Trump promotes World Liberty Financial despite calling crypto a ‘scam’

During a two-hour livestream on X Spaces, Trump, his sons, and their business partner Chase Herro, who once described himself as the “dirtbag of the internet,” debuted a new crypto endeavor called World Liberty Financial. Trump’s appearance was largely promotional. In his opening remarks, Trump did not speak directly about World Liberty Financial,instead touching on Sunday’s thwarted assassination attempt, giving a condensed version of his campaign stump speech, and outlining his hopes for the future of cryptocurrency in the U.S. 

“If we don’t do it, China’s going to do it,” Trump said. “China’s doing it anyways and if we don’t do it we’re not going to be the biggest and we have to be the biggest and the best.” 

The Trumps themselves don’t own or operate any part of World Liberty Financial, according to Bloomberg. Instead the project appears to be run by Herro and Zachary Folkman, who used to teach classes on how to pick up women. Herro and Folkman were introduced to Trump’s sons via real-estate investor Steve Witkoff, he said during the livestream. 

The two also earned the praise of Donald Trump Jr, who touted their expertise in macroeconomics. “You could put them in a board room at Goldman Sachs and they’d smoke the people in the room,” he said.  

World Liberty Financial is a project in what is known as DeFi, or decentralized finance, in which users of a platform can lend and borrow crypto to another without an institution, like a bank, in the middle. During the livestream, Donald Trump Jr. spoke of the family’s own experience being debanked, a term referring to the difficulties certain individuals or companies have in accessing credit lines from established financial institutions. 

“There was a time period where the Trumps could have picked up the phone and called any CEO, of any bank, and got a loan from anyone in the world for any project with low (loan-to-value ratio) and things like that, then we got into the political arena and like that it was turned off,” he said. 

In a decentralized financial network, individuals can broker such deals with each other directly with transactions recorded on smart contracts stored on the blockchain. Folkman and Herro had previously been involved in a DeFi platform called Dough Finance. Dough Finance had previously been hacked, according to…