Justin Sun blasts Trump-linked WLFI's 'absurd' governance vote, escalating feud

A public dispute between Tron founder Justin Sun and Trump-linked crypto project WLFI$0.08085 escalated Wednesday after Sun sharply criticized a new governance proposal, calling it "one of the most absurd governance scams" he has seen.

In a lengthy post on X, Sun accused the project of designing a vote that punishes dissent, with token holders who vote against the proposal risking having their tokens locked indefinitely.

He also claimed he and other large holders had been excluded from the process, alleging that tokens tied to roughly 4% of voting power under his control had been frozen.

More broadly, Sun questioned whether the vote has any real authority, claiming control over the protocol sits with anonymous wallet addresses, including a multisignature setup that can override outcomes and a separate account with the power to blacklist users.

"This proposal is not governance," Sun said in the post. "It is an exercise of power by the selected few who are carefully engineering a further power consolidation and property expropriation operation."

WLFI proposal

The criticism centers on WLFI's new proposal that would overhaul token lockups across the ecosystem. More than 62 billion WLFI tokens would be subject to new terms, including multi-year lockups and vesting schedules.

Under the plan, tokens held by insiders — such as team members, advisors and partners — would face a two-year lockup followed by a three-year gradual release, alongside a 10% token burn upon opting in. Early supporters would face slightly shorter vesting terms but no burn. In total, up to 4.5 billion tokens could be permanently destroyed.

Holders who do not accept the new terms would remain locked indefinitely, per the proposal.

Sun was not alone in pushing back. Simon Dedic, founder of Moonrock Capital, said early investors had effectively been "rugged."

"All the $WLFI early investors who thought they were sitting on solid profits just got rugged, by the Trump family themselves," Dedic wrote on X, adding that the move appeared to give the project another chance to extract value from investors. He also criticized what he described as "blatant misconduct" with little effort to conceal it.

A World Liberty Financial spokesperson told CoinDesk that the proposal "was designed to further align all the participants in the WLFI ecosystem for the long-run," adding that it aims to "optimally ensure long-term participation in our ecosystem and help ensure healthy market supply."