World Liberty Financial’s native token experienced a resurgence following the project’s decision to blacklist Tron founder Justin Sun’s token holdings of 595.109 million WLFI tokens.
Sun stated,
“As one of the early major investors in World Liberty Financials, I have contributed not only capital but also my trust and support for the future of this project. My goal has always been to grow alongside the team and community, and to jointly build a strong and healthy WLF ecosystem.
However, during the course of operations, my tokens were unreasonably frozen.”
According to CryptoSlate’s data, WLFI’s value rose by almost 4% in the last 24 hours to $0.18754 from an all-time low of $0.1632. This price increase added approximately $500 million to the project’s market capitalization, which was $4.6 billion at the time of writing.
CoinGlass data indicates that crypto traders speculating on WLFI suffered losses of $17 million due to the digital asset’s volatile price movements.
Meanwhile, WLFI’s price performance led to a 50% increase in the token’s open interest volume to $7.2 billion at the time of publication.
These developments signify a significant turnaround for a digital asset that had seen a 70% drop in value since it launched on Sept. 1.
Sun vs WLFI
On Sept. 4, the WLFI team blocked a wallet address owned by Sun that held 595.109 million WLFI tokens valued at nearly $104 million.
According to Onchain Lens, Sun’s wallet was allegedly blocked by the WLFI team due to suspicions that an exchange connected to him had been using customer tokens to manipulate the asset’s price. These allegations were not confirmed at the time of writing.
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Rumors began circulating after wallets associated with Sun transferred over $10 million worth of WLFI tokens to exchanges. Conor Grogan, a Coinbase executive, highlighted a transaction on X, stating:
“A Binance deposit wallet connected to Justin Sun received over 60 million WLFI tokens worth $12M yesterday from HTX. The 60M WLFI deposit represents about 52.6% of HTX’s total WLFI holdings at present from what I can find onchain based on HTX’s public wallets.
However, Sun defended the transactions, describing them as “a few general exchange deposit tests with very small amounts, followed by an address dispersion.” He stated:
“No buying or selling was involved, so it could not possibly have any impact on the market.”
Sun slams WLFI
Following these events, Sun criticized World Liberty Financial’s blocklisting of his tokens in a statement on Sept. 5 shared on X as “unilateral” and “unreasonable.”
According to him, the actions taken by President Donald Trump’s crypto venture infringed on the “legitimate rights of investors,” and could potentially harm investor confidence in the project.
He wrote:
“Tokens are sacred and inviolable—this should be the most basic value of any blockchain. It’s also what makes us stronger and more fair than traditional finance.”
Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik also defended Sun by pointing out that the crypto billionaire was not responsible for WLFI’s initial price decline when analyzing the timestamps of his transactions.
