 

Unlocks, the gradual process of releasing previously restricted tokens into circulation to prevent early selling, can introduce volatility to the market for a given token. The price of WLFI has decreased over 14% in the last 24 hours to trade at $0.08, its lowest point since its inception last year, per CoinGecko.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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