Even so, World Liberty said in mid-March it had raised $550 million selling so-called governance tokens. Most of those sales took place after Trump’s election win in November, Reuters calculations show.The tokens, which go by the symbol $WLFI, give holders the right to vote on changes to the project’s underlying code and to signal their opinion on its direction and plans. They cannot be traded.As its fundraising got traction, World Liberty disclosed in January that the Trump family had taken control of the business, a review of changes in the fine print on World Liberty’s website shows. Two of its co-founders, crypto entrepreneurs Zak Folkman and Chase Herro, were replaced as the controlling parties of World Liberty by an entity in which the Trump family holds a 60% stake.The changes have not been previously reported.
Anyone should have seen this coming, but of course the actual deed got buried in fine print. And people are still buying these "governance" tokens.
Also:
The five largest DeFi lending platforms, as ranked by data site DefiLlama, all have governance tokens that give holders voting rights. But unlike World Liberty, those five platforms either allocated the majority of their governance tokens to be given away for free to users, sold them to venture capitalists in return for money to build the platform, or paid them to partners in return for building the project.World Liberty governance tokens lack another critical feature of those issued by other DeFi platforms – the ability of token holders to vote for the platform to pay them a share of its profits. World Liberty has told token holders any vote to breach its existing deals with Trump and other backers would have no force, according to a 13-page description of the business released in October.
In other words, WLF is scammy even by the standards of scammy shitcion defi (which is scammy even by shitcoin standards to begin with).