Trump’s DeFi project’s December crypto buying spree nears $45M

Donald Trump’s crypto project, World Liberty Financial, has been on a massive crypto buying spree in December — now nearing a total spend of $45 million after buying $250,000 of Ondo (ONDO).

Since Nov. 30, a World Liberty wallet has purchased $30 million worth of Ether (ETH) and $10 million worth of Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC) alongside a handful of other purchases, according to a Dec. 16 X post from the blockchain monitoring account Lookonchain and data from Arkham Intelligence.

Lookonchain said World Liberty’s most recent buy at around 11 pm UTC on Dec. 15 was for $250,000 worth of Ondo (ONDO), about a day after it bought $500,000 worth of Ethena (ENA).

It had previously purchased $2 million each of Chainlink (LINK) and Aave (AAVE), bringing its total token buys for this month to $44.75 million.

The project, unveiled in September, bills itself as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for trading crypto that lists president-elect Trump as its “chief crypto advocate” and his sons Donald Jr, Eric and Barron as “ambassadors.” A company linked to the family is entitled to 75% of net revenues.

Nansen research analyst Nicolai Søndergaard recently told Bloomberg that World Liberty’s token buys could be ”a way to gain additional trust or a way to boost the project by shedding light on these assets as the project will likely do well if these assets do.”

The project has struggled to meet the goal for the sale of its self-titled World Liberty Financial (WLFI) token. So far, it’s sold less than a quarter of the $300 million WLFI it put up for sale.

It did, however, get a boost last month when Tron blockchain founder Justin Sun bought $30 million worth and became the project’s largest investor and was then later added as an adviser. 

Related: Trump may use Bitcoin as US reserve asset on ‘day one’ — How high will BTC price go? 

Sun and Tron have been accused of selling unregistered securities by the Securities and Exchange Commission — an agency Trump promised to overhaul to be more crypto-friendly.

Meanwhile, on Dec. 13, AaveDAO, the autonomous collective behind the DeFi protocol Aave, passed World Liberty’s proposal to allow it to deploy an Aave instance — its own version of the protocol.

World Liberty proposed allowing for the borrowing and lending of Ether, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), and stablecoin’s USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT). It’d also give 20% of fees generated to AaveDAO and 7% of WLFI’s supply, worth $21 million, with its price at 1.5 cents.

World Liberty Financial did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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