With World Liberty Financial (WLFI) launching its USD1 (USD1 0.01%) stablecoin on Solana (SOL 0.48%) and other leading blockchains, investors once again face a familiar conundrum. Is it a better move to buy a platform, or to buy an operator that aims to generate value on the same platform?
Although there’s often an argument to be made both ways, in this case the answer to that question is pretty clear, so let’s dive in and determine whether it’s better to buy Solana or World Liberty Financial.
Image source: Getty Images.
This debut is a Solana story first
It makes the most sense to start by talking about Solana because it’s the platform play here. So why would a project like World Liberty Financial want to launch on Solana?
In short, because the chain’s fees are fractions of a cent and are split such that 50% is burned, reducing the supply of coins, and 50% goes to validators. That ensures validators are incentivized, stakers get compensated appropriately, and that the tokenomics are at least in part anti-inflationary. Plus, the network posts real-world transaction throughput measured in the thousands of transactions per second, with a theoretical peak of more than 65,000.
The benefits of mass-scale usage are showing up in the chain’s revenue data. Solana has by far the most chain fees of all the major blockchains, a clean proxy for demand. On Sept. 17 alone, it generated $1.7 million in chain revenue.
Furthermore, there are many emerging growth segments that have made Solana their home. In particular, decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) projects have migrated to Solana on account of its transaction speed and low fees. Similarly, features like Actions and Blinks let websites and AI bots kick off transactions from anywhere, which is tailor-made for AI agents that need to execute without forcing users through app mazes; the AI agent segment on the chain is flourishing as a result.
Those factors point to the same conclusion. Fees, users, and their assets are all coalescing on Solana. Those flows all accrue value to the network, regardless of how any single application performs.
World Liberty Financial isn’t the better buy
Now, let’s turn to evaluate World Liberty Financial. If you’re not up to speed, you should first know that World Liberty Financial is a crypto company owned by the Trump family. The token bearing the company’s name confers some limited voting rights in its governance policies, and its main line of business, for now, is to harvest fees from its USD1 stablecoin.
For this token to be the superior purchase, investors need a durable link between the growth of its revenue and tokenholder value. There is no such link. Its own disclosures position it primarily as a governance token, not a claim on any assets or cash flows, nor any other economic value generated by the business. This excludes the possibility of direct value capture by investors even if USD1 usage grows explosively.
Governance risk is also dramatically higher than what long-term investors typically prefer here. There are a handful of controversial partner ties, enormous political corruption concerns, and even baffling account freezes of high-profile holders, all of which inject risk.
To be fair, World Liberty Financial could evolve. Assuming governance tightens, tokenholder economics are rectified, and its product-market fit works as intended, it might yet carve out a useful niche. But today, the balance of evidence suggests most of the upside from the company’s activity will flow to Solana’s fees and ecosystem, not to World Liberty’s tokenholders.
Therefore, Solana is by far the better buy here.
