In brief
- A wallet linked to Tron founder Justin Sun was blacklisted by World Liberty Financial after moving $9 million in WLFI tokens.
- WLFI token has dropped 19% to $0.18, with retail traders who bought at launch prices above $0.33 now down 45%, while early investors like Sun remain profitable with 10x+ gains
- Sun denied selling tokens in a message on X, claiming the transfers were just “deposit tests.”
An Ethereum wallet linked to Tron founder Justin Sun has been blacklisted after moving more than $9 million worth of World Liberty Financial tokens, or WLFI, according to blockchain data.
At the time of writing, WLFI, the native token of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial DeFi project, is changing hands for $0.1789, or 19% lower than it was this time yesterday. The token only just started trading on exchanges earlier this week. Exchange volumes indicate the token has been especially popular with traders in South Korea, on exchanges Upbit and Bybit.
It’s unclear why World Liberty Financial would have blacklisted the wallet, identified as belonging to Sun by blockchain analytics platforms Arkham and Nansen, for transferring tokens. But it is possible that early investors, like Sun or the Tron DAO, would have received token warrants that prohibit them from selling for a set amount of time.
Neither World Liberty nor Justin Sun immediately responded to a request for comment from Decrypt.
Nick Vaiman, co-founder and CEO of Bubblemaps, told Decrypt he’s not convinced Sun moved the tokens with the intention of selling.
“To be honest, I don’t think this dump has anything to do with Justin Sun. He barely moved funds to centralized exchanges, and this morning’s transfers were just from one of his addresses to another,” he said. “His latest statement saying he has nothing to do with the dump looks legitimate.”
我们的地址只是笼统地做了几笔交易所充值测试，金额非常低，然后做了一个地址分散，没有涉及任何买卖，不可能对市场产生任何影响。
— H.E. Justin Sun 👨🚀 (Astronaut Version) (@justinsuntron) September 4, 2025
The Sun statement the Bubblemaps team was referring to appeared on X in Mandarin. In it, Sun said the wallet “only generally did a few exchange deposit tests, the amounts were very low, then did a distribution to one address.” He added that the tests “did not involve any buying or selling,” and that it would have been impossible for the token movements to have impacted the market.
Another Bubblemaps analyst, the pseudonymous Deebs, added that sending tokens to an exchange doesn’t prove that they were sold.
“The $9 million transfer that Arkham and others have cited was simply a transfer to another wallet under his control. He did not send those funds to an exchange (yet),” he said. But he cautioned that it’s possible that World Liberty has access to non-public information that explains the blacklisting.
Some analysts have been incredibly skeptical about the World Liberty project. Last week, analysts at Compass Point flagged WLFI as “another catalyst that could potentially decimate retail traders.”
And users on Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt parent company Dastan, have overwhelmingly agreed with them. Before the market closed yesterday afternoon, odds had tipped entirely in favor of WLFI seeing a red candle within its first 69 hours of trading.
Early investors of the WLFI token, including Sun, managed to buy in at just $0.015 per token, or a $1.5 billion valuation, and are still very much in the green by more than 10X. But those retail traders who bought WLFI as soon as it became tradeable at a price above $0.33? They’re now down 45%.
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