Trump's Sluggish DeFi Project Gets a Big Boost From Justin Sun's $30M Token Purchase

Sun's investment, best known for creating the TRON blockchain, comes after World Liberty Financial saw slow initial sales of its WLFI token.

Updated Nov 25, 2024, 7:04 p.m. Published Nov 25, 2024, 7:00 p.m.

The Donald Trump-backed cryptocurrency platform World Liberty Financial got off to a sluggish start, with investors buying far fewer of its WLFI tokens than the project hoped for.

But now, Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun has just given it a significant boost, buying $30 million worth of WLFI.

World Liberty is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform backed by the incoming U.S. president and all three of his sons. The project is run by a circle of Trump world insiders, crypto entrepreneurs and financial figures.

Sun, meanwhile, is best known for establishing TRON, a blockchain platform mostly popular in Asia. He is also affiliated with HTX, a popular crypto exchange formerly known as Huobi.

On Nov, 25, $30 million of WLFI tokens were purchased by a wallet tagged to Huobi by Etherscan, the Ethereum blockchain data service. A spokesperson for TRON declined to directly comment on whether the sale was tied to Sun, but sources familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that he was behind the purchase.

And Sun confirmed this in a tweet.

World Liberty Financial was launched in September 2024, aiming to provide decentralized borrowing and lending services, with governance managed through the native WLFI token. Sales of the WLFI token went live in September, but only non-U.S. investors and accredited U.S. investors were allowed to participate.

The purchase restrictions — combined with the fact that WLFI tokens are non-transferable — appeared to make the token a tough sell for most crypto investors. Although the project set a target of selling $300 million worth of tokens, it had only sold $21 million worth before Sun's purchase on Monday.

According to the WLFI "gold paper" outlining the project's plans and details of the WLFI token, a portion of the WLFI sale proceeds will go to a company controlled by Donald Trump.

Trump's company, however, would only profit once the sale proceeds exceeded $30 million, which they hadn't before Monday's sale to Sun.

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.

Sam Kessler

Sam is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor for tech and protocols. His reporting is focused on decentralized technology, infrastructure and governance. Sam holds a computer science degree from Harvard University, where he led the Harvard Political Review. He has a background in the technology industry and owns some ETH and BTC. Sam was part of the team that won a 2023 Gerald Loeb Award for CoinDesk's coverage of Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse.