In brief
- USD1 briefly slipped below its dollar peg on Binance, falling to a value around $0.98 before recovering within minutes.
- Around the same time, the company’s native token, WLFI, dropped roughly 7%.
- World Liberty claimed it repelled a “coordinated attack” involving hacked X accounts, disinformation, and short-selling.
A stablecoin issued by the Trump family’s crypto company briefly slipped from its dollar peg Monday, after a series of events the company later claimed to be “manufactured chaos.”
At roughly 8:15 am ET on Monday morning, the stablecoin, USD1, fell from a trading value of 0.9990 USDT, down to 0.9802 USDT on Binance, the popular crypto exchange. Other sites, including price aggregator CoinGecko, showed the slip as smaller, to $0.994.
Within 30 minutes of the incident, the token rose again to full parity with USDT, the world’s top dollar-pegged stablecoin. It has since remained at that price.
USD1 is issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company. It is currently the fifth-largest stablecoin in the world, with a market capitalization of $4.93 billion.
Around the same time that USD1 briefly fell below a dollar, World Liberty’s native token, WLFI, abruptly dropped roughly 7%, from $0.117 to $0.109. The token has since partially made up those losses by climbing up to $0.113 at writing.
World Liberty soon thereafter announced that the company had been the subject of a “coordinated attack” that involved the hacking of company co-founders’ X accounts, “paid influencers” spreading negative information about World Liberty online, and massive short positions opened against WLFI to “profit from the manufactured chaos.”
“World Liberty’s elite engineering and security teams today successfully repelled a coordinated attack from multiple vectors,” a company spokesperson told Decrypt. “Hackers and paid-disinformation campaigns attempted to undermine trust in WLFI, but their battle-tested infrastructure and systems operated exactly as they should.”
Decrypt could not independently verify any posts made to the X accounts of World Liberty’s co-founders that appeared to be written by hackers. The World Liberty spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked if the company has identified any alleged hackers.
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