Newsletter: Even the most pro-Trump crypto faithful think Trump’s new crypto scheme is a terrible idea. Also, an FTX crypto executive earns some benefit of the doubt, and a lawsuit accuses “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli of disrespecting the Wu-Tang Clan.
New filings in the FTX case, made after executive Ryan Salame pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 7.5 years, raise the possibility that something weird happened with respect to promises about an investigation into his partner, Michelle Bond.
The Trump family’s latest crypto scheme, “World Liberty Financial”, has the makings of the biggest clusterfuck in Web3 is Going Just Great history.
![The project hasn’t even launched yet, and it’s off to a bumpy start. First, Donald Trump Jr. had to issue a statement to try to stop people from buying up all the fake tokens purporting to be associated with their murky project [I64]. Then, Twitter accounts for Lara and Tiffany Trump were both compromised and used to send tweets announcing a supposed token launch. “This is a scam!!!” tweeted Eric, himself retweeting the tweet from his wife’s account containing the scam token address. Now, CoinDesk has gotten hold of a white paper for this supposed World Liberty Financial, which they note appears to be a clone of Dough Finance, a crypto lending platform that was hacked for around $2 million just a month and a half ago [W3IGG]. The hack was not a sophisticated one, and instead exploited sloppiness on behalf of the development team. The four people who built Dough are all listed as members of the World Liberty Financial team, as are Trump’s sons (including 18-year-old Barron, who they list as a “DeFi visionary”). Zachary Folkman, a Dough Finance creator who is now listed as the head of operations for World Liberty Finance, previously ran a pick-up artist advice platform called “Date Hotter Girls”.25 You should really just read the piece by CoinDesk, they did some great reporting here.](/proxy/post_attachment/313664/532467c497.png "The project hasn’t even launched yet, and it’s off to a bumpy start. First, Donald Trump Jr. had to issue a statement to try to stop people from buying up all the fake tokens purporting to be associated with their murky project [I64]. Then, Twitter accounts for Lara and Tiffany Trump were both compromised and used to send tweets announcing a supposed token launch. “This is a scam!!!” tweeted Eric, himself retweeting the tweet from his wife’s account containing the scam token address. Now, CoinDesk has gotten hold of a white paper for this supposed World Liberty Financial, which they note appears to be a clone of Dough Finance, a crypto lending platform that was hacked for around $2 million just a month and a half ago [W3IGG]. The hack was not a sophisticated one, and instead exploited sloppiness on behalf of the development team. The four people who built Dough are all listed as members of the World Liberty Financial team, as are Trump’s sons (including 18-year-old Barron, who they list as a “DeFi visionary”). Zachary Folkman, a Dough Finance creator who is now listed as the head of operations for World Liberty Finance, previously ran a pick-up artist advice platform called “Date Hotter Girls”.25 You should really just read the piece by CoinDesk, they did some great reporting here.")
