With Donald Trump busy fumbling the launch of his newest crypto offering, World Liberty Financial, phony projects have been cashing in on the frenzy.

From August 29 through late Monday evening, the only thing Trump had said about his project was its name. This left the rest to the world’s imagination and opened the door to fakes and lookalikes who duly lured in suckers and their money.

From September 3 through at least noon on September 17 — the day after Trump’s launch — a fake website ranked ninth among Google’s search engine results for the query ‘World Liberty Financial.’ The website promoted a fake governance token, WL, which has sadly traded over $3 million since inception.

A dizzying assortment of fake governance tokens exists for World Liberty Financial, which has not yet launched an official version. A brand new — and very fake — WLFI on Binance Smart Chain traded over $50 million in the 24 hours after Trump said he would issue the real WLFI sometime in the future.

A fake WLFI on Ethereum has traded over $7 million over the past three days while another fake on Solana traded almost $1 million. On Coinbase’s Base, another traded over $60,000.

Read more: Who is behind World Liberty Financial, Trump’s new crypto?

Of course, transaction volumes do not necessarily equate to money lost. Wash trading and self-dealing is rampant across crypto exchanges and so many of these figures could include insiders washing money in a merry-go-round to create the fake impression of trading activity or credibility.

It is virtually impossible to know how much money the founders of these fake projects have stolen.

Even more fake World Liberty Financial scams

World Liberty Financial does have a Telegram channel, but many fake channels drew in thousands of suckers. One imposter attracted more than 70,000 by promising giveaways worth up to $15,000. Once inside the fake channel, administrators encouraged users to connect their Metamask wallet and grant permissions that permitted the draining of funds.

Hackers also overtook the X (formerly Twitter) social media accounts of Trump family members to promote fake crypto giveaways during the two weeks leading up to the launch of World Liberty Financial.

Read more: The entire DJT token drama in one article

Even before Trump named his project, professional grifters were busy co-opting his surname for their own purposes. Formerly imprisoned felon Martin Shkreli claimed that he had earned the endorsement of Trump’s son Barron for a meme coin, DJT.

Sadly, the fake coin traded hundreds of millions of dollars while declining 97% from its high to date.

In short, Trump’s latest crypto project has not even launched, yet in the confusion, thousands of people have already lost money. Even staunchly pro-Trump news station Fox News was disappointed in Trump’s launch of World Liberty Financial. On Monday, it lamented its “thin” and “uneven rollout.” Wired called the event “meandering” and “short on details.”

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Donald Trump launched his World Liberty Financial crypto project last night on a live social audio room on X (formerly Twitter). And it was, as some had speculated, a complete flop.

The announcement was made from a room in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort alongside Farokh Sarmad, co-founder of the aptly-named Rug Radio.

Trump had previously previewed the announcement on August 29, and during the following two weeks, many commentators predicted the launch wouldn’t go well.

Indeed, Nic Carter earned over 170,000 views for his plea for Trump to cancel the launch, while CoinDesk linked four World Liberty team members to rugged crypto project Dough Finance. Bloomberg, meanwhile exposed World Liberty marijuana and “get rich quick” course salesman, Chase Herro, who spoke during the social audio space yesterday.

Timeline of the Trump DeFi announcement

The first topic of conversation addressed during the announcement was the recent assassination attempt at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf course. For some time, Farokh and Trump exclusively discussed non-crypto topics.

It wasn’t until the listener tally hit over 170,000 concurrent listeners that the duo finally pivoted to crypto, specifically Trump’s NFT collections.

Incredibly, however, the conversation ended not long after with no mention of World Liberty Financial by Trump.

After a brief intermission — and after Trump had left the room from which Rug Radio was broadcasting — associates and family members joined the conversation. Although Farokh mentioned the project once more, details were few and far between.

Read more: Did Martin Shkreli violate his parole by launching DJT coin with Barron Trump?

More than an hour into the interview and with listeners dwindling to less than 90,000, Trump’s son Donald Jr. revealed that the project would somehow involve real estate.

Another 10,000 concurrent listeners left and Farokh moved on to another family member.

Shortly after, someone mentioned that stablecoins would be somehow involved. Another 5,000 left.

According to Don Jr., all stablecoins are somehow backed by US treasuries.

With less than 75,000 listeners and 90 minutes after the start of the broadcast, Farokh tried to move along to Trump’s youngest son, 18-year-old Baron. However, the teenager had already left.

In short, the launch was an unmitigated disaster. Such a disaster, in fact, World Liberty Financial didn’t even bother to post any details in its Telegram channel.

Just two hours into the meandering show, fewer than 47,000 listeners remained — a 72% decline from its peak above 170,000. By the time someone said World Liberty Financial would issue a “non-transferable” governance token sometime in the future and exclusively to accredited investors, fewer than 40,000 remained.

Nothing happened. No token was launched and few attendees even understood what the project was.

As it turned out, the predictions of a flop came true.

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The post Early warnings that Trump’s DeFi project would flop appeared first on Protos.

Hackers gained access to Donald Trump Jr’s X account this week, using it to post a series of inflammatory messages. This included announcing the ‘death’ of former president Donald Trump Sr, proclaiming Richard Heart to be innocent, and threatening to “burn the SEC.”

The account, which boasts over 10 million followers, was hacked on Wednesday morning with those responsible immediately posting “I’m sad to announce, my father Donald Trump has passed away. I will be running for president in 2024.”

This was followed minutes later by a message that read, “Richard Heart is innocent, when I become president I am going to burn the SEC. @RichardHeartWin.”

Soon after, the ante was upped again with a post proclaiming, “This just in: North Korea is about to get smoked.“

Hex founder Heart is currently facing legal charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It alleges Heart misappropriated at least $12 million of his token sales to buy personal luxuries, including a 555-carat black diamond known as ‘the Enigma.’ 

Despite the allegations, devoted HEX fans remain optimistic that Heart will somehow beat the SEC’s allegations. His three projects, Hex (HEX), PulseChain (PLS), and PulseX (PLSX) dropped by 87% in August from their all-time highs.

The account also used a racial slur to describe Joe Biden, claimed to have had sex with Logan Paul’s partner, and alleged it had exchanged “interesting messages” with Jeffrey Epstein.

Within an hour the tweets had been deleted, however, some still garnered as many as 600,000 views. The Trump organization has since confirmed the account was hacked.

Dr. Aram Sinnreich, a professor of communication studies at American University, told Forbes that, “X has fired most of its data security professionals and eliminated many of its data security protocols, which makes it particularly vulnerable to hacking.”

He added, “the truth is that every social media profile is just one well-written ‘phishing’ email away from being hacked.”

The X account of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was also hacked. This resulted in the loss of $691,000 worth of crypto assets from those unlucky enough to follow the direction of the links shared by the account.

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The post Donald Trump Jr says ‘Richard Heart is innocent’ in X account hack appeared first on Protos.

In the third instalment of my column So you don’t have to, the spotlight is once again on infamous crypto shill Ben Armstrong, aka BitBoy. Last time, we dissected his truly terrible book Catching Up to Crypto — now, we review his rather lengthy interview with Donald Trump Jr.

On May 4, the son of former president Donald Trump streamed a chat with Armstrong on his Rumble channel called Triggered. However, things quickly went askew.

In the video, BitBoy is said to have begun investing in bitcoin in 2012, “before anyone had even heard of crypto.” But in his book, Armstrong admits that any coins he purchased back then were quickly sold thereafter. He wasn’t a pioneer in cryptocurrency by any means, nor did he have programming or coding knowledge.

At another point, the duo called bitcoin’s early spenders “stupid” for buying pizza and drugs with it, without acknowledging that if no one had bought real-world goods with bitcoin, it would have likely failed.

But perhaps the funniest part of the interview occurred when Trump Jr. and BitBoy swap stories on the various times they were cut off from the US banking system. Reasons to kibosh varied, from authorities not loving the word ‘crypto’ in the names of their business ventures, to having a not-so-stellar reputation after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Read more: Proud Boys ties to pro-crypto political consultant Samuel Armes

BitBoy shills and misinforms in Trump Jr. interview

Of course, Armstrong never misses a primetime opportunity to shill and promote the cryptocurrencies he owns. Both GoodGensler and XRP are name-dropped in the video — both crypto firms offer coins he’s invested in. BitBoy also makes sure to mention Ethereum, Cardano, ICP, Hbar, Algorand, and Polygon.

“If you don’t understand that everything the media is telling you is wrong, then you don’t have a brain,” Armstrong rather ironically told Trump Jr. during the hour-and-a-half of my life that I’ll never get back.

At one point in a discussion on blockchain’s various use cases, he suggested that our identities could be tokenized and blockchains could be used to verify age and other aspects of an individual. He didn’t express why tokenization or blockchain are needed for this.

Read more: BitBoy’s unhinged video rant really does encapsulate crypto

Armstrong later suggested that the only way to attack the Bitcoin network is to perform a 51% attack. But there are alternative attack methods, whether we’re discussing the future security budget once all the coins are mined, attacking the few developers who have access to the code, or even the re-awakening of Satoshi’s wallet (which would crater price if the coins were sold).

Then, they brought up US Senator Elizabeth Warren and claimed she’s anti-bank and anti-crypto because she takes political donations from Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Now, I’m not defending Warren here, but arguing those companies represent the banks and are against crypto seems inaccurate — at worst they don’t care about crypto, at best they occasionally support it.

Suffice to say, this interview left me absolutely exhausted. A final highlight worth mentioning: apparently Sam Bankman-Fried makes Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme “look like small potatoes” and no one but Armstrong could have predicted the collapse of FTX.

“Could anyone else [besides you] have seen it coming?” Trump Jr. asked BitBoy at one point. 

Armstrong responds with a resounding “no.”

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