DWF Labs, an Abu Dhabi-based crypto investor and trading firm, said on Wednesday it had bought $25 million worth of digital tokens issued by the World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture controlled by the family of U.S. President Donald Trump.
DWF Labs' purchase makes it one of the largest known holders of the World Liberty token, which is also known as $WLFI.
A so-called governance token, $WLFI cannot be traded but gives holders the right to vote on changes to the project's underlying code.
DWF Labs said in a statement on its website that it bought the tokens in a "strategic private transaction" with World Liberty, without giving details of the number of tokens it has acquired.
The purchase underscores DWF Labs' "desire to participate in WLFI governance and focus on projects addressing real-world financial needs", the statement said.
Launched last autumn, World Liberty aims to open access to financial services via digital tokens, without intermediaries like banks, in an area of crypto known as decentralized finance, or DeFi.
World Liberty said in March it had raised $550 million from selling the governance token. As it raised those funds, Trump's family took control of World Liberty and grabbed the lion’s share of the funds, aided by governance terms that industry experts said favour insiders, Reuters reported in March.
"WLFI tokens can be unlocked in the future if the community decides, and we believe that it will definitely happen, sooner or later," Andrei Grachev, managing partner of DWF Labs, who is based in Switzerland and Dubai, said in an email to Reuters.
The Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun is the largest known buyer of $WLFI tokens, having spent $75 million on them, according to his social media posts. Sun is now an adviser to the project.
DWF Labs will also act as a liquidity provider for World Liberty's planned stablecoin, USD1, and will open an office in New York, it said in the statement. The company will not take fees for its market-making service, it said in the email to Reuters.
