- Tron founder, Justin Sun, has invested US$30 million in the Trump-backed DeFi lending protocol World Liberty Financial.
- Sun has also joined World Liberty Financial as an advisor.
- Both Trump and Sun are known for their colourful histories and brushes with the law — Trump is a convicted felon while Sun has been charged with multiple crimes in the US including using wash trading to manipulate the price of Tron’s native token TRX.
Good news for the shitcoin aficionados out there — alleged fraudster and founder of the Tron network, Justin Sun, has teamed up with convicted felon and incoming president of the United States, Donald Trump, to create something of a crypto-scamster dream team.
Sun has clambered aboard Trump’s World Liberty Financial (WLFI) DeFi lending project as an advisor. How might Sun advise this promising new project I hear you ask? If what the US authorities allege against Sun is true, then he should be able to share the finer points of sophisticated business tactics like wash trading and secretly paying celebs to endorse the project.
In addition to joining the World Liberty Financial team, a wallet controlled by the Sun-affiliated crypto exchange HTX (formerly Huobi) has also reportedly bought a cool US$30 million worth of the project’s non-transferable (yes, it really is non-transferable), governance token, WLFI. Despite this wallet being controlled by HTX, sources knowledgeable on the matter say this investment actually came from Sun himself, making him the project’s largest investor.
In a post on X / Twitter announcing the investment Sun sounded downright Trumpian, claiming the US is becoming “the blockchain hub” and added that “TRON is committed to making America great again.”
Related: Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial DeFi Project Accepts Sign-Ups, Remains Vague on Use Cases
Sun Thrilled to Be WLFI Largest Investor
Worldwide Liberty Financial is a project created by and run by figures close to Donald Trump, including several of his children. Technically speaking, it’s a fork of the Aave lending protocol.
According to reports as much as 70% of the project’s token, WLFI, is reserved for the founders and other insiders — an unusually high percentage. Given that the token is a governance token but so much is held by founders it’s not clear what purpose holding the token would serve for the average investor. This lack of utility is further compounded by the token being non-transferable, meaning most investors won’t even be able to trade it should they want to take profits.
Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director during his first term, has described the project as a scam.
Into this heady mix of terrible tokenomics, dubious utility and high-profile warnings, strides Justin Sun. World Liberty Financial announced Sun joining their team on X / Twitter this morning, describing it as an “exciting announcement” and for reasons known only to themselves mentioned that he’d recently bought that stupid ‘artwork’ of the banana gaffer-taped to a wall:
The day before being announced as an advisor to World Liberty Financial, Sun announced the purchase of US$30 million (AU$46.3m) of WLFI, although in the spirit of honesty and transparency he didn’t specify exactly where this investment had come from.
Blockchain sleuths later determined it had come from a HTX controlled wallet. But CoinDesk has since spoken to sources familiar with the matter who say the investment came from Sun directly.
Curiously, Sun also mentioned in his tweet that Bitcoin owes its success to Donald Trump — perhaps he expects Bitcoin CEO, Satoshi Nakamoto, to head down to Mar-a-Lago to thank Trump in person.
Sun And Trump Share Colourful Histories
Trump’s colourful past and penchant for the dodgier side of business is well known, but Sun has a similarly interesting background.
In March of 2023 Sun was charged in the US with offering the sale of unregistered securities, a pretty common charge these days that often doesn’t mean much.
However — and this is where it gets a little spicy — Sun was also charged with “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market for TRX (Tron’s native crypto)” by wash trading on an enormous scale. He was also charged for running a scheme in which celebs — including Lindsay Lohan and everyone’s favourite slayer of old men, Jake Paul — were paid to tout TRX and other cryptocurrencies without disclosing that they were being compensated.
Related: Justin Sun Pays Millions for Banana Art, Peels Off with a Cultural Snack
Sun has denied any wrongdoing and claims that US authorities don’t have jurisdiction over him or his businesses as they’re based overseas, claiming through his lawyers that US authorities “efforts to leverage highly attenuated contacts to the United States, to extend U.S. securities laws to cover predominantly foreign conduct, go too far and should be rejected”.
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