Justin Sun anchors Trump DeFi token sale with $30M buy

On November 25, 2024 — three weeks after Donald Trump won the presidential election — TRON founder Justin Sun announced he had purchased 2 billion governance tokens from the Trump-family-controlled DeFi protocol World Liberty Financial (WLFI) for $30 million. The transaction was the largest single WLFI buy on record at the time and was widely credited with rescuing a token sale that, per Reuters and other reporting, had been struggling to meet its targets in the weeks after launch. Sun followed up with a second tranche of 1 billion tokens for $15 million in January 2025, bringing his cash investment to $45 million. On January 22, 2025 — one day after Trump's inauguration — Sun was named a WLFI advisor, a title that came with an additional 1 billion tokens awarded for free, bringing his total WLFI holdings to approximately 4 billion tokens. WLFI's published structure routes 75% of net token-sale proceeds to Trump-family entities (DT Marks DEFI LLC and DT Marks SC LLC); the Witkoff family and WLFI's other co-founders share the remainder. WLFI governance tokens are non-transferable and non-sellable, meaning the cash inflows from Sun's purchases function more as one-way payments to the Trump family than as conventional investments. At the time of Sun's purchases, he and his company TRON were defendants in an active SEC securities-fraud lawsuit filed during the Biden administration; the SEC paused that lawsuit on February 26, 2025 to "explore a potential resolution," weeks after Sun became a WLFI advisor. Sun later told reporters his WLFI bet was part of TRON's promise to "make America great again" in crypto.