The fight between Justin Sun and the Donald Trump family linked World Liberty Financial took a fresh turn on Monday with WLFI filing a defamation case against Sun over his “smear campaign.”
The Founder of Tron, who was once seen as the biggest backer of the crypto company, hit back calling the move a “pr stunt” which had no merit.
In its plea WLFI says Sun published defamatory statements against WLFI to further his own financial interests. The platform also alleges that Sun engaged in shorting $WLFI tokens and indulged in straw purchases on behalf of undisclosed third parties while threatening to take the token’s price to ‘shit’ if he was not paid ‘hundreds of millions of dollars.’
World Liberty lays bare Sun’s hidden transactions
World Liberty says Blue Anthem, which is owned by Justin Sun, purchased two billion non-transferable $WLFI tokens for $30 million in November 2024. An additional one billion non-transferable $WLFI tokens were granted to Blue Anthem for agreeing to serve on World Liberty’s Advisory Board.
In January 2025, the company acquired another billion tokens, taking its total holdings to 4 billion tokens.
The lawsuit says Blue Anthem later transferred $9 million worth of tokens to Binance despite the assets being non-transferrable. Sun also acquired tokens on behalf of other investors.
Following these “prohibited transactions,” World Liberty froze Blue Anthem’s tokens in keeping with its terms of sale which, it says, were disclosed to Sun in a Token Unlock Agreement to which Blue Anthem had assented.
At this point, World Liberty says, Sun went on a “scorched-earth pressure campaign,” to extract millions of dollars from the company by having his counsel threaten litigation against the platform.
WLFI said Sun, “weaponized his money, hiring influencers and deploying bots, to amplify his lies across social media.” The statement goes on to say, “his actions were coordinated, paid for, and deliberate,” and that, “he weaponized his platform to spread lies to more than 4 million followers.”
WLFI said its actions were about the integrity of decentralized finance, saying, “when a major investor tries to destroy the project’s reputation, it threatens the trust of every holder. We cannot allow that.”
Sun’s love affair with Trump seems to be over
Justin Sun has vowed to fight the defamation lawsuit by WLFI saying it lacks merit echoing the comments made by the defi platform when last month, the crypto founder had filed a lawsuit over his assets being frozen, claiming his rights as an investor had been violated. Sun, however, had said that he remained an ardent supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Sun had posted on his social media accounts around that time calling World Liberty’s administrators as “bad actors” and accused them of treating the crypto community as “a personal ATM.”
In addition to buying up millions of dollars worth of WLFI tokens, Sun also holds the Solana-based meme coin TRUMP, claiming to be its biggest holder.
In a move that raised eyebrows, the SEC had settled its case against Sun. Soon after, the head of the agency stepped down. Last month, when the president hosted a gala at Mar-a-Lago for the top investors of his meme coin, Sun was conspicuously absent.