On September 1, 2025, WLFI started trading. Twenty percent of every presale bag unlocked, the charts went live, and the strangest crypto project of this cycle stopped being a rumor and became a ticker.
Today is September 1, 2026. WLFI one year later is a story of a token that briefly touched roughly $0.40 in its opening hours, a stablecoin that quietly became the sixth largest in the world, a lawsuit that made a magazine cover, and a bank charter with an Abu Dhabi royal behind it. We wrote every chapter as it happened; the full archive lives under our World Liberty Financial tag. This post is the year in one place, plus the part I’ve never fully written down: what I did with my own tokens, and what I got wrong.
The Scoreboard After Twelve Months
Numbers first, because that’s what the reporters googling this want.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Presale price (first round) | $0.015 |
| Day-one peak | ~$0.40, briefly, in the opening hours |
| Price today | ~$0.058 |
| Drawdown from day-one peak | ~85% |
| Return vs presale, today | ~3.9x |
| Circulating supply | ~31.8 billion of 100 billion |
| Market cap | ~$1.8 billion |
| USD1 supply | ~$4.05 billion, sixth-largest stablecoin |
One note on the peak. Most aggregators log the all-time high somewhere between $0.26 and $0.33, because the $0.40 print was a wick that lasted minutes. I watched it happen. It counts.
Read those two return numbers together and you get the whole WLFI story. If you bought on the open market, you’re down 85%. If you were in the presale, you’re still up nearly 4x, and that’s before we get to what I sold at.
The Timeline: A Year in Fourteen Rows
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Aug 2025 | ALT5 Sigma raises $1.5B to become the WLFI treasury company, buying 7.28B tokens at $0.20 |
| Sep 1, 2025 | Trading opens, 20% of presale tokens unlock |
| Sep 4, 2025 | WLFI blacklists Justin Sun’s wallet after a ~$9M token move to HTX |
| Nov 2025 | Team burns ~$22M of compromised tokens, launches user recovery plan |
| Late 2025 | Governance vote extends the lock-up cliff by two years |
| Apr 2026 | WLFI publicly accuses Sun; “see you in court” |
| Apr 29, 2026 | ALT5 Sigma rebrands as AI Financial Corporation, ticker changes to AIFC |
| Jul 2026 | Trump’s disclosure shows $1.4B in 2025 crypto income; the WLFI unlock schedule hits the front page of the WSJ |
| Jul 2026 | New York Magazine runs the Sun vs WLFI cover story; my take in the WLFI lawsuit update |
| Aug 2026 | The Zhou investigation and a Tether audit delay keep the stablecoin beat busy |
| Aug 14, 2026 | OCC grants preliminary conditional approval for the WLFI bank charter |
| Aug 20, 2026 | Judge denies arbitration; Sun’s case goes to public court. Who won the arbitration hearing? Depends who you ask |
| Aug 25, 2026 | USD1 launches natively on Canton Network |
| Aug 27, 2026 | WSJ: Sheikh Tahnoon’s group holds 49% of the bank’s holding company |
Thirteen months of headlines if you count the prologue, and not one quiet one.
USD1: The Product That Actually Worked
Strip away the politics and the lawsuits, and World Liberty Financial has one product that did exactly what it promised. USD1.
The stablecoin launched in March 2025, fully reserved with Treasuries, dollar deposits, and cash equivalents, issued by BitGo Bank & Trust with monthly attestations and a live proof-of-reserves feed. Two months later it landed the deal that made its name: MGX, the Abu Dhabi fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon, used USD1 to settle its $2 billion investment into Binance. USD1 went from zero to over $2 billion in supply in about five weeks, the fastest ramp any stablecoin had ever posted.
A year on, USD1 sits around $4.05 billion, sixth on DeFiLlama’s stablecoin table. It lives on more than ten chains. In May it became the first native token on Stripe’s Tempo network. Last week it launched natively on Canton, the institutional chain that processes over $9 trillion in tokenized assets a month, where it can now settle the cash leg of tokenized securities trades.
The bank charter is the endgame for USD1. If the OCC grants final approval, issuance, redemption, and reserve management move inside a federally supervised trust company instead of a third-party issuer. That’s the play: stop being a crypto company with a stablecoin, start being a bank with a product.
I’ll admit it. Whatever you think of who owns it, USD1 is a legitimate success story. Our full USD1 review lands on September 8.
ALT5 Sigma: The Treasury Company That Bought at $0.20
Three weeks before trading opened, a Nasdaq micro-cap called ALT5 Sigma announced a $1.5 billion raise to become the WLFI treasury company. Half of that was a private placement paid by World Liberty itself, in tokens, priced at $0.20. ALT5 ended up with 7.28 billion WLFI, about 7.3% of the supply, and World Liberty ended up with enough shares and warrants to eventually own roughly half of ALT5. Disclosures later showed the Trump family was entitled to around $500 million from that single transaction.
Read that price again. $0.20. The exact level I averaged out of my unlocked tokens. That wasn’t a coincidence. ALT5 paid $0.20 in a private placement two weeks before trading opened, and a treasury company’s OTC entry is the one level you’d expect market makers to defend. When we lost $0.28 and slid into $0.20 with no bid showing up, the read was simple: if they can’t protect the treasury company’s entry, the plan is to go lower. So I stopped waiting for a bounce and sold into it.
On September 4, 2025, ALT5 valued its stack at $1.31 billion. Today the same 7.28 billion tokens are worth roughly $420 million. The stock did worse. ALTS closed at a record $10.26 in June 2025, then diluted pre-deal shareholders from 21.6 million shares to well over 100 million to fund the WLFI buy. In April 2026 the company rebranded as AI Financial Corporation and switched its ticker to AIFC. The shares now trade around $0.60, a market cap near $85 million, for a company sitting on $420 million of WLFI. That’s roughly a quarter of net asset value, and the stock has spent the summer below Nasdaq’s $1 minimum bid.
The company hasn’t been idle. It cleared its going-concern warning in June, unlocked half its WLFI stack as usable collateral, took a $15 million debt facility from World Liberty, and authorized a buyback of up to $100 million. In July the WSJ reported it was in talks to sell its core payments business to Perpetuals.com. Whatever AiFi becomes, the treasury is the company now.
The Treasury Lesson
There’s a lesson here that I know too well. We wrote about crypto treasury companies expanding last summer, and the funniest section is the one where I admit AirdropAlert was accidentally the first one. Back in 2017 we got paid in ETH, stacked thousands of it, and never hedged. ALT5 made the same bet with $750 million and a Nasdaq listing. Keep that in mind for the next section, because I’m about to confess I did it a third time.
The Godfather Offer
Here’s my favorite quote of the year, because it’s mine.
When World Liberty put the lock-up extension to a governance vote, the ballot had two real outcomes: vote yes and accept a two-year extension on your locked tokens, or don’t, and stay locked indefinitely. I called it a Godfather offer. An offer you can’t refuse. New York Magazine printed it, and it’s been quoted back at me more times than anything I’ve ever said about Bitcoin.
I’m a huge movie geek, so the comparison was reflex, not strategy. But it’s also the most honest description of how the year felt as a presale holder. You got in early, you got a great price, and then you found out the terms could change with a vote you couldn’t meaningfully lose.
The magazine is framed on my office wall now. A little artifact of my side quests in life. And with the Sun trial heading to open court, the New York Magazine cover story isn’t a throwback yet. It’s still the current chapter.
My Position: 13x on the Unlocked, a Mistake on the Rest
Time to write down what I actually did.
When the 20% unlocked, I didn’t sell. We opened around $0.40, and I thought this could run to $2 or higher, so selling the open was never the plan. Then the drop started. $0.35. $0.30. $0.28. At each level I waited for a bounce, because the first days of any launch are highly manipulative and I didn’t want to get shaken out of a token I believed in. The bounces never held. By the time we reached $0.20, I stopped waiting and averaged out of the entire unlocked portion. Final average: $0.20. From a $0.015 entry, that’s a 13x. It covered my initial outlay and left enough to eat well for a while. Not the top, but as a trade, the unlocked portion was clean.
The Degen Side of me
The other 80% is where I got it wrong, and it had nothing to do with the token. My original plan was simple. I believed WLFI could run past $2. My hedge was to start building short positions above $1.50 to protect the locked bag on the way up. That was a good plan for a scenario that never showed up. Price topped at $0.40 in the first hours and never came close to my trigger.
The mistake was what I did next, which was nothing. I never wrote a new plan for the world where $1.50 doesn’t arrive. While I was selling the unlocked tokens at $0.20, I decided to let the locked 80% ride. Gamble it comes back, life-changing money if it does. Pure YOLO on a bag I couldn’t touch anyway.
I should have shorted at $0.20. A hedge there would have locked in a multiple of what the bag is worth today. Same lesson as 2017, same lesson ALT5 is learning in public: a bag you can’t sell is a bag you should hedge. Coulda, woulda, shoulda buys you nothing, but writing it down here means I’ll ask the right question next time: what’s the plan if the bull case doesn’t come?
Year Two: Three Things I’m Watching
Final OCC approval. Preliminary conditional isn’t final. If the trust bank opens, USD1 becomes a different asset and WLFI becomes a different company.
The Sun trial in open court. Discovery in public. Whatever WLFI’s internal practices look like, we’re going to read about them.
The 2028 cliff. The extended lock-up is the overhang nobody can trade around. Every holder in that bag, including me, is waiting for the same date.
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Final Words
WLFI one year later is two stories wearing the same ticker. The token is down 85% from its first-day spike, wrapped in lawsuits and a lock-up nobody chose. The stablecoin is a $4 billion product with a federal charter in progress and institutional rails most crypto projects would kill for.
My verdict on year one: the product outran the token, and the politics outran both.
I made 13x on what I could sell and a mistake on what I couldn’t. Year two, I’m mostly a spectator with a locked bag and a front-row seat. See you next time!
This is not financial advice. This is what I did with my own money, including the part I got wrong. Do your own research, size responsibly, and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
FAQ
When did WLFI start trading? September 1, 2025, when 20% of presale tokens unlocked and public trading opened.
What was the WLFI all-time high? It briefly touched roughly $0.40 in the opening hours of trading. Most aggregators record a lower figure, between $0.26 and $0.33, because the spike was a short-lived wick.
Is WLFI a good investment after one year? It depends entirely on your entry. Presale buyers at $0.015 are still up nearly 4x. Open-market buyers near the launch are down around 85%. The 2028 lock-up cliff is the biggest overhang.
What is USD1? World Liberty Financial’s dollar stablecoin, launched March 2025, fully reserved and issued by BitGo Bank & Trust. It now holds about $4.05 billion in supply, the sixth-largest stablecoin, and recently launched natively on Canton Network.
Who owns World Liberty Financial’s bank? Per the WSJ, a group backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan holds 49% of WLTC Holdings, with a Trump family-affiliated entity holding 38%. The OCC’s approval is preliminary and conditional.
Who is the biggest public holder of WLFI? AI Financial Corporation, formerly ALT5 Sigma, holds about 7.28 billion WLFI, around 7.3% of supply, bought at $0.20 in August 2025. Its stock trades near $0.60 under the ticker AIFC, down from a $10.26 high.
What was the WLFI “Godfather offer”? The governance vote that extended the lock-up by two years. The alternative to voting yes was staying locked indefinitely, which I described to New York Magazine as an offer you can’t refuse.
