Two hours gone and some tokenomics

Former President Trump and his two oldest sons lent their social media accounts' tens of millions of followers to a livestream last night launching a so-called decentralized finance project called World Liberty Financial.

Reality check: Over the meandering audio-only stream on X that lasted two hours, we didn't learn anything specific about the project beyond how it plans to distribute its token, WLFI.

• We attempted to wring some news out of the event, but here I want to tell readers about the misery of listening.

In the room: The former president didn't say a word about the project on last night's stream.

• He gave a first-hand account of the assassination attempt against him Sunday, he talked about how his kids brought him around on blockchain technology and the success of his NFTs.
• As something like 150,000 people listened, he said that the digital asset industry is "a fledgling business, and yet it is a massive business. But it has a chance to be really something special."

By the numbers: At its peak, over 160,000 people were listening to the livestream, but they started dropping off fast as it became clear that Trump wasn't going to say anything about the topic.

• By the end, it had dwindled to the range of 50,000 people (live shot of me listening).

World Liberty Financial's press email told Axios that nothing beyond the livestream would be released last night.

The project's founders Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman eventually showed up on the stream, as did Trump's two older sons, Eric and Don Jr. (Barron left midway through without saying anything.)

• They talked about the problems in traditional lending a lot, the value of stablecoins and people's need for liquidity in their financial lives, but they never really articulated anything about what World Liberty Financial would do.
• It seemed that one of the first products would be enabling people to borrow against their DeFi assets, but that's based on random comments, not any actual explanation.

Zoom in: The founders said that previous news accounts of the distribution of the token were wrong.

• Instead, they said, roughly 63% will be sold to the public (accredited investors only), 17% will be saved for promotions and 20% will be reserved for the team.
• The token will only be used for governance of the project. It won't be transferrable and it won't earn yield.
• It also has limits built in to make it harder for anyone to dominate a vote.

Friction point: Farokh Sarmad, the founder of Rug Radio, who hosted the event, acknowledged near the end that he'd meant to cap it at 75 minutes tops.

• He failed.

💭 Our thought bubble: It's impossible to imagine how the Trumps and World Liberty thought two hours (plus) of calling each other brilliant and Trump Organization war stories would sell this thing.

• But that's what a small city worth of people suffered through last night, all to get a tweet's worth of fresh info.