Trump-backed World Liberty Financial disputes allegations of 'selling tokens' to crypto teams

The Trump-backed DeFi protocol World Liberty Financial, which has built up a treasury of various crypto tokens, disputed claims that it is “selling tokens,” following the publication of a news article by Blockworks citing anonymous sources alleging the team is proactively pitching projects on “token swap” deals.

“We’re making routine movements of our crypto holdings as part of regular treasury management, and payment of fees and expenses and to address working capital requirements,” the World Liberty X account posted on Monday. “To be clear, we are not selling tokens — we are simply reallocating assets for ordinary business purposes.”

“These actions are intended to be part of maintaining a strong, secure, and efficient treasury. No need to speculate — this is all standard practice for managing operations at WLFI,” the message continued.

On Monday, amid a steep market selloff, Blockworks reported that World Liberty had approached several blockchain teams with an offer to swap at least $10 million worth of unlaunched WLFI tokens for the same amount of the blockchain’s native token. The team was also reportedly charging a 10% fee for the arrangement. 

The allegations come about two weeks after World Liberty completed its sale of 20% of the 100 billion WLFI token supply, raising a total of $254 million just before President Donald Trump entered office. The WLFI team scaled back its initial target of raising $450 million after a slow start to the token sale. For instance, on the Saturday before Inauguration Day, only $91 million in total had been raised, or about 35% of the amount eventually brought in.

Citing increased demand for the token, World Liberty sold an additional 5 billion tokens, representing 5% of the total WLFI supply.

Concerns were raised last week after World Liberty purchased approximately $2 million worth of MOVE tokens amid rumors that Movement was holding talks regarding a tech-efficiency program with the newly established Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire Elon Musk. The acquisition also preceded Movement’s announcement of a developer mainnet, which was not a publicly-known part of its roadmap.

Movement Labs’ founder Rushi Manche denied allegations of “insider trading” or foul play and told The Block, “nothing from the Movement Labs offices or growth team have crossed DOGE's desks.”

World Liberty holds approximately $364 million worth of cryptocurrencies. Its largest holding is $176 million worth of ETH, the native token of the blockchain it is built on. Its next three largest holdings are $62 million worth of wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), $51 million staked ETH (StETH) and $47 million USDC. 

TRX, the native token of Tron, is World Liberty’s fifth-largest position at just over $9 million. Notably, Tron founder Justin Sun was named an advisor to World Liberty after announcing a $30 million investment in the project. Sun said he would purchase an additional $45 million after the project announced it was furthering its token sales. 

After TRX, World Liberty’s next largest treasury holdings are about $4.9 million worth of each LINK and AAVE. It also holds about $3.6 million worth of Ethena’s ENA and much smaller, sub $200,000 allocations in DeFi platform Ondo and AI protocol Colle’s governance tokens. The team has also seemingly reduced its exposure to Tether’s USDT stablecoin, which was once among its largest holdings.

World Liberty’s first major expansion of its reserves into altcoins, including AAVE, ENA and LINK, happened in mid-December. However, in honor of Trump entering office as the 47th president, the team made a series of symbolic purchases for about $4.7 million or $47 million of various tokens on Inauguration Day.

Blockworks reported that the World Liberty protocol, a fork of Aave, is expected to launch in Q3 2025 at a $1.5 billion valuation. WLFI tokens are not currently tradeable, and the project’s “goldpaper” stated the tokens will be “locked indefinitely.”

According to previous reports, 60% of the World Liberty holding company’s equity and 75% of the fees generated by the WLFI token sale will be allocated to the Trump family.