Tron (TRX) founder Justin Sun has criticized World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family, accusing the platform of operating in a way that undermines core decentralized finance principles and exploits its user base.
Sun, an early and major investor in the project, said his backing was initially driven by its stated mission to advance financial freedom through decentralized infrastructure, as he noted in an X post on April 12.
However, he now claims that key elements of the platform were not disclosed to investors, including a smart contract mechanism that allows the team to unilaterally freeze or restrict user-held tokens.
According to Sun, this function effectively grants centralized control over user assets, contradicting the project’s public positioning as a decentralized platform.
He further alleged that his own wallet was blacklisted in 2025, making him one of the largest affected investors and raising broader concerns about investor protections within the ecosystem.
‘Hidden controls’
The cryptocurrency billionaire also accused the project’s operators of embedding hidden controls, extracting fees without transparency, and restricting access to funds without due process.
“Every action taken by the WLFI team to extract fees from users, to secretly implant backdoor controls over user assets, to freeze investor funds without disclosure or due process, and to treat the crypto community as a personal ATM — all of these actions are illegitimate and were never authorized by any fair, transparent, or good-faith community governance process,” Sun said.
He argued that the governance processes cited by the team to justify these actions lack fairness, with limited participation, withheld information, and predetermined outcomes.
Sun’s criticism comes just days after World Liberty Financial moved 5 billion WLFI tokens to the DeFi lending platform Dolomite as collateral, securing approximately $75 million in stablecoin loans.
The deposit now represents a dominant share of the platform’s liquidity, accounting for the majority of its roughly $794 million total supply.
The timing of the transaction has intensified scrutiny around the project’s operations, with Sun warning that such practices risk eroding trust among investors and the broader crypto community.
He has called for the unlocking of affected tokens and greater transparency, urging the project to realign with principles of fairness and accountability in decentralized finance.
