World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the Donald Trump-backed crypto project, has closed its token sale after raising approximately $590 million.

The project’s raise of $590 million would put it in the top-10 list of token raises, according to data curated by ICODrops. To date, the largest token sale is EOS, which raised $4.21 billion.

EOS is a blockchain platform developed by Block.one, which later founded Bullish, CoinDesk’s owner.

On stage at Consensus 2025 in Hong Kong, WLFI co-founder Zak Folkman credited Tron’s Justin Sun with the success of the project’s token sale.

After WLFI first launched its sale, its critics called the momentum sluggish. But this changed after Sun invested $30 million into it in November 2024 and later invested more.

«When we were launching this project, it was a very heated time,» Folkman said during Consensus. «There was a lot of scrutiny on our project due to who was involved.»

This meant that traditional crypto VCs would not touch the token.

«[Sun] saw that regardless of the outcome, this project is a monumental move forward for the entire crypto community,» Folkman added during the Consensus panel.

Rules around WLFI’s token sale mean that the token was only available to accredited investors and can’t be transferred or publicly sold on exchanges. A date has not been set for an exchange listing.

Crypto venture funding in the U.S. clocked in at approximately $861 million for the first three months of 2025, but was dwarfed by artificial intelligence’s nearly $20 billion haul, according to data provided by Pitchbook, showing how investors continue to pivot towards AI.

Data shows that investors closed 795 deals in the U.S in AI from January to March, with blockbuster deals like Databricks’ $15.3 billion round and Anthropic’s $2 billion raise dominating headlines.

Crypto’s largest blockbuster deal, in comparison, was Abu Dhabi’s MGX, with a $2 billion investment into Binance – the first institutional placement in the crypto exchange. Other deals of note include a $82 million raise from payment infrastructure company Mesh, ETF issuer Bitwise’s $70 million round, and digital asset bank Sygnum’s $58 million offering.

Prior reporting by Pitchbook shows that AI startups attracted one-third of global VC investment in 2024, totaling $131.5 billion, with nearly a quarter of new startups being an AI company across 4,318 VC deals, compared to crypto’s $4.9 billion across just 706 deals.

Analysis: Has AI stolen crypto’s venture dollars?

Blockbuster rounds from VCs in the AI space and headline-grabbing antics, such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman seeking trillions, and AI’s rise from technological novelty to household name thanks to transformer models, would make one think that there’s suddenly an investor preference for one over the other.

Historically, all data shows that VCs have generally favored AI over crypto, with AI and machine learning attracting consistent funding that’s expanded exponentially, according to Statista data, growing from $670 million in 2011 to $36 billion in 2020.

There’s only been one year where crypto beat AI for funding, and that comes with a caveat: narrower AI categorizations, like ABI Research‘s $22.3 billion AI estimate in 2021, suggest crypto briefly outpaced AI funding during the bullish crypto cycle before AI funding surged again to over $100 billion by 2024.

Keep in mind that all of this ignores crypto-native quirks like airdrops, which put fresh capital in the hands of users and, in turn, pump the token price, inflating the size of projects’ treasuries.

A recent report from Dragonfly found that between 2020 and 2024, the 11 largest airdrops generated $7 billion. This won’t close the gap between AI and crypto, but it shows that there are more ways to get a dollar than traditional venture capital.

Solana’s high staking rewards will live to inflate SOL another day.

A contentious effort to reform the blockchain network’s generous inflation regime flopped on Thursday after supporters of SIMD-0228 failed to garner the supermajority they needed to implement the major economic change.

The surprise result delivered a blow to the Solana power brokers who rallied to replace Solana’s static inflation mechanics with a market-based system. Their proposal likely would have cut the network’s 4.7% annual staking rewards down to 1% or less.

In a contest that pitted Solana’s influential leaders and investors – who claim the network’s high staking rewards are bad for SOL’s price – against small-time operators who feared the effects of a big cut to their revenue, the opposition rallied hardest on Thursday, as late-voting validators’ ballots broke heavily in favor of «no.»

That was enough to scuttle the first major attempt at lowering Solana’s uncommonly high staking emissions rate. Among the most valuable programmable blockchains by market cap, Solana issues comparatively large sums of new tokens to its validators, the computer operations that power proof-of-stake blockchains.

Much like election night in the U.S., SIMD-0228’s weeklong political circus featured betting, ranting, data threads, chart-reading wonkery, endless social media debates and more than a bit of heated name-calling. One validator put their votes up for sale. Many others split their tickets.

It crescendoed with a dramatic rush of ballots cast by many of Solana’s 1300 validators. In the end, the opposition won an exceptionally high turnout election that laid bare the divide between big and small validators.

In the end, SIMD-0228 became the network’s first economic reform to fail at the polls.

Little stakers

Solana validators are only called upon to vote when the network is grappling with a major economic change, said Jonny, the operator of the Solana Compass validator.

SIMD-0228 is the third ever such vote to appear in records by StakingFacilities.com (the current proposal went up for consideration with an unrelated SIMD that passed). Its controversies sparked the highest turnout vote in the network’s history.

Over 66% of validators cast votes, according to a dashboard from Flipside Crypto. Together they wielded 75% of the network’s voting power, a remarkable share given voting in this decentralized system is voluntary.

Of participating validators with 500,000 SOL or less, over 60% voted against SIMD-0228, per a Dune dashboard. Larger validators saw the exact opposite: of validators with more than 500,000 SOL, 60% voted in favor.

The lopsided results suggest opponents’ warnings of economic ruin struck a nerve with small-time validators.

Big Stakes

Proponents of SIMD-0228 believe it would have solved Solana’s inflation problem, which they claim drags down SOL’s price. Their thinking goes like this: fewer tokens means fewer sellers, and fewer in the hands of tax collectors, too.

In place of the network’s static 4.7% SOL emissions that validators receive annually, they called for a dynamic system that adjusts to nudge staking trends up or down

Opponents, meanwhile, called the proposal reckless and rushed. Some told CoinDesk they suspected its co-author, the influential investment company Multicoin Capital, had written it to favor its own interests. Others publicly warned SIMD-0228 would disrupt elements of Solana’s DeFi economy, or turn off institutional investors who they claimed were attracted to SOL’s native yield.

Some doomsayers even claimed SIMD-0228 would chip away at Solana’s decentralization by forcing hundreds of validators with small SOL stakes offline, though others dispute the size of the blow.

Solana validators make money based on how much SOL they’ve staked, either from their own coffers or from tokens delegated to them by others. Those with smaller stakes are more acutely exposed to changes in emissions than those with bigger operators.

«Many people feel like SIMD-0228 is not the best proposal to address inflation on Solana,» said SolBlaze, a validator operator.

«SIMD-0228 is a significant economic change, and changes on this scale deserve more time to discuss, analyze data, and iterate with feedback from different sectors of the ecosystem.»

Reformists aren’t going to give up the fight, said Max Resnick, one of the proposal’s co-authors and an economic researcher at Anza Labs.

«We are gonna chat with the no’s and come to a compromise,» he said.