Trump Family’s WLFI Token Haul Hits $5 Billion

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 💸 Trump clan bags $5B worth of WLFI

• 🧑‍💻 Bye-bye Holešky: Ethereum’s testnet shuffle

• 📊 DeFi summer vibes: DEXes clear $1.1T in trades

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Trump Family Grows $5 Billion Richer After WLFI Token Sale

The Trump family now holds around $5 billion worth of World Liberty Financial's WLFI governance tokens after a significant unlock of 24.6 billion tokens on Monday.

“This isn’t some meme coin, it’s the governance backbone of a real ecosystem changing how money moves,” claimed Donald Trump Jr., one of the project’s cofounders, on X.

Data from Arkham shows that several presale participants deposited their WLFI tokens to exchanges shortly after the token was made tradable. One trader made $19.2 million from selling 60 million WLFI tokens on Binance. 

Some traders also wasted no time in opening significant shorts on WLFI. Lookonchain noted one whale had deposited $10 million in USDC on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid to short WLFI with 3x leverage. 

Around 56% of WLFI token supply is held by the founders, team and Trump family entities. That includes an entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC, which holds about 22.5 billion WLFI tokens.

“It also [DT Marks DEFI] takes 75% of net token sale revenue. One family captures the upside while everyone else takes market risk,” said pseudonymous analyst StarPlatinum on X. 

“Maybe the token will go up because he’s the President. But history shows one thing: Insiders always sell.”

Late on Monday, WLFI shared a new proposal that called for using 100% of fees earned in protocol-owned liquidity (POL) to buy back and burn tokens. 

Ethereum to Sunset Its Largest Testnet Holesky 

Ethereum's largest testnet, Holešky, will be shut down two weeks after the Fusaka upgrade is finalized on the network.

The Ethereum Foundation announced on Monday that the testnet had “reached its planned end-of-life date” and that it would no longer be supported by client, testing, or infrastructure teams after Fusaka goes live.

Holešky was launched in 2023 to test staking infrastructure and validator operations, and played a key role in testing major upgrades like Dencun and Pectra.

But after validator inactivity and exit queues following the Pectra upgrade in early 2025, the Foundation decided to migrate testing to the newer Hoodi testnet in March for a cleaner, more stable testing environment.

Ethereum’s testnet structure now spans three testnets: Sepolia for decentralized apps (DApps) and smart contracts, Hoodi for staking, validators, and infrastructure testing, and Ephemery for transient testing without the state persistence concerns of longer-running testnets.

DEXes Surpass $1.1 Trillion in August Trading Volume

Decentralized exchanges (DEXes) recorded a combined $1.15 trillion in trading volume in August, marking the first time monthly DEX activity surpassed the $1 trillion threshold.

The total comprises $506.3 billion in spot trading volume, as per data from DeFiLlama, which was the second-highest monthly total after January 2025.

Perpetual trading volume soared to $648.6 billion — the highest monthly level on record, with decentralized exchange Hyperliquid alone accounting for $383 billion.

On the spot trading front, Uniswap represented the lion's share of DEX volume, with $139 billion in monthly trading volume. 

August’s record volumes signal investor confidence returning to the onchain economy, as total value locked across DeFi protocols has also grown to over $152 billion. 

LIVESTREAM ALERT🚨

Today on Unchained at 10:00 am ET/7:00 am PT, Nick Vaiman, CEO and co-founder of visual intelligence platform Bubblemaps, joins Laura to talk about some of Bubblemaps’ biggest investigations, from presidential coins to celebrity memecoin season, and more. 

Watch on X or YouTube!

• 🛠️ Ethereum layer 2 Starknet suffered a multi-hour outage on Tuesday that erased about an hour of activity before developers reorganized the chain and restored block production, with a full incident report still pending.

• 📢 Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT published a spreadsheet alleging 100+ crypto influencers took paid promo deals without labeling ads, sharing wallet receipts and rate cards as evidence and spotlighting FTC disclosure rules many appear to have ignored.

• 💥 BNB Chain’s Venus Protocol, once holding over $7B in assets, was exploited for $27M after its Core Pool contract was redirected to a malicious address draining vUSDC and vETH, with the stolen funds still sitting idle as security teams track them.

• 📈 Hyperliquid booked $106M in revenue and nearly $400B in perpetual trading volume in August, seizing 70% of the decentralized perps market even as it scrambled to add safeguards after traders exploited futures glitches earlier this year.

• 🧑‍💻 12 DeFi platforms holding about $20B adopted Security Alliance’s “Safe Harbor” rules, pledging not to sue white-hat hackers who preempt thieves and return funds within 72 hours, aiming to boost rescue operations as 2025 hack losses climbed past $2.2B.

• 🔧 Bunni DEX paused all contracts after an attacker exploited its custom liquidity logic to siphon roughly $2.4M in USDC and USDT on Ethereum, with users urged to withdraw and Euler clarifying its lending protocol was unaffected.

• 🌀 Sky (formerly Maker) spent $75M in six months buying back SKY tokens—lifting the price about 8% since February—while other projects like Pump.fun and World Liberty Financial rolled out their own buyback schemes to support sagging tokens.

• ⚠️ Nobel economist Jean Tirole warned that if stablecoins lose their peg, governments may face pressure to rescue retail holders much like bank bailouts, as issuers tempted by higher yields could expose the now-$280B market to hidden risks.

• 🇪🇺 An EU Commission adviser said December proposals for the Savings and Investment Union would include real-world-asset tokenization features, arguing regulators should prioritize on-chain securities infrastructure over rushing a “MiCA 2.0.”

• 💹 Coincheck, already Nasdaq-listed via a SPAC merger, acquired French-regulated broker Aplo to gain MiCA foothold and expand into Europe, with the deal closing in October through a share swap.

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