The governance vote at World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a DeFi project advertised around Trump’s logo, is drawing suspicions of a “slow” drawdown after a prominent trader asked its partner wallets to push the proposal while most public holders could not access or vote their tokens.
DeFi^2 (@DeFiSquared), who describes himself as the #1 ranked trader on Bybit in 2023 and 2024, wrote on X that he “brings a shock vote for the governance of World Liberty Fi this month which seems to be the beginning of a slow release of value from the management of WLFI by the group.”
World Liberty Fi Hit With ‘Rigged Vote’ Claims
DeFiSquared wrote: “What you see above seems to be a curved vote, where most of the top voters are shown as team bags or strategic partner bags by Bubble Maps. This is in contrast to the real voters at the bottom of the screenshot, all of whom are locked out of accessing their WLFI tokens from TGE, and cannot vote until the team allows to open.”
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The proposal at the center of the thread is what he calls the “USD1 growth proposal.” He argues that it reads “normal” on its face, but says the management sequence is what it’s being told: “why is the team going out of their way to force this vote to pass, instead of voting on unlocking the WLFI token that the majority of owners are asking for?”
His thesis hinges on the economics of WLFI. DeFiSquared claims that WLFI owners “have absolutely no right to receive protocol revenue,” and says the project’s “Golden Paper” specifies the revenue stream: “75% of protocol revenue goes to the Trump family, and 25% goes to the Witkoff family.” In his formulation, that creates a perverse incentive: “It’s actually as crazy as it sounds: the team is forcing a vote to sell WLFI tokens at the expense of locked-in holders, in order to finance the protocol going exclusively to them.”
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He also pointed out that the results of the votes were done late. “This vote actually failed when it reached the number of votes rejecting the proposal, until the team / partners forced the vote,” he wrote, adding the context of the token distribution: “the WLFI team was allocated 33.5% of all tokens and strategic partners another 5.85%, while the public sale was allocated only 20%.
After the vote, he points to on-chain flows as confirmation, citing “new transfers like this one of 500 million WLFI tokens on Jump Trading,” while “investors’ WLFI shares are still forcibly closed.”
DeFiSquared closes with a valuation and positioning call: “it’s hard to see the intrinsic value behind a 17 billion dollar token with no real governance, no revenue share, and a new base to sell pressure that happens to benefit them.” He added that he has shorted WLFI “remaining closed since pre-market prices were above $0.34,” and expects further declines “due to purges, deliberate releases,” and “other factors related to Trump’s last term.”
At press time, WLFI traded at $0.1608.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
