Donald Trump headlined an event billed as the unveiling of a crypto platform promoted by the Republican nominee and his sons, putting the spotlight on a niche sector of digital assets with a history of controversy.

The project, World Liberty Financial, will be part of the decentralised finance segment of digital assets and is supposed to help with financial security and being able to transact freely, Trump’s son Donald Jr said in an X Spaces livestream on Monday.

“It’s a real problem that needed to be addressed, and honestly, I think this is the way,” Donald Jr said after comments from his father. The launch came a day after the former president emerged unscathed from a second apparent assassination attempt, the latest shock to roil the presidential contest.

The Republican nominee has pivoted to courting the digital asset sector in search of donations and votes amid a tight race for the White House, even vowing to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet”. His stance is an about-face given that he previously denounced Bitcoin as a “scam”.

“If we don’t do it, China is going to do it,” Donald Trump said, in reference to the goal of the US becoming the key crypto hub. “China is doing it anyway. But if we don’t do it, we’re not going to be the biggest, and we have to be the biggest and the best.”

Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr began promoting World Liberty Financial on X and Telegram in recent weeks. Decentralised finance - or DeFi - is an arcane crypto sector where people trade, lend and borrow digital assets peer-to-peer using automated software.

“The effort is consistent with Trump’s pro-crypto policy stance,” said Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University. “It’s one thing to say you are pro-crypto” and another to launch a company in the space, Harvey said.

The more than two-hour-long X Spaces event was light on specific details about World Liberty Financial or when it might go live. It did say the project would issue a digital token, WLFI, that would play a role in the governance of the business. But US persons would have to be verified accredited investors to purchase the cryptocurrency. The conversation also touched on a range of other topics, such as stablecoins, tokenisation, access to credit and digital payments.

The former president’s profile may make many more people aware of DeFi, proponents of which claim gains in efficiency resulting from cutting out traditional intermediaries like banks. Critics argue the sector rests in a regulatory grey zone and is prone to hacks, a bugbear for crypto as a whole.

A white paper for World Liberty Financial reviewed by Bloomberg News before Trump’s X Spaces announcement listed Donald Trump as “chief crypto advocate”, Eric and Donald Jr each as “Web3 Ambassador”, and 18-year-old Barron Trump as “chief DeFi visionary”. A disclaimer in the document said that World Liberty Financial is “not owned, managed, operated or sold” by the Trumps, while noting they may receive compensation.

  - Bloomberg