TRON founder takes the Trump-linked DeFi project to California federal court, escalating a months-long feud over blacklisted tokens and governance rights.
TRON founder Justin Sun has filed a lawsuit against World Liberty Financial in California federal court, according to an X post from Sun Tuesday night. The lawsuit marks the latest escalation in a bitter public feud between WLFI’s largest investor and the Trump family’s DeFi project.
Sun, who invested $75 million in WLFI, alleges that the project wrongfully froze his tokens, stripped his governance voting rights, and has threatened to permanently burn his holdings, all without justification. He says he exhausted good-faith efforts to resolve the dispute before turning to litigation.
“They have left me with no choice but to turn to the courts,” Sun wrote on X.
The conflict traces back to September 2025, when WLFI blacklisted a wallet holding more than 500 million of Sun’s tokens after on-chain analysts flagged transfers routed through HTX, a crypto exchange that Sun is affiliated with.
Sun is also pushing back against a new governance proposal published by WLFI on April 15 that restructures token unlocks for all major holder categories, placing early supporter tokens on a two-year cliff followed by a two-year linear vest — a timeline that would extend well past Trump’s second term. Holders who decline the new terms face indefinite token locks. Sun says that because his tokens are frozen, he cannot vote on the proposal at all, as The Defiant reported last week.
Throughout his statement, Sun was careful to distinguish the project operators from President Trump himself, reaffirming his support for the administration while directing criticism at “certain individuals on the World Liberty project team.”
WLFI has fallen roughly 76% from its all-time high reached soon after launch, now trading around $0.08. The token is down 44% year to date.
Sun himself has previously been accused of fraud, namely by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which filed a lawsuit against Sun and three of his firms in 2023, alleging wash trading to manipulate the price of TRX.
The SEC dismissed the charges with prejudice last month.
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