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At Permissionless last week, Empire co-host Jason Yanowitz sat down with World Liberty Financial’s Zak Folkman.
As Yanowitz pointed out, World Liberty Financial has certainly garnered a fair bit of controversy, although, Folkman said, “we’re not really doing anything controversial.”
Quick sidebar here: Folkman also went on to say that legacy media (meaning the New York Times and other larger news sources) are “corrupt” and try to create a narrative; he referred to the fact that they use unnamed sources and “unverified facts.” Given that Blockworks has previously reported on the project using anonymous sources, I wanted to explain that this is a normal practice in journalism.
Our goal is to report the truth, and sometimes the way to do that is to keep a source anonymous. However, we have strict guidelines in place to ensure that every story that goes out is heavily vetted.
But let’s get back to Folkman, shall we? According to him, World Liberty Financial was already operating before Trump took office.
“We started our token sale even before [President Donald Trump] got elected…So, you know, this is a project that we’ve been working on for quite some time now. The entire goal was to build DeFi products that make Web3 technology available to people who are familiar in operating in a Web2 environment,” Folkman said.
Folkman, later on in the conversation, also said that the team’s fielded a lot of interest from public firms who want to use WLFI in corporate treasuries.
He said World Liberty plans to undergo an audit on its stablecoin, USD1, and that it would be putting its attestation report on its website “within the next few days.”
He added that they’re working closely with Chainlink as well, “to be the first stablecoin that’s going to implement Chainlink’s proof of reserves and securement.”