This morning, February 23, USD1 stablecoin — the fifth largest in the world by market capitalization (~$5 billion), issued by the Trump family's World Liberty Financial crypto project — briefly lost its peg to the dollar, falling to ~$0.98 on Binance at approximately 8:15 a.m. Eastern Time. At the same time, the WLFI token fell by more than 8%, dropping to ~$0.107.
The trigger for the panic was a deleted retweet by Eric Trump, in which he reposted a message from the official WLFI account about new USD1 trading pairs on Binance. The deletion sparked a wave of speculation about Eric's possible exit from the project. However, an independent check showed that his profile still links to WLFI, and most of his previous posts about the project remain in place — no specific posts about the token could be confirmed as deleted.
The WLFI team's position: the project claimed a "coordinated attack" — allegedly, the co-founders' accounts were hacked, influencers were paid to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), and attackers opened large short positions on WLFI to profit from the chaos. The team emphasizes that the USD1 issuance and redemption mechanism, backed 1:1 by US dollars and US Treasury bonds (custodian — BitGo), allowed the peg to be quickly restored.
Important context. The incident occurred against the backdrop of several significant events:
— Just three days ago, on February 20, Binance launched an airdrop campaign for 235 million WLFI tokens for USD1 holders, scheduled to run until March 20, which generated increased interest and an influx of liquidity.
— The project is under increasing political pressure: Democrats in the House of Representatives are investigating WLFI's $500 million deal with an Emirati entity linked to Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, with a deadline for submitting documents set for March 1, 2026.
— Today, on-chain investigator ZachXBT announced the publication of an investigation into insider trading at one of the largest crypto companies (date: February 26). A number of users on social media began to speculate about a connection with the WLFI ecosystem, which added fuel to the fire.
Conclusion: analysts are inclined to believe that the depegging was a short-term liquidity stress rather than a structural failure in the stablecoin's collateralization. At the time of writing, USD1 is trading near $0.998, and WLFI has partially recovered its losses and is trading near $0.113. The team urges users to rely only on verified information channels.
