World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s main crypto venture, is facing renewed scrutiny after a recent report revealed that the project quietly sold billions of WLFI tokens to private investors.
World Liberty Back In The Spotlight
On Friday, a Bloomberg report revealed that the Trump family-backed crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, made hundreds of millions of dollars from undisclosed sales of its WLFI token, raising fresh concerns about the project’s transparency.
The news media outlet explained that after the two fundraising rounds that brought in $550 million between October 2024 and January 2025, the project sold an additional 5.9 billion WLFI tokens to accredited private investors.
The transactions, which were not publicly disclosed, seemingly raised hundreds of millions of dollars, with a significant portion of the proceeds allocated to founder-affiliated entities. While no exact figure was disclosed, the additional sales may have generated roughly $295 million, based on the second fundraising round’s $0.05 token price.
Intelligence platform Tokenomist.ai discovered the sales after examining World Liberty’s governance filings at Bloomberg’s request. The platform found that the number of tokens allocated to the founder, team, adviser, and partner had increased without a discernible explanation. This discrepancy had not been disclosed to the project’s broader investor base.
World Liberty Financial confirmed the sales to Bloomberg, labeling them as “white glove” transactions with private buyers. However, the project refrained from disclosing the identities of the buyers or those who received the money from the additional sales.
Citing the project’s disclosures, the report noted that 75% of WLFI token sale proceeds go to DT Marks DEFI LLC, an entity affiliated with US President Donald Trump and certain family members that holds 22.5 billion WLFI tokens. The news outlet’s previous calculations estimated that the presidential family generated roughly $390 million from the two public fundraising rounds.
WLFI Slides To Record Lows As Concerns Mount
The news of the undisclosed sales deepens concerns about the Trump family’s crypto project, which has been under investors’ scrutiny over the past month. Last week, Tron founder Justin Sun escalated the online dispute against World Liberty Financial to a full-on legal battle.
As reported by Bitcoinist, Sun, one of WLFI’s largest investors, filed a complaint against the Trump-backed crypto venture. He alleged that the project’s team froze his tokens using an embedded smart contract backlist function, revoked his voting rights, and threatened to burn his holdings without proper justification.
In the filing, Sun detailed that he invested $45 million to purchase 3 billion WLFI tokens and received one billion tokens for advising the project, bringing his total to roughly 4 billion. Additionally, he claimed that World Liberty Financial privately blamed him for the WLFI’s 40% price crash at the time of launch, leading to his address blacklist on September 2025.
Recently, Sun slammed the project’s controversial governance proposal, which would keep early investors’ tokens locked for at least another two years before they begin unlocking gradually. In an X post, he called the project a “World Tyranny,” affirming that the proposal is a mechanism for coercion, as investors who do not accept the new terms risk having their tokens locked indefinitely.
The project has also faced backlash for depositing 5 billion of its own WLFI tokens into the decentralized lending protocol Dolomite and borrowing around $75 million in stablecoins against them.
Amid its recent controversies, WLFI’s selling pressure has deepened, hitting an all-time low (ATL) of $0.054 on Friday afternoon. This represents an 83% decline from its all-time high (ATH) of $0.33 on September 1, 2025, leaving many investors at a loss.
“It is surreal to have the Trump family not only profiting off this financial venture that features glaring conflicts of interest but doing so in a way that blocks other investors from sharing in the gains,” Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University, told Bloomberg.
