Former US president Donald Trump along with his sons and entrepreneurs late Monday launched a cryptocurrency platform but provided few details.

Little was revealed about the Trump family crypto project during a two-hour online presentation other than an offer to let people buy digital “tokens” giving them a vote in platform decisions.

The event went ahead as planned despite an apparent assassination attempt against Trump on Sunday at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

World Liberty Financial intends to offer services based on so-called decentralized finance, a mechanism that eliminates the need for an intermediary such as a bank to carry out transactions with a third party, the politics-laced discussion indicated.

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is based on so-called blockchain technology, which keeps a theoretically open but tamper-proof record of transactions.

World Liberty Financial will enable users to lend or borrow cryptocurrencies to or from one another, a service already offered by many platforms, one of the best-known of which is Aave.

The former president’s son Donald Trump Jr. touted this as “the start of a financial revolution,” during a session streamed on X, formerly Twitter.

Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro, the linchpins of the project and established cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, said the platform would primarily use “stablecoins”, which are backed by a traditional currency, most often the dollar.

As a result, they are free from the sometimes brutal fluctuations experienced by digital currencies untethered to real-world money.

World Liberty Financial wants to attract the masses to cryptocurrencies, creating a platform easily accessible to people, Folkman said.

Project leaders said they would sell tokens that give owners the right to take part in the governance of the platform, with 63 per cent of them offered to the public, 20 per cent going to the founding team and the rest set aside as rewards for users.

No timetable for the project was disclosed.

During his presidency Trump referred to cryptocurrencies as a scam, but has since radically changed his position, presenting himself as a “pro-bitcoin president” if elected in November.

In so doing, he is standing in opposition to the Biden administration, which is seen as a proponent of regulating the sector.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general (DG) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), has officially announced her intentions to seek another four-year term as head of the organisation.

Okonjo-Iweala announced her bid for a second term more than a month after 58 member countries supported a proposal from the African Group of WTO for her to head the organisation for another term.

The DG appreciated the support and said she would give her feedback to members soon.

In a statement to Reuters on Monday conveying her feedback, Okonjo-Iweala said she is ready to “compete”.

“I would like to be part of this chapter of the WTO story and I stand ready to compete for the position,” she said.

“For my second term, I intend to focus on delivering.”

She added that among the priorities were addressing “unfinished business”.

In 2020, the administration of former United States President Donald Trump blocked Okonjo-Iweala’s appointment – a move seen by some as an attack on an organisation he had previously described as “horrible”.

The United States said it favoured her opponent; South Korea’s Yoo Myung-hee, because the WTO needed “someone with real, hands-on experience in the field”.

However, on February 15, 2021, she secured US backing when Jeo Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Speaking on the odds of getting limited chances if Trump wins the forthcoming election, she said, “I don’t focus on that because I have no control”.

Commenting on the job, the WTO chief admitted the job was difficult.

Okonjo-Iweala said the geopolitical tensions among WTO’s 166 members “was a significant challenge”.

“It is tough, you know, very tough. There’s no getting away from that. But it’s also a job that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning,” she added.

The current term of Okonjo-Iweala finishes at the end of August 2025 and is eligible for a second four-year term.

The former Nigerian minister assumed office as DG WTO on March 1, 2021, for a single term of four years.

Prior to her position at WTO, Okonjo-Iweala served twice as a minister of finance in Nigeria from 2003 to 2006 and from 2011 to 2015 and briefly acted as foreign minister in 2006.

Nigeria’s headline inflation rate dropped to 32.15 per cent for the month of August 2024, according to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

This represents a 1.25% percentage point decrease from the 33.4 per cent recorded in July 2024 and the second consecutive monthly slowdown in inflation after easing in the previous month.

The NBS, in its Consumer Price Index report posted on its website on Monday, signals a slower pace in the increase of the average price level compared to the previous month.

The report read, “In August 2024, the headline inflation rate further eased to 32.15 per cent relative to the July 2024 headline inflation rate of 33.40 per cent.”

On a year-on-year basis, the August 2024 inflation rate was 6.35 percentage points higher than the 25.80 per cent rate recorded in August 2023, indicating a significant increase over the past year.

On a month-on-month basis, the inflation rate in August 2024 stood at 2.22 per cent, slightly lower than July’s rate of 2.28 per cent, signalling a slower pace in the increase of the average price level compared to the previous month.

It added that Food inflation was 37.52 per cent in August 2024, while Month-on-Month headline inflation was 2.22 per cent.