ALT5 Sigma Corporation shares plunged 12.7% in overnight trading.
The crypto token of a project backed by US President Donald Trump fell on its first day of trading on Monday.
WLFI, the token of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, fell 25 per cent to about $0.21, according to CoinDesk data.
It marks the latest way that the Trump family and their associates are seeking to profit from crypto, an industry that the president has championed through pushing forward legislation and appointing friendly regulators.
“This isn’t some memecoin, it’s the governance backbone of a real ecosystem changing how money moves. Freedom + finance + America FIRST,” Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest son, wrote on X.
Monday’s price gives the WLFI tokens available for trading on exchanges including Binance and Coinbase, a nominal total value of about $6.4bn, according to CoinDesk.
World Liberty Financial was set up last October with Trump as “co-founder emeritus” and his three sons as co-founders. The company created 100bn tokens and said it had sold about a quarter of them for a face value of $550mn. But they were not tradeable and holders could use them only to vote on corporate proposals at World Liberty Financial.
Last month, a vote was passed to make the tokens tradeable.
World Liberty Financial said 24.7bn tokens would be traded initially, with 7.8bn of that amount allocated to its new “crypto treasury” company, announced last month.
The deal involves a Nasdaq-listed blockchain company ALT5 Sigma Corporation raising $1.5bn, with half of that amount paid in WLFI tokens. The cash will be used to then buy more WLFI tokens.
ALT5 Sigma plans a treasury that will hold Trump-backed World Liberty Financial's tokens. The move is reminiscent of how Strategy was transformed into a bitcoin proxy stock after its then-CEO, now chairman, Michael Saylor, initiated its bitcoin-buying spree.
President Trump held 15.75bn WLFI tokens at the end of last year, according to financial disclosures, which at Monday’s trading price would be worth about $3.6bn.