World Liberty Financial (WLF), the highly anticipated decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol backed by Donald Trump, kicked off its public token sale on Tuesday, raising approximately $11.49 million on its first day.

This figure represents around 3.8% of the protocols ambitious $300 million fundraising target expected from the token’s first sale.

Figures Fall Short of Projections

At the time of this writing, Dune Analytics data reveals that approximately 766 million WLFI tokens had been sold at $0.015, generating around $11.49 million in sales. The project’s website also reportedly experienced intermittent outages as the sale went live.

These results fall short of the projections outlined in the WLFs roadmap, which had anticipated raising $300 million through the sale of 20% of the WLFI token supply. It would have given the token a fully diluted market capitalization of $1.5 billion.

On Monday, co-founder Zak Folkman hosted a live stream on X Spaces, revealing that well over 100,000 people had signed up for the whitelist since it opened on September 30.

However, even after Trump took to X, urging his followers to buy the token, blockchain data shows only 8,699 unique wallet addresses hold WLFI so far.

Additionally, some critics have castigated the Republican flagbearer for focusing on the project with the U.S. presidential election only weeks away.

More Details on the Project

Information from WLF’s whitepaper, or the “gold paper” as it has been styled, shows that the cryptocurrency will be available to accredited investors in the U.S., qualified investors in the UK, and others globally.

In terms of distribution, 63% of WLFI will be sold to the public, 17% will be set aside for user rewards, and 20% will be allocated for team compensation.

The roadmap also revealed that WLFI will function as a governance token, allowing holders to vote on decisions about the platform’s future. However, investors will not be able to transfer their tokens for at least one year after purchase.

The project will unfold in three phases. In the first chapter, WLF plans to launch a decentralized finance lending platform and then integrate it with exchanges in the second stage. This will enable users to handle on-ramping and off-ramping with on-chain know-your-customer (KYC) protocols.

The final phase will focus on fractionalizing real-world assets and obtaining the necessary regulatory licenses.