World Liberty Financial’s native token, WLFI, experienced a resurgence after the project decided to blacklist Tron founder Justin Sun’s token holdings of 595.109 million WLFI tokens. This move by the project led to a significant increase in the value of WLFI, with the token’s price rising by almost 4% in the last 24 hours to $0.18754 from an all-time low of $0.1632. This uptrend in price added approximately $500 million to the project’s market capitalization, which currently stands at $4.6 billion.
According to data from CoinGlass, crypto traders speculating on WLFI incurred losses of $17 million due to the digital asset’s volatile price swings. Despite this, WLFI’s price performance has resulted in a 50% increase in the token’s open interest volume, which now stands at $7.2 billion.
These recent developments mark a significant turnaround for WLFI, which had previously lost around 70% of its value since it began trading on September 1st.
On September 4th, the WLFI team decided to blacklist a wallet address owned by Justin Sun, containing 595.109 million WLFI tokens valued at nearly $104 million. Reports from Onchain Lens suggested that Sun’s wallet was blocked due to allegations that an exchange associated with him was using customer tokens to manipulate the asset’s price. However, these allegations have not been confirmed.
Rumors began circulating after wallets linked to Sun transferred over $10 million worth of WLFI tokens to exchanges. Coinbase executive Conor Grogan flagged a transaction on X, highlighting a deposit of over 60 million WLFI tokens worth $12 million from HTX to a Binance wallet connected to Sun.
In response, Sun defended the transactions, stating that they were merely “general exchange deposit tests with very small amounts” and had no impact on the market. Despite this, Sun criticized World Liberty Financial’s decision to blacklist his tokens, calling it “unilateral” and “unreasonable.” He expressed concerns that such actions could damage investor confidence in the project and violate the legitimate rights of investors.
Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, also came to Sun’s defense, pointing out that Sun was not responsible for WLFI’s initial price decline when analyzing the timestamps of his transactions.
Overall, the conflict between Sun and World Liberty Financial has sparked controversy within the crypto community. Investors will be closely monitoring the situation to see how it unfolds and whether it will have a lasting impact on the project’s future.