No token swap deals with Trump-linked World Liberty Financial (WLFI), TRON and Movement Labs reject Blockworks’ claims

Representatives from TRON and MOVE, two of the protocols whose tokens are being held by the treasury of World Liberty Financial (WLFI), have come out to deny they entered a token swap agreement with the Trump-linked DeFI project. 

Blockworks first reported that World Liberty Financial has been offering blockchain teams a token swap deal. According to the Monday report, representatives from WLFI had pitched protocol teams on a deal to get included in the project’s treasury. 

The deal would allow the project to buy $10 million of WLFI tokens plus a 10 percent fee, and in return, World Liberty Financial will purchase the same amount of the protocol’s tokens. 

However, a spokesperson from TRON informed CoinDesk that “There is no token swap agreement.” Notably, TRON’s TRX is the second-largest holding in WLFI’s wallet, according to on-chain data analytics platform Arkham Intelligence. The WLFI wallet holds 40.7 million TRX, worth $9.3 million after installmental purchases throughout January.

Movement Labs’ MOVE token also surged in late January after World Liberty Financial acquired $2 million worth of the token. The protocol has also denied that it entered a swap agreement. 

Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs, told CoinDesk earlier that they have not sent tokens to anyone, including WLFI. “There weren’t any deals — any back door deals. It was purely just market buying,” the co-founder said. 

The World Liberty Financial platform will launch in Q3 2025 at a $1.5 billion FDV, with the WLFI token already available for purchase at $0.05 each, totaling approximately $1.2 billion in sales.

A juicy offer with a caveat

According to reports, the World Liberty Financial platform project offers protocols a juicy deal, but there’s a catch—several, in fact. 

Some projects have received offers, but according to one with permission to discuss private business dealings, the offer came with a caveat. $10 million is allegedly the minimum buy-in, but it would take $15 million to get priority treatment from World Liberty Financial.

According to a platform representative, none of the tokens will be subject to a vesting period, and the minimum buy-in for a token swap partnership is set at $10 million. 

Due to Donald Trump’s relationship with the crypto industry and position as United States president, many consider a spot on World Liberty Financial’s balance sheet an endorsement of some sort. 

World Liberty Financial’s token swap deal is currently being processed on a “first come first serve” basis. However, the report claimed the note it received confirmed that the platform is “prioritizing projects with the strongest technical metrics, mindshare, [and] willingness to do larger tickets than USD $10M.”

When it launches, World Liberty Financial will become a vehicle for users to access third-party DeFi apps for various functions like earning yield on stablecoins or borrowing crypto assets. For now, the token swap deal is the subject of focus. Users interested in participating can also head to the site to buy the upcoming WLFI tokens. 

According to the website, roughly 24 billion WLFI tokens have been sold at $0.05 each, with Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun claiming that TronDAO has bought $75 million.

World Liberty Financial’s current holdings 

World Liberty Financial’s crypto wallet holds around $378 million in crypto. This figure is held primarily in ETH, even though the token has been subject to huge amounts of volatility in recent times. The wallet also holds Justin Sun-linked wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), staked Ether (stETH), USDC, and a collection of other smaller tokens. 

According to the message shared with Blockworks, token swap candidates will engage in an initial meeting followed by a video meeting with World Liberty Financial co-founder Zak Folkman to finalize a deal if they choose to move forward with the offer. 

Folkman and his fellow World Liberty Financial co-founder Chase Herro are two known faces in the crypto sphere. They are perhaps most famous for building Dough Finance, a crypto platform that got hacked for $2 million in July 2024. 

The two launched World Liberty Financial alongside real estate magnate and Trump associate Steve Witkoff. As it stands, only the President’s son Eric, who is on the project’s “board of managers,” is directly involved with World Liberty Financial. However, the Trump family will enjoy financial upside nonetheless. 

An LLC affiliated with Trump and his family is entitled to 60% of the project’s equity, 75% of the fee revenue generated by the WLFI token sale, and 22.5 billion WLFI tokens, worth about $1.1 billion at the public sale price. 

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