By Tom Wilson
LONDON, April 13 (Reuters) – A major investor in U.S. President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial has claimed that the company “secretly” deployed a tool to unilaterally freeze and limit private ownership of its WLFI token.
In posts on social media platform X on Sunday, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun said, without providing evidence, that World Liberty had embedded what he described as a “backdoor blacklist function” in the blockchain-based contracts used for the tokens.
The move, Sun wrote, gave World Liberty “unilateral power” to “effectively freeze, restrict and confiscate the property rights” of any token holder without cause and without recourse.
Reuters could not determine whether World Liberty has or is using such a tool. This news agency was also unable to determine any specific information about Sun’s trading activities.
The official World Liberty account on X posted a response to Sun’s allegations on Sunday: “We have the contract. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court.”
When contacted for comment, a company spokesperson directed Reuters to its posts on X. Sun did not respond to a message from Reuters on Telegram and his spokesperson did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
World Liberty is the most prominent of several lucrative crypto businesses co-founded by the Trump family. When it launches in 2024, the cryptocurrency company says it will give control of financial flows to small investors through a yet-to-be-launched “decentralized finance” app.
It generated more than $460 million in income for the Trump family in the first half of 2025, according to a Reuters analysis https://www.reuters.com/investigations/inside-trump-familys-global-crypto-cash-machine-2025-10-28/ published last year.
Sun in late 2024 became the largest publicly known investor in the then-nascent World Liberty, spending tens of millions of dollars on the WLFI token and being appointed as an advisor to the company. He later increased his holdings to at least $75 million, according to his social media posts from January 2025.
In 2024, Sun told a New York Times reporter that his investment was a vote of confidence https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/politics/trump-crypto-world-liberty-financial.html in what he called the Trump family’s “excellent project.”
In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission settled the 2023 lawsuit against Sun https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/justin-sun-settles-sec-fraud-case-10-million-2026-03-05/ for $10 million. The lawsuit alleges fraud, selling unregistered crypto securities and concealing payments to celebrities to promote his products. Sun did not admit wrongdoing.