World Liberty Financial’s native token staged a comeback after the project blacklisted Tron founder Justin Sun’s token holdings of 595.109 million WLFI tokens.
Sun remarked,
“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 value rose by nearly 4% in the last 24 hours to $0.18754 from an all-time low of $0.1632. The price uptrend added around $500 million to the project’s market capitalization, which stood at $4.6 billion as of press time.
CoinGlass data shows that crypto traders speculating on WLFI lost $17 million due to the digital asset’s volatile price swings.
Meanwhile, WLFI’s price performance has led to a 50% rise in the token’s open interest volume to $7.2 billion at the time of writing.
These developments mark a significant turnaround of fortunes for a digital asset that has lost around 70% of its value since it started trading on Sept. 1.
Sun vs WLFI
On Sept. 4, the WLFI team blocklisted a wallet address belonging to Sun that held 595.109 million WLFI tokens worth nearly $104 million.
According to Onchain Lens, the WLFI team allegedly blocked Sun’s wallet due to allegations that an exchange connected to him had been using customer tokens to suppress the asset’s price. The reports remained unconfirmed as of press time.
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These rumors began after wallets connected to Sun transferred over $10 million worth of WLFI tokens to exchanges. Conor Grogan, a Coinbase executive, had flagged a transaction on X, saying:
“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 and described them as “a few general exchange deposit tests with very small amounts, followed by an address dispersion.” He added:
“No buying or selling was involved, so it could not possibly have any impact on the market.”
Sun slams WLFI
Following these actions, Sun criticized World Liberty Financial’s blocklisting of his tokens in a Sept. 5 statement shared on X as “unilateral” and “unreasonable.”
According to him, the President Donald Trump’s crypto venture actions violated the “legitimate rights of investors,” while adding that such decisions could damage 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 the WLFI’s initial price decline when the timestamps of his transactions are scrutinized.
