The Trump family’s World Liberty crypto venture is being sued by one of its billionaire backers on extortion charges.
Crypto billionaire Justin Sun and his companies sued Liberty Financial, a crypto project world co-founded by President Donald Trump, accusing the company of extortion and an “illegal scheme” to seize their tokens.
Sun alleged that the company co-founded by US President Donald Trump and his son Eric Trump has “frozen” all of his tokens and stripped him of the right to vote on governance issues.
In a complaint filed Tuesday in San Francisco federal court, Sun also claimed that “world freedom is on the brink of collapse” and questioned whether it has enough reserves to back its USD1 stablecoin.
According to the lawsuit, Sun invested a total of $45 million to purchase 3 billion WLFI tokens of World Liberty due in 2024 and 2025, and was awarded another billion WLFI tokens for advising the project.
But he says his relationship with the World Liberty team soured in the middle of last year, when they refused to commit more investment and support to the project. In recent weeks, Sun and World Liberty have been sparring with each other on the social network X amid the project’s deepening conflict with early investors.
Sun is a strong supporter of Trump and his stance on cryptocurrency, but he accused “certain individuals” associated with World Liberty of working against the president’s values.
“They wrongfully froze all of my tokens, took away my right to vote on governance proposals, and threatened to permanently destroy my tokens by ‘burning’ them – all without any proper justification,” he said in a social media post announcing the lawsuit.
Sun is the founder of a separate billion-dollar crypto project, TRON. He initially invested $45 million (£33 million) in World Liberty and said that, at times, his WLFI tokens have been valued at more than $1 billion (£740 million).
Since September, the price of a single WLFI token has fallen from 31 cents to less than 8 cents.
