Justin Sun sues Trump family crypto venture over frozen tokens, voting rights

Justin Sun sued World Liberty Financial in federal court in California, accusing the Trump family-backed crypto venture of freezing his WLFI tokens, cutting off his voting rights and threatening to destroy his holdings. The billionaire founder of TRON said he tried to resolve the dispute in good faith before turning to court, even as he remained a public supporter of President Donald Trump.

Sun’s complaint centers on a promise that helped sell World Liberty in 2024: a decentralized finance project that said small investors would have a say over financial flows through a still-unveiled app. Instead, Sun alleges, the company secretly changed its smart contract to blacklist wallets, freeze tokens and later reallocate tokens without any governance vote. He said World Liberty also moved to pressure him into minting and promoting its USD1 stablecoin on the TRON network, then retaliated when he refused.

The lawsuit says Sun spent $45 million on WLFI tokens in 2024. Other reporting has said he later became World Liberty’s largest token holder after investing $75 million late that year. Sun’s filing also points to a governance proposal from April 15, 2026, that would require 10 percent of adviser tokens to be permanently burned, a move he says shows the venture was preparing to seize control rather than honor token-holder rights.

The complaint paints a far darker picture of the company’s finances, saying World Liberty was on the brink of collapse and lacked enough readily available reserves to handle immediate redemptions. It also alleges hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and severe financial insolvency. Separate coverage has said the venture borrowed against its own token and drained USD1 liquidity pools, raising fresh questions about whether the stablecoin has enough backing to hold value under stress.

The case highlights a larger problem in political crypto: when branding, access and governance are bundled together, token ownership can become a form of leverage rather than power. Sun’s earlier Ethereum wallet was blacklisted in September 2025 after he moved more than $9 million worth of WLFI tokens, and the new suit suggests the dispute is less about one investor than about who really controls a venture that marketed itself as decentralized while remaining tied to the Trump brand. World Liberty Financial declined to comment.