Justin Sun and Trump’s Crypto Venture Take Their Feud to Court
What started as a bitter argument on social media has turned into a full-blown legal war. Justin Sun, one of the biggest names in the global cryptocurrency world, and World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s flagship crypto company, are now suing each other, and the fight is getting uglier by the day.
World Liberty Financial fired the latest shot on Monday, filing a defamation lawsuit against Sun in a Florida state court in Miami-Dade County. The company accused the Chinese-born billionaire of running a deliberate online campaign to destroy its reputation, claiming he hired social media influencers and used fake bot accounts to spread false information about the business to millions of followers.
The lawsuit demands that Sun publicly take back his statements and pay unspecified damages. But Sun threw the first legal punch. Back in April, he filed his own lawsuit against World Liberty Financial in a California federal court, accusing the company of fraud and breach of contract.
Sun claimed the company secretly locked his digital tokens, worth up to one billion dollars, to force him into promoting their stablecoin called USD1 on his own blockchain platform, TRON. When he refused, he says, they froze his investment as punishment. He called the move criminal extortion.
World Liberty Financial told a completely different story. The company said it froze Sun’s assets because he had broken the rules of his own investment agreement, specifically by making prohibited transfers of his tokens to cryptocurrency exchange Binance and carrying out what are known as short sales, which are essentially bets that a company’s value will fall. The company said it acted to protect its token holders and had no choice but to fight back through the courts.
The two sides have shown no desire to settle quietly. Eric Trump, son of the president and one of the company’s key figures, publicly dismissed Sun’s lawsuit as ridiculous. World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, called the claims entirely without merit.
The stakes are enormous on both sides. World Liberty Financial’s tokens have already lost around 81 percent of their value over the past year, currently trading at just six cents. Sun, meanwhile, faces ongoing scrutiny from American regulators and previously paid a ten-million-dollar fine to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. #Justin Sun and Trump’s Crypto Venture Take Their Feud to Court#
