Author: Eric, Foresight News
Original Title: WLFI's FUD Farce, from Bear Market's Nerves
On the evening of February 23, Beijing time, Eric Trump, son of U.S. President Trump and co-founder of World Liberty Financial (WLFI), retweeted a post about Binance listing more USD1 trading pairs. However, shortly after, Eric Trump deleted the retweet.
Amid the pessimistic atmosphere of the bear market, speculation about this simple action was magnified endlessly. The exchange rate between USD1 and USDT on Binance briefly depegged to 0.9802, and the price of WLFI also dropped nearly 10% temporarily. As of the time of writing, the price fluctuations of USD1 and WLFI have returned to normal.
As prices fell, a large amount of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) emerged on X, such as claims that Eric Trump had deleted all Crypto-related tweets, or that there might be internal issues within the Trump family.
Soon, WLFI stepped in to debunk the rumors, stating that World Liberty Financial had been targeted by a coordinated attack. The attackers had hacked into the accounts of several WLFI co-founders, bribed KOLs to spread panic, and heavily shorted WLFI in an attempt to profit from the artificially created chaos. Later, the WLFI official account tweeted again to clarify that the WLFI and USD1 contracts had not been attacked; only the X accounts were compromised, and USD1 still had sufficient backing.
But is that really the case?
After this "bloodshed caused by a deleted retweet," some WLFI supporters or onlookers noted that while they did see many posts on X claiming that "Eric Trump" had deleted all Crypto-related tweets, in reality, Eric's account had merely un-retweeted the WLFI official post about "more USD1 trading pairs being listed on Binance," and had not mass-deleted tweets.
Many users joked self-deprecatingly that the industry is on the verge of being disproven, and any slight movement could lead to unexpected outcomes—everyone's nerves are on edge. WLFI, as a Crypto project endorsed by the U.S. President's family, if even they were to abandon it, might indicate that Crypto truly has no hope.
Although the WLFI incident itself did not cause significant impact, it raised considerable skepticism. Foremost among these are speculations about the true internal situation of WLFI.
Just before this "attack" began, the well-known on-chain detective ZachXBT posted a cryptic message, announcing that on February 26, he would release a major investigation into one of the most profitable enterprises in the cryptocurrency space, which found that multiple employees of the company had engaged in insider trading using internal data over an extended period.
Given the timing, many naturally linked "ZachXBT's爆料" with "Eric Trump's deleted retweet," suggesting that WLFI might be preemptively deleting evidence. However, data from Polymarket shows that people do not seem to believe WLFI is the target of the爆料.
Some also argue that WLFI stepped in to debunk the rumors because Eric Trump's deletion caused negative consequences, and they wanted to shift the blame to "non-existent hackers" to quell public anger. The most direct reason is that if hackers truly "hacked" the X accounts of multiple WLFI co-founders, merely un-retweeting would be highly unreasonable.
Additionally, WLFI's claim of "heavy shorting of WLFI" has been questioned. There is currently no data showing that anyone shorted WLFI tokens in advance; at the time of the incident, there were only small sell-offs of USD1 on-chain. Thus, the idea that someone preemptively shorted WLFI might be entirely baseless. Given these facts, it is understandable that conspiracy theories emerged, suggesting that WLFI's debunking was an attempt to cover up other facts (such as deleting evidence related to ZachXBT's爆料) by shifting blame.
From a completely neutral perspective, this farce seems more like a concentrated outbreak of the mutual distrust prevalent in the current crypto space.
Before the Lunar New Year, Binance launched a highly lucrative USD1 savings campaign, which not only successfully increased USD1's issuance to a position second only to USDT and USDC but also provided substantial liquidity for USD1 and other token trading. However, such large-scale subsidy activities also planted seeds of doubt in many users' minds: could such massive subsidies be a precursor to bad news?
Perhaps Eric Trump simply accidentally un-retweeted, but Crypto Twitter (CT) imagined countless conspiracy theories, attributing numerous "underlying reasons" to Eric Trump's action. Crypto retail investors have been tormented to the point of "once bitten, twice shy." If not for the current market environment, flawed debunking like WLFI's official response might not have gained traction.
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