Photo: Daniel Ceng/Anadolu/Getty Images

The deluge of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency plays does not pause for federal holidays. On Monday, the family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, began publicly trading its own coin, $WLFI, so that the masses could buy into yet another Trump crypto property that is vague about its actual purpose.

There are so many Trump-related cryptocurrencies that even the crypto-pilled sons, Eric and Donald Jr., sometimes have trouble keeping track. To refresh, World Liberty Financial, is most well-known as their company that has received questionable investments including $75 million from a Chinese billionaire named Justin Sun and a $2 billion investment from a state-owned Emirati firm — money that could raise flags about presidential conflicts of interest, if that were still a thing.

When the $WLFI coin opened for public trading on Monday, it was valued at about 40 cents. That number sounds humble but would make it one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies in the world by market cap. But like other Trump-adjacent properties before it, $WLFI began to tumble whenpremarket hype met reality. By the end of the day, it closed around 23 cents. If you were to buy at the beginning of the day, you would have seen about half of your on-paper value disappear.

But that’s a minor problem for some $WLFI buyers. Hours after the market closed, some buyers began to report on the official WLFI forum that they were being targeted by hackers who were draining their accounts of new coins. $WLFI operates on the ethereum blockchain, which had a recent upgrade that hackers used to exploit the accounts to steal their coins. “The instant the tokens arrive, they will be stolen by automated sweeper bots before we have a chance to move them to a secure wallet,” one user wrote.

This all sounds like a public-facing loss for the World Liberty Finance executive team, which includes Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Zach Witkoff, the son of the president’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. But the Trump family owns about 22.5 billion $WLFI coins, meaning that even if they’re trading around 22 cents, their theoretical value is about $5 billion. And even if their retail investors are taking a hit on $WLFI, the Trump sons are not looking back. Later in September, they’re planning an IPO for their crypto-mining concern, American Bitcoin.

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