Trump-backed World Liberty Financial purchases $2 million in MOVE tokens as protocol unveils a developer mainnet
World Liberty Financial, the Trump-backed DeFi platform, purchased approximately $2 million worth of MOVE tokens on Tuesday.
Movement Labs is reportedly one of the firms in discussions with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, according to the DB newswire citing sources familiar with the matter. MOVE now represents World Liberty’s tenth-largest holding.
Hours after the purchases came to light, Movement Labs’ founder, Rushi Manche, said in a message on X that the organization is not in close contact with the DOGE.
MOVE, initially launched as an ERC-20 token with a 10 billion supply cap, is up nearly 15% on the day.
Moving coins
Beginning Tuesday morning Eastern Time, World Liberty project began swapping out blocks of stablecoins for MOVE, the native asset of the Movement blockchain. These transactions were structured similarly to previous token purchases.
The project typically uses the CoW Swap decentralized exchange to trade around $470,000 worth of USDT or USDC stablecoins, an apparent nod to Trump being the 47th president of the United States.
Last Monday, for instance, World Liberty completed a series of purchases totaling $112.8 million on Trump's first day in office. The project holds approximately $389 million in cryptocurrencies, including protocol-specific tokens like Chainlink’s LINK, Ethena’s ENA and Aave’s AAVE.
Notably, World Liberty has purchased nearly $10 million worth of Tron’s TRX token, making the token its sixth-largest position. Last week, Tron founder Justin Sun said he was bumping his $30 million WLFI investment to $75 million. Sun was previously named as an advisor to the project.
World Liberty initially struggled to sell its WLFI tokens and had reduced its $450 million target. However, the project announced on the Sunday before Trump’s inauguration that it had “completed” its mission to sell 20% of its 100 billion token supply and it would open up the sale of an additional 5 billion tokens “due to massive demand and overwhelming interest.”
On Saturday, Bloomberg reported that the cost-cutting DOGE initiative led by Elon Musk is “evaluating” the use of blockchain technology to track government spending. The article did not name any particular networks, though it did say the agency is holding conversations with representatives from multiple existing public blockchains.
Representatives for World Liberty and Movement have not responded to a request for comment.
Efficient chains
Musk reportedly believes blockchains could be a cost-efficient way to track federal spending, secure data, make payments and “manage” buildings. Trump has vowed to boost the domestic U.S. crypto industry and cement the country as "the crypto capital of the world.”
One of Trump’s first official acts in office was signing an executive order to create a digital asset working group, which in part is evaluating the creation of a strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies. Trump reportedly favors tokens issued in the U.S. for this crypto stockpile.
Tuesday’s purchases come as Movement Labs deployed its developer mainnet and announced a multi-asset liquidity program called Cornucopia to entice DeFi engineers to build on the blockchain. Like Sui and Aptos, Move is a fork of Meta’s ill-fated Diem stablecoin project.
"The deployment of Movement Developer Mainnet and Cornucopia marks the beginning of a new era for blockchain development," co-founder Cooper Scanlon said in a statement. "By structuring our launch to include both technical infrastructure and day-one DeFi liquidity, we're creating an ecosystem where developers can leverage Move's robust security features while accessing Ethereum's massive scale. This coordinated approach ensures we're delivering immediate value for both developers and users."
Movement Labs is also developing the Move Stack, an execution layer framework compatible with rollups like Optimism, Polygon and Arbitrum. Manche has previously said the organization aims to build a highly scalable blockchain capable of supporting massive applications like Facebook and Instagram.
According to the token generation event, 10% (1 billion tokens) of the total token supply was earmarked for the Movement Foundation, while early contributors and backers received 17.5% and 22.5%, respectively, vested over 60 months. The foundation is also expected to distribute 10% of the supply to community members in an upcoming airdrop.
The San Francisco-based blockchain development firm closed a $38 million Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital in April and previously raised $3.4 million in pre-seed funding.
Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.
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