The token of World Liberty Financial, the crypto company co-founded by the Trump family, has now begun trading.

Why it matters: Once again in 2025, the first family has been made into paper billionaires by putting a new token on the market.

Catch up quick: World Liberty Financial had already sold the token across several private sales since March, raising over $700 million. Early investors paid as little as 1.5 cents.

• But WLFI was originally launched as nontradable, meaning investors could not buy or sell holdings on public exchanges.
• That changed Monday, meaning the token — and the Trumps' investment in it — could now be valued by public markets.

By the numbers: The Trumps own about 25% of the supply of WLFI, which at current prices would theoretically be worth a few billion dollars on paper.

Zoom in: Per usual for a new token launch, WLFI experienced a sharp uptick in demand just as it hit the market, but then it began to fall in price.

• As of this afternoon, it was trading at $0.22, or 25% below its peak yesterday.

Follow the money: The Trumps' holdings in WLFI are still in lockup, meaning as of now they can't sell any of the tokens they own.

• They have still profited through the deal via a trading arrangement with another Trump family entity, however. The New York Times puts the take at "hundreds of millions of dollars."

Between the lines: It's not unusual for tokens to fall after their launch.

• The Official Trump meme coin did much the same thing. Four days after launch it peaked at $44.28, sliding fast. These days it trades at around $8.
• Even the opportunity to have dinner with the president only brought it up into the $15 range for about a month or so, before it fell back below $10.
• Only 20% of the meme coin has ever hit the market, even though a bit more has "unlocked," meaning the Trump-owned entities behind it could sell.

The big picture: Giving the public something they can buy to show allegiance to the Trumps has drawn ire from critics in the first year of this presidency.

• Another such instrument, nevertheless, is now trading.

Context: World Liberty Financial is marketed as a decentralized finance, or DeFi, project. So far it has only launched its token and a stablecoin known as USD1. An exchange and a lending product are marked as "soon" on the website.

• WLFI is the governance token for World Liberty Financial. It's theoretically a way to vote over the direction a project takes. But with just 25% of its total supply on the market, the lion's share of voting power remains in house.

What we're watching: According to the gold paper published by the company, the total supply of WLFI is 100 billion tokens. Most of the remaining supply is allocated with vesting schedules to be determined.

Howard Lutnick, the U.S. commerce secretary, announced during the three-hour televised cabinet meeting last week that GDP data would begin to be published to various blockchains via oracle networks Chainlink and Pyth.

• And the crowd said: Why?

What they're saying: "Economic data onchain would be tamper-proof, transparent, and globally accessible without central chokepoints, potentially curbing quiet revisions and boosting trust in dissemination," Omer Goldberg, the founder of financial intelligence firm Chaos Labs and a Meta engineering alum, wrote on X.

What we're watching: If nothing else, look for prediction markets to start using the data.

💭 My thought bubble: There are probably good reasons for governments to use blockchains for data distribution. The only way to discern those will be found by experimenting. This is a small start.

• It's probably not going to make a huge difference to publish GDP data on chain, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single nonce.

Blockchains built and controlled end-to-end by a big, well known company have become a new trend, one some industry participants refer to as "corp chains."

The big picture: The idea was always that the crypto world would build these cooperatively shared blockchains that lots of people would use in common. But now that crypto seems finally to be going mainstream, big companies want to control every last bit of their assets' digital existence.

• For some, that threatens crypto's original promise of shared networks giving way to corporate control.

Friction point: "Crypto really started as a movement to reduce our reliance on intermediaries and really democratize access to payments and financial services," Christian Catalini, chief strategy officer for Bitcoin-focused blockchain payments company Lightspark, tells Axios.

• "But if these corporate chains become the dominant ones, then we may find ourselves in a world that is very similar to the one where we started," notes Catalini, who was an early academic researcher studying cryptocurrency at MIT, before he left to join Facebook's Libra project.

Catch up quick: The first noteworthy corp chain was probably Base, from Coinbase, a blockchain where transaction fees earned on Base are profit for Coinbase.

• Daily transaction fees on Base are highly variable, but roughly $200,000 per day in ether is a good ballpark of what the company is earning, which helps explain why other companies might want to imitate it.

Between the lines: Base does contribute to a larger network though, in that it pays Ethereum — the world's second largest blockchain — a small amount of its revenue in order to guarantee its security.

How it works: One thing to remember about blockchains is that, unlike the normal internet, users pay all crypto networks to do work.

• If you want to deposit some money in a revenue generating app, you have to pay the blockchain to run the computing necessary to make that deposit.
• That's unlike on the web, where the bank itself would just eat the cost of doing that work. It's a whole different model.

The latest corp chains to come along are standalone.

• Circle, which runs the biggest U.S.-based stablecoin, USDC, announced Arc.
• Stripe is reportedly working on a chain known as Tempo, based on a since deleted job posting.
• And Google has a blockchain in the private testnet phase meant to be used for payments, potentially reaching the billions of people Google touches.

The other side: Not everyone views these chains with skepticism.

• The partners who run the venture arm of the ETF firm VanEck, Wyatt Lonergan and Juan Lopez, sent Axios a statement saying users will get a better user experience.
• "Everything will begin to move onchain, fast. The winners won't just use blockchains for payments, they'll be the payments rail, and everyone else will build around them," they said.

♊️ Gemini is seeking a $2.2 billion valuation in its IPO despite losses. (Axios Pro)

🐕 A dogecoin treasury company launched with $175 million. (The Block)

🧐 The Ethereum Foundation has released a plan to make its ecosystem work as if it were one blockchain again. (The Defiant)