**Trump-Supported DeFi Token Struggles with Initial Sale Amid Website Outages**

A new cryptocurrency initiative endorsed by U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump faced early setbacks as its website crashed on launch day and initial token sales fell significantly short of expectations. The public sale for the World Liberty Financial token, WLFI, commenced at approximately 12:40 UTC (8:40 a.m. ET) on Tuesday but was plagued by technical difficulties, deterring potential investors.

Despite the website's frequent outages in the first hour, nearly 2,900 participants managed to purchase WLFI tokens. Blockchain data revealed around 344 million tokens were sold, distributed across roughly 3,000 unique wallets. However, this figure constituted only 1.7% of the 20 billion tokens designated for public sale.

Sandy Peng, an advisor to World Liberty Financial and co-founder of the Scroll blockchain network, attributed the site's downtime to unexpectedly high traffic, reporting 72 million unique visits in its initial hour. Efforts to mitigate the issue included switching to a new web hosting service to handle the load.

Sales saw a brief surge around 17:30 UTC when the site functioned properly for about an hour. By 18:10 UTC, the associated Ethereum blockchain wallet held assets valued at nearly $5.7 million in Ether (ETH), $1.6 million in Tether (USDT), and approximately $300,000 in USD Coin (USDC).

WLFI tokens are projected to play a governance role within the World Liberty Financial platform, which plans to enable users to engage in borrowing, lending, and other decentralized finance (DeFi) activities. These tokens will initially be non-transferable, effectively locking them into wallets or smart contracts unless future modifications are made. Token holders will have voting rights on several critical issues, including protocol upgrades and security oversight.

The project, heavily branded with the Trump name, lists Donald Trump as "chief crypto advocate" and his sons Eric, Barron, and Donald Jr. as "Web3 ambassadors." The public sale allocated 20 billion tokens at a fixed rate of 1.5 cents each, aiming for a total fundraising goal of $300 million.

Participation in the WLFI token sale is limited to non-U.S. residents and accredited U.S. investors to adhere to U.S. securities laws. The project had pre-approved over 100,000 accredited U.S. investors meeting specific income and net worth criteria prior to the sale.

A recently released "gold paper" provides further details on the WLFI token's distribution and its envisioned function within the World Liberty Financial platform. The document notes the importance of adhering to U.S. regulations to maintain legal compliance in all governance decisions.

World Liberty Financial positions itself as a comprehensive platform for borrowing and lending cryptocurrencies, establishing liquidity pools, and transactions with stablecoins. The venture aims to utilize the Trump brand's global reach to transition Web2 users into the Web3 ecosystem, while promoting the use of USD-based stablecoins and preserving the U.S. dollar's status as the global reserve currency in the DeFi space.