The Trump family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, filed a lawsuit Monday against Tron founder Justin Sun, accusing the crypto entrepreneur of shorting their token last fall and then defaming the company once his holdings of the asset were frozen.
The suit comes just weeks after Sun himself—one of the largest holders of the company’s WLFI token—filed a lawsuit against World Liberty, accusing the company of improperly freezing his investment.
Monday’s lawsuit, filed by World Liberty in Florida state court, accuses Sun of funding “a large, deliberate, short-selling campaign designed to suppress $WLFI's price” when the token launched for public trading back in September.
World Liberty claims it then froze Sun’s massive token position to “prevent further harm” to the company and its token holders—a right the company says it always had pursuant to Sun’s token unlock agreement.
Shortly thereafter, Sun made public pleas to World Liberty to unfreeze his tokens, arguing he had done nothing improper.
Per today’s lawsuit, Sun then began privately threatening litigation against the Trump family’s crypto firm, allegedly claiming his lawsuit would “light World Liberty on fire” and cause WLFI’s price to “go to shit.”
Sun ultimately did file a lawsuit against World Liberty last month, claiming he remains an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump, but that the president’s company violated his rights as an investor by improperly freezing his tokens.
In a string of social media posts around that time, Sun also accused World Liberty’s operators of treating “the crypto community as a personal ATM” and labeled the company’s leaders—among them, several members of the Trump family—as “bad actors.”
In today’s lawsuit, World Liberty argued such statements were defamatory and “profoundly harmful” to the company. The firm also accused Sun of hiring social media influencers and deploying social-media “bot” accounts “to amplify his lies.”
This morning, Sun dismissed the lawsuit as “a meritless PR stunt” in a post on X, and said he looks forward to defeating the accusations in court.
Sun has historically been one of the biggest backers of the Trump family’s sprawling crypto empire. In addition to buying up tens of millions of dollars worth of the WLFI token, he also purchased millions of dollars worth of the president’s Solana-based meme coin (TRUMP) last year, and claimed to be the asset’s top holder.
Earlier this year, the Trump SEC moved to settle its yearslong fraud case against Sun, a decision that reportedly prompted the agency’s head of enforcement to shortly thereafter resign.
But Sun’s relationship with the Trumps has frayed in the last few months. Late last month, when the president hosted a Mar-a-Lago bash for top holders of his meme coin, Sun was notably a no-show.
