The governance proposal would give early token buyers the ability to start unlocking their tokens in two years — notably, after Trump’s second presidential term ends.
World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the DeFi project tied to the Trump family, has posted a governance proposal restructuring token unlocks for all major holder categories, covering over 62 billion WLFI tokens in total.
Under the proposal, early supporters — presale buyers who purchased WLFI at either $0.015 or $0.05 per token — would see their more than 17 billion locked tokens placed on a 2-year cliff followed by a 2-year linear vest, with tokens beginning to unlock at year two and fully distributed by year four.
That timeline would extend well past January 2029, when Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president ends. Founders, team members, and partners, which hold a collective 45.2 billion WLFI, face a stricter schedule: a 2-year cliff with a 3-year linear vest, plus an immediate 10% burn of their allocation upon passage, per the proposal.
Notably, there was no prior deadline to replace, as the World Liberty team noted in the proposal and an X announcement today. WLFI’s original sale terms gave early buyers no guaranteed unlock date, and tokens could remain locked indefinitely, with any release contingent on a governance vote.
Holders who decline the new schedule remain under those original indefinite terms, per the proposal.
WLFI is currently trading around $0.08, down over 75% from its all-time high near $0.33, which it reached soon after launch.
Mounting Controversy
Earlier this week, WLFI’s largest investor, Justin Sun, publicly clashed with the project, alleging a hidden blacklisting function in the token contract gives WLFI unilateral power to freeze holder assets. WLFI responded by threatening legal action and calling Sun’s claims baseless.
The conflict follows reporting that WLFI borrowed roughly $75 million in stablecoins using its own WLFI tokens as collateral on Dolomite — a lending protocol co-founded by WLFI’s own CTO — drawing comparisons to prior DeFi blow-ups involving founder self-collateralization.
The latest governance vote runs for seven days with a 1 billion WLFI quorum threshold.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
