Futures of World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the cryptocurrency linked to the family of President Donald Trump, lost more than 44% of their value on opening this weekend as traders chose to short the decentralized finance (DeFi) token.
The futures began trading Aug. 23 on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid at $0.44. Within hours, the price had collapsed to below $0.25 on the back of significant trading volume.
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The debut followed months of uncertainty. Initially, the token was planned to be non-transferrable. In mid-July, however, the measure was overturned. That decision paved the way for the weekend introduction. Spot trading and token distribution are due to go live in September.
The current price would put WLFI at a fully diluted value of $24 billion having debuted at around $44 billion, based on the token’s total supply of 100 billion.
More than $59 million in trading volume has been recorded, with $57 million in open interest, according to HyperLiquid. Open interest measures the nominal amount of open positions on a specific market.
The funding rate is also skewed to the downside at an annualized rate of -35%. When negative rates occur, traders holding short positions need to pay those holding longs, a classic bearish signal.
Negative funding rates have been rare of late in the crypto market despite major assets like BTC and ETH selling off. WLFI’s negative rate demonstrates how traders believe the token is overvalued and are so confident in further downside that they are willing to pay to hold the short position.