This week, Donald Trump filed a 927-page financial disclosure showing more than $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025. Somehow, I ended up as the opening story of the Wall Street Journal’s feature on Trump’s crypto windfall, with further quotes appearing in the New York Times and in Forbes’ deep dive on the investors who lost billions on Trump stocks and crypto.
Within hours, the aggregators picked it up. By the next morning, dozens of outlets had recycled the same storyline: crypto investor bet big on $WLFI and $TRUMP, hoped to retire, lost a fortune while the president got rich.
My quotes in those articles are real. I said every word, and I stand by all of them. What the rewrites do, however, is compress a full conversation into a narrative that fits their headline. “Lost big” makes better copy than “sold enough to cover his cost basis and is freerolling the rest.”
So this is the full story — how the WLFI trade actually played out, what the official WLFI unlock schedule looks like, and why the unlock dates matter more than anything in this week’s headlines.
What the Disclosure Actually Showed
The numbers are genuinely staggering. Trump’s filing revealed roughly $636 million from the $TRUMP memecoin and about $799 million from World Liberty Financial, adding up to more than $1.4 billion in crypto-related income for a single year.
The investor side of the ledger looks very different. Chainalysis data cited by the New York Times shows that 58 wallets made profits above $10 million each on $TRUMP — roughly $1.1 billion combined — while about 764,000 wallets lost money. Nansen’s analysis found that 85% of $WLFI buyers on the secondary market are underwater, and around two-thirds of $TRUMP holders are in the red. On top of that, Etherscan data shows that 99.3% of WLFI’s valuation sits in whale wallets.
Meanwhile, the project collected fees and token sale proceeds up front, regardless of where prices went afterward. A Trump entity received a 75% cut of WLFI token sales according to the project’s own documentation. Whatever you think of it politically, as a token launch structure it worked exactly as designed — for the issuer.
Forbes ran the full ledger across all five Trump-family ventures: after cashing out $1.9 billion, the family remains up $3.1 billion overall, while their supporters are down an estimated $7 billion. Every single one of those ventures — Trump Media, WLFI, both memecoins, and American Bitcoin — is down between 82% and 99% from its peak.
I’ve been to both Trump memecoin dinners — the first at his Virginia golf club, the second at Mar-a-Lago — and I’ve followed this ecosystem closer than most. As Forbes noted in their piece, I attended both events for a combined $1,700 in trading fees, using a delta-neutral strategy I explained on this site long before it made the news. None of this week’s revelations surprised me. The part the headlines get wrong is what it meant for my own position.
My WLFI Trade, From Presale to Freeroll
Here’s the trade, in full, with the parts the news cycle left out.
I bought WLFI in the early supporter round at $0.015. The thesis was simple: a token carrying the Trump brand into his presidency could catch a narrative bid like $TRUMP did, and at $2 with a reasonable unlock, it would have been retirement money. That hope was real — the WSJ reported it accurately. A 130x moonshot scenario is what you’re buying when you enter a presale like this, and everyone in that round knew it.
Before launch, pre-market prices were trading between $0.20 and $0.30. That’s already more than 13x my entry, so I sold roughly 5% of my allocation there — enough to cover my entire initial investment. From that moment, the position was a freeroll. Everything left was house money.
On September 1, 2025, the token launched and 20% of early supporter allocations unlocked. I’ll be honest about launch day: I was hyped. I genuinely thought the Trump brand could carry it to $1 or $2. It topped at $0.40 within hours, and that was the high. The pump I hoped for never came.
I didn’t sell the top
Nobody rings a bell up there. As price fell back through the range, I sold a tranche at $0.25, then another at $0.19. The level I was watching was $0.20, because treasury company ALT SIGMA had purchased its coins at that price. When the market makers couldn’t defend the line where a major buyer had their cost basis, that told me everything about the demand underneath. Time to clear out the rest of the unlocked bag.
Every one of those launch-window sales was pure profit, since the pre-market sale had already covered my cost. All in, the trade closed multiples above my initial investment on just the liquid 20%.
The remaining 80% is still locked, and I’ll be equally honest about that part: I think it’s probably going toward zero before the cliff ends. If it isn’t, great — that’s the freeroll. Either way, nothing about this trade keeps me up at night, which is why my quote in the Journal was relaxed rather than bitter. A game is a game.
What I Actually Meant by “A Game Is a Game”
That quote traveled further than anything else I said this week, so let me unpack it, because it wasn’t resignation — it was a worldview.
We’re in crypto. We are here to make money. Whether that’s farming airdrops, trading charts, or joining presales like the WLFI round, the P&L is the scoreboard, and everything else is commentary. Nobody enters a token sale tied to a presidential brand because they believe in the whitepaper.
Judged by that scoreboard, I didn’t play this one optimally. I held through the top hoping for the $1–2 run, and my unlocked tokens fell more than 80% from the high before I finished selling. That happens — to everyone, on every timeframe, forever. The difference between a good trader and a bag holder isn’t avoiding mistakes; it’s making sure the mistakes are survivable. My P&L on WLFI is green, and that’s the whole game.
From here, my options are limited but not zero. The hope is that the team ships something that sparks renewed interest — a reason for a bid to exist — so the price recovers before the 2028 cliff. In the meantime, locked tokens can still be worked: tossing in hedge shorts against the position lets me scalp profits on tokens I can’t sell, effectively earning yield on a frozen bag.
Trump netted $800 million from World Liberty; I netted a few multiples on my entry. He played a better game than I did. I won’t retire on mine — but I made sure I can eat.
The Official WLFI Unlock Schedule
Now for the part that actually matters going forward, because this is what determines whether anyone holding locked WLFI ever sees liquidity — and what happens to the price when they do.
According to World Liberty Financial’s official documentation, the schedule works like this:
Early supporters (the $0.015 and $0.05 sale rounds, October 2024 – March 2025):
- 20% initial unlock — became available on or about September 1, 2025, after signing the Token Unlock Agreement
- Remaining 80% — governed by a community governance proposal passed on or around May 6, 2026
- Unlock type — 2-year cliff, then 2-year linear unlock
- Cliff ends — around May 2028; nothing is claimable before then
- Fully unlocked — around May 2030
- Tokens on this schedule — 17,043,666,558 WLFI
Founders, team members, and advisors are on a separate, longer schedule:
- Unlock type — 2-year cliff, then 3-year linear unlock, with a 10% token burn
- Fully unlocked — around May 2031
- Tokens on this schedule — 45,238,585,647 WLFI
Two details in the fine print deserve attention. First, accepting the schedule is opt-in: holders who don’t sign keep their tokens locked indefinitely, usable only for governance. Second, there’s no deadline to claim once tokens unlock — unclaimed tokens simply accumulate in the contract.
Add those two pools together and you get more than 62 billion WLFI queued up behind a cliff that starts breaking in mid-2028. For perspective, the entire drawdown everyone wrote about this week — the 80% collapse from the highs — happened on a small liquid float where nearly all the value is concentrated in whale wallets. The real supply has never touched the market.
What the Unlock Means for the Price
This is where I part ways with the news coverage entirely, because the disclosure story is backward-looking and the unlock story is what comes next.
WLFI currently trades under $0.06. That’s still above the $0.015 early supporter round — which is why I could exit my liquid tokens in profit — but below the $0.05 round, meaning even some original sale participants are underwater before their tokens ever unlock.
Everyone still holding an original allocation is a spectator until May 2028. You can watch the chart, you can vote in governance, but you cannot sell. Justin Sun learned this the hard way, suing World Liberty in April after claiming the company blocked him from selling his stash to prop up the price.
Then the cliff breaks. Starting around May 2028, early supporter tokens begin unlocking linearly for two years, with the much larger team allocation following on a three-year drip. Whether there’s a bid waiting on the other side of that cliff depends on what World Liberty builds between now and then — the stablecoin business, the DeFi integrations like the WLFI looping strategies on Dolomite we covered previously, and whether the Trump brand still carries a premium in crypto two years from now.
My honest read: the unlock schedule was designed to push the supply problem past the current administration’s peak attention, and the market has two years to forget before it has to remember. Position accordingly.
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On Media Narratives
One last thing, since this post exists partly because of it.
Getting interviewed by Forbes, WSJ, and NYT was a good experience — the reporters were thorough, and my quotes ran accurately and in context. What happens downstream is a different game. Aggregators compress, mash quotes from different interviews together, and pick the framing that travels. One outlet this week merged my September Bloomberg quote about WLFI’s low float with this week’s story into something I never quite said.
That’s not a complaint, just how the machine works. The primary sources are fair; the copies drift. It’s the same reason you should read a token’s official unlock documentation instead of a thread summarizing it. For everything I’ve written on the Trump crypto ecosystem from primary experience, the full archive is under our Trump tag.
Final Words
Trump’s disclosure confirmed what the fee structures already implied: issuing tokens beats buying them. He collected $1.4 billion on the way in, while two-thirds of his memecoin buyers and 85% of WLFI secondary buyers sit on losses. My own WLFI trade worked out — not because I called the top, but because I covered my cost in the pre-market and treated a broken support level as the exit signal it was.
The story everyone should be watching now isn’t in the disclosure. It’s the 62 billion tokens sitting behind a cliff that breaks in May 2028. The headlines this week were about money already made and lost. The unlock schedule is about money that hasn’t moved yet.
If you enjoyed this blog, you may want to check our other crypto news updates.
As always, don’t forget to claim your bonus on OKX below. See you next time!
FAQ
When does WLFI unlock?
Early supporters received 20% of their allocation on September 1, 2025. The remaining 80% sits behind a 2-year cliff that ends around May 2028, then unlocks linearly over two years, completing around May 2030. Team and advisor tokens follow a longer schedule ending around 2031.
What is the WLFI unlock schedule for early supporters?
A 2-year cliff from the governance proposal passed in May 2026, followed by a 2-year linear unlock. Roughly 17 billion WLFI tokens are subject to this schedule, and holders must opt in by signing the Token Unlock Agreement.
Can I sell my locked WLFI tokens?
No. Locked tokens cannot be transferred or sold. They can only be used for governance participation until they unlock and are claimed to your wallet. Tokens held in the unlocking contract must be claimed before they can be moved.
Do I have to accept the new unlock schedule?
Acceptance is opt-in. If you don’t sign, your tokens remain locked indefinitely, though you keep governance rights and remain subject to any future unlock proposals.
Is WLFI still above its presale price?
It depends on your round. At current prices under $0.06, the token trades above the $0.015 early supporter round but below the $0.05 round, so early participants from the second round are underwater even before their tokens unlock.
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