Justin Sun, once World Liberty Financial's largest outside backer, is now its most prominent public critic. By midday Sunday, the project had punched back.

In a post on X published early Sunday, the Tron founder accused the Trump family-backed DeFi project of building an undisclosed "backdoor blacklisting function" into the smart contract used to deploy WLFI tokens. The function, Sun wrote, gives the company "unilateral power to freeze, restrict, and effectively confiscate the property rights of any token holder, without notice, without cause, and without recourse."

Sun framed the design as the inverse of what investors were sold, calling it "a trap door marketed as an open door." He positioned himself as "the first and single largest victim," pointing to the wallet World Liberty blacklisted in September 2025 after he moved roughly $9 million of WLFI between addresses.

"Every action taken by the WLFI team to extract fees from users, to secretly implant backdoor controls over user assets, to freeze investor funds without disclosure or due process, and to treat the crypto community as a personal ATM — all of these actions are illegitimate and were never authorized by any fair, transparent, or good-faith community governance process," Sun wrote.

The post marks a sharp escalation. In September, Sun professed innocence and asked the team to unfreeze his tokens, calling the action "unreasonable" but stopping well short of alleging fraud. Sunday's statement instead accuses the project of secretly embedding admin controls, extracting fees from users, and running governance votes whose "outcomes were predetermined."

Sun also drew a careful political line, opening the post by reaffirming his support for President Trump and "his crypto friendly policy," and limiting his attack to the "bad actors at WLFI." He invested $30 million in the project in late 2024 and was named an advisor, later building his position to roughly $75 million alongside a $100 million commitment to the TRUMP memecoin.

His frozen WLFI stash, estimated by Bubblemaps at roughly 545 million tokens, has lost more than $80 million in value since the freeze, with the bulk of the decline tracking WLFI's broader downtrend.

World Liberty responds

Hours later on Sunday, World Liberty responded directly on X, writing: "Does anyone still believe @justinsuntron?" The post accused Sun of "playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct," called it a "same playbook, different target," and claimed the project has "the contracts," "the evidence," and "the truth." It closed with "See you in court pal," a sign that WLFI is apparently prepared to litigate against its former marquee investor.

"Whoever is hiding behind this official account, step forward and identify yourself," Sun responded in turn. "As the largest investor in this project, I demand that those responsible come forward by name, instead of hiding in the shadows."

The timing of Sun's broadside is pointed. WLFI fell to a record low last week after revelations that the project's treasury had pledged 5 billion WLFI tokens on Dolomite, a lending protocol whose co-founder Corey Caplan also serves as a WLFI advisor and CTO, to borrow roughly $75 million in USDC and USD1. More than $40 million of those proceeds moved to Coinbase Prime. The position now represents over half of Dolomite's total supplied assets, and the protocol's USD1 pool is running near 93% utilization.

World Liberty has dismissed the resulting criticism as "FUD," saying it is "nowhere near liquidation" and would simply post more collateral if WLFI's price kept falling. The project also said it would file a governance proposal this week to set a phased unlock schedule for early retail buyers, around 75% of whose tokens remain locked.

World Liberty's WLFI token currently trades at about $0.08, trading flat over the past day, according to The Block's World Liberty Financial Price page. The project's market capitalization is about $2.5 billion, per the data.