Just days after reassuring the crypto market and buying more Ethereum (ETH), World Liberty Financial rapidly moved all holdings to new addresses. The Trump family DeFi fund sent out all ETH and other tokens, with suggestions the fund may join the panic-selling.
World Liberty Fi is moving all assets from its public portfolio, with multiple outflows within a couple of hours. After holding for months and even achieving some unrealized gains, World Liberty Fi even continued buying and holding Ethereum (ETH) during the latest market stagnation. The moves did not stall the recovery of ETH, which has gone up from its daily lows to trade at $2,764.14.
After the most recent market crash, the fund incurred a paper loss of between $25M and $50M. Soon after that, all assets started moving out of the wallet, ending up with Coinbase Prime.
Just before starting the series of transfers, World Liberty Fi warned it is not selling assets, but reallocating its treasury.
We’re making routine movements of our crypto holdings as part of regular treasury management, and payment of fees and expenses and to address working capital requirements. To be clear, we are not selling tokens—we are simply reallocating assets for ordinary business purposes.…
— WLFI (@worldlibertyfi) February 3, 2025
The wallet of World Liberty Fi sent out all ETH holdings to Coinbase Prime, sparking fears of a potential panic sell. The other plausible explanation is that the fund may be moving its assets for safekeeping, using custodial wallets through Coinbase and Gnosis Safe Proxy.
World Liberty Fi moves ETH, token balances
World Liberty Fi suggested it may still be interested in holding crypto, after rapidly expanding its holdings to 67,000 ETH. The fund bought the dip and brought its ETH reserves to an all-time record, absorbing earlier selling from whales.
Soon after that, all ETH left the main wallet, leaving a balance of only 15 ETH and around 19K staked ETH.
World Liberty Fi accumulated 67,000 ETH during the recent dip, then moved almost the entire balance to Coinbase Prime. | Source: Arkham Intelligence
Based on other transfers for USDC transactions, it seems some of the fund’s holdings may be moving to new wallets for extra security. One of the latest transfers for $2M USDC was sent to a new intermediary address. Other holdings, including WBTC, were moved to brand-new intermediary addresses, and then sent again to Coinbase Prime.
Recent on-chain data showed World Liberty Fi recently acquired the ENS name, 9290.eth, and yatogame.eth. The 9290.eth wallet matched the address of the original World Liberty Fi address, as tracked by Arkham intelligence. The 9290.eth address also originated some of the recent transactions of WBTC.
World Liberty Fi also controls vanity addresses WorldLiberty.ETH, trumpcoin.eth, erictrump.eth and barrontrump.eth. Several other vanity address tokens were sent to the World Liberty Fi multisig, though there is no exact evidence the fund decided to acquire those address tags.
World Liberty Fi had a similar approach for moving other tokens, sending them to intermediary addresses. After moving the previously accumulated LINK, AAVE, MOVE, USDC, and ETH, the fund immediately started swapping out its stETH.
World Liberty FI divested its staked ETH into simple ETH, after divesting its balance by sending almost all coins to Coinbase Prime. | Source: Arkham Intelligence
Starting with over 19K stETH, the 9290.eth wallet started swapping the token for ETH. The new tokens were returned to the main wallet, raising the ETH balance to above 12,965, while holding a little over 6,000 stETH. The swapping of staked ETH shifts the balance to a more liquid asset, as ETH dipped under $3,000 in the past 24 hours.
The coin movements led to a major outflow of the World Liberty Fi portfolio, which only days ago held over $404M in notional value. Within an hour, the portfolio had a drawdown, from $88M to $85M.
Crypto community remains skeptical as WLFI portfolio moves
The crypto community remained skeptical, as some of the assets were still swapped and the fund did not give its new proof of reserves. World Liberty Fi claimed the transfers were part of its normal business process, although this is the biggest outflow of tokens in the fund’s history.
World Liberty Fi has retained all its TRON (TRX) holdings of over 41M tokens and has retained some balances of Ethena (ENA). Some of the allocations of the fund were briefly in the green but ended up incurring as much as $25M in losses. AAVE, ENA, and ONDO were among the biggest losers of the fund’s token selection. Some of the holdings even received allocations during the inauguration event on January 20 and gave more exposure to the respective projects.
All the while, WLFI tokens were still on sale during their second round with a price of $0.05. WLFI sold 23.94B tokens out of a target of 25B. Beyond the retail interest, Blockworks cited persons close to the World Liberty Fi project, which claimed any crypto platform could buy $10M to $15M in WLFI tokens, and the fund would in exchange acquire some of the tokens for exposure.
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