Blockchain billionaire Sun takes Trump family’s crypto firm to court

Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun has sued World Liberty Financial, the digital currency venture cofounded by United States President Donald Trump and his sons, alleging that World Liberty illegally froze his holdings of tokens issued by the company.

Sun alleged in the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California on Tuesday, that World Liberty secretly installed tools to prevent the sale of his tokens after they became tradable in September 2025. The lawsuit also alleges that World Liberty threatened to “burn” – or permanently delete – his holdings, even while they were in Sun’s digital wallet.

Sun, the Hong Kong-based founder of the Tron cryptocurrency, bought $45m of WLFI tokens – some 3 billion – and was later awarded a further 1 billion tokens after being named as an adviser to World Liberty, the lawsuit said.

Sun’s portfolio of 4 billion WLFI tokens is worth roughly $320m, according to a Reuters news agency calculation based on the latest WLFI price.

World Liberty Financial declined to comment on the lawsuit. A spokesperson for the company had told Reuters earlier this week that Sun “is not an advisor at World Liberty Financial, and he has never held an operational role in the company”.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

World Liberty is the most prominent of several lucrative crypto businesses cofounded or controlled by the Trump family, which has already made more than $1bn from World Liberty, according to a Reuters analysis. World Liberty’s bylaws state that 75 percent of the revenue from WLFI token sales is routed to the Trumps.

World Liberty is under increasing scrutiny from some of its investors, who have complained for months about what they describe as the company’s lack of transparency, centralised governance structure and failure to respond to community complaints.

In the lawsuit, Sun described himself as “one of World Liberty’s anchor investors”.

World Liberty’s structure means that the WLFI tokens Sun bought in 2024 are not equivalent to standard company shares. The tokens do not carry ownership in the company, and holders are not entitled to dividends, although they do gain a limited say in the company’s governance.

Souring relationship

The lawsuit caps a dramatic deterioration of relations between Sun and World Liberty.

In September, Sun claimed that the company had frozen his token holdings, and earlier this month, he alleged in a post on social media platform X that World Liberty had secretly embedded what he described as a “backdoor blacklisting function” in the blockchain-based contracts used for the tokens.

That gave World Liberty “unilateral power” to “freeze, restrict, and effectively confiscate the property rights” of token holders without cause or recourse, Sun wrote on X.

World Liberty at that time responded to Sun’s allegations with a post on X that said: “We have the contracts. We have the ⁠evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal.”