Trump's World Liberty Financial borrowed millions from a protocol its own advisor co-founded

Onchain data shows WLFI deposited 5 billion of its own tokens as collateral to borrow stablecoins it then sent to Coinbase Prime, pushing a lending pool to 100% utilization and leaving depositors unable to withdraw.

What to know:

• World Liberty Financial, a Trump family–backed crypto venture, pledged 5 billion WLFI tokens on the Dolomite lending platform to borrow $75 million in stablecoins, draining the protocol's USD1 pool and sending more than $40 million to Coinbase Prime.
• The WLFI token dropped nearly 10 percent to a record low as the oversized collateral position, nominally valued at about $440 million, left Dolomite exposed to potential bad debt because any forced liquidation would likely crash the thinly traded token's price.
• The maneuver, involving WLFI using its own governance token to borrow its own USD1 stablecoin from a protocol advised by a World Liberty Financial insider, has sparked concerns about circular economics and the use of user-funded pools to finance a single insider borrower.

World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture co-founded by the Trump family, has executed a series of transactions through decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Dolomite that raises questions about insider access, circular token economics, and concentrated risk to other depositors.

Onchain records analyzed by CoinDesk, sourced from Etherscan, Arkham and publicly accessible wallet data, show the sequence began on Feb. 8, when WLFI's treasury deposited 14 million USD1, its own dollar-pegged stablecoin, into Dolomite as collateral and borrowed 11.4 million USDC against it.

Minutes later, 11.45 million USDC moved to a Coinbase Prime deposit address, per Arkham. Two days later, 12.5 million USD1 was sent from the treasury to a separate Coinbase Prime deposit address. Coinbase Prime is typically used for converting crypto to fiat or for institutional OTC trading.

That 12.5 million USD1 was not borrowed from Dolomite. It moved directly from WLFI's treasury wallet to the exchange, meaning the venture sent its own stablecoin straight to a fiat off-ramp.

But the WLFI token entered the picture twelve days later. On Feb. 20, the treasury deposited 890 million WLFI into Dolomite and borrowed 20 million USD1 against it.

On March 24, another 1.1 billion WLFI followed. In total, 1.99 billion WLFI tokens now sit as collateral inside Dolomite, and the treasury has received roughly 31.4 million in stablecoins from the protocol across both episodes.

The choice of protocol is not incidental, however.

Dolomite co-founder Corey Caplan is an advisor to World Liberty Financial. WLFI now sits at the top of Dolomite's supplied-assets list with $458.9 million in supply liquidity, roughly 55% of the protocol's entire $835.7 million total.

The structural concern sits in Dolomite's USD1 pool. USD1, which now has $4.6 billion in circulation, ranks second on the protocol with $180 million supplied against $167.5 million borrowed, a utilization ratio of about 93%.

The USD1 supply rate sits at 16.24% and the borrow rate at 9.18%, figures that reflect concentrated borrowing activity rather than broad organic demand.

At that utilization, ordinary depositors who lent USD1 to the pool expecting to withdraw at will cannot all do so at once. Their funds are effectively locked until the large borrower repays.

The collateral backing the WLFI-denominated borrow is a separate problem.

WLFI trades with limited market depth relative to the size of the position. If the token moves sharply lower and Dolomite's liquidation mechanism triggers, the forced sale would crash the price before the collateral could be unwound, leaving the protocol holding bad debt that would fall on the same retail depositors who currently cannot exit.

Activity escalated in April through a different route. On April 2, the WLFI treasury sent 2 billion WLFI to a Gnosis Safe proxy wallet at address 0x44a681DD. Five days later, it sent another 1 billion.

Neither transfer went directly to Dolomite, and onchain data does not yet show where those tokens are headed. The three billion additional tokens are worth roughly $266 million at WLFI's current price of $0.0888.

World Liberty Financial did not immediately respond to CoinDesk's request for comment.

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