World Liberty Financial has a mobile app ‘in the works’

“We’re not really doing anything controversial,” said co-founder Zak Folkman at Permissionless last week

article-image

World Liberty Financial co-founder Zak Folkman | Permissionless IV by Ben Solomon for Blockworks

share

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


At Permissionless last week, Empire co-host Jason Yanowitz sat down with World Liberty Financial’s Zak Folkman.

As Yanowitz pointed out, World Liberty Financial has certainly garnered a fair bit of controversy, although, Folkman said, “we’re not really doing anything controversial.”

Quick sidebar here: Folkman also went on to say that legacy media (meaning the New York Times and other larger news sources) are “corrupt” and try to create a narrative; he referred to the fact that they use unnamed sources and “unverified facts.” Given that Blockworks has previously reported on the project using anonymous sources, I wanted to explain that this is a normal practice in journalism. 

Our goal is to report the truth, and sometimes the way to do that is to keep a source anonymous. However, we have strict guidelines in place to ensure that every story that goes out is heavily vetted. 

But let’s get back to Folkman, shall we? According to him, World Liberty Financial was already operating before Trump took office.

“We started our token sale even before [President Donald Trump] got elected…So, you know, this is a project that we’ve been working on for quite some time now. The entire goal was to build DeFi products that make Web3 technology available to people who are familiar in operating in a Web2 environment,” Folkman said. 

Folkman, later on in the conversation, also said that the team’s fielded a lot of interest from public firms who want to use WLFI in corporate treasuries. 

He said World Liberty plans to undergo an audit on its stablecoin, USD1, and that it would be putting its attestation report on its website “within the next few days.”

He added that they’re working closely with Chainlink as well, “to be the first stablecoin that’s going to implement Chainlink’s proof of reserves and securement.”

He also said that a mobile app is in the works. 

“It’s something that we’ve been working on for a very long time now with some of the best partners and builders in the space, both on our team and companies that we’ve partnered with. And this is kind of the culmination of what I was talking about in terms of creating a Web2-style FinTech application that allows a non-native crypto user to be able to very easily deposit…get the benefit of earning through DeFi applications and [be] able to send and receive crypto between friends and family very easily,” he told Yanowitz.

So there you have it. The World Liberty Financial empire keeps growing.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday