The Trump-controlled crypto firm World Liberty Financial countersued investor Justin Sun on Monday, alleging defamation.
The complaint, filed in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court for Miami-Dade County, Florida, and seen by Banking Dive, is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages from Sun, as well as a public retraction for several statements he made online about World Liberty Financial.
Sun, who sued World Liberty Financial last month alleging fraud and breach of contract, launched a “public smear campaign” against the crypto firm to erode public trust in the brand and “tank” the price of its token, $WLFI, according to Monday’s complaint.
“Sun weaponized his money and his influence within the industry, hiring influencers and deploying fake social-media ‘bot’ accounts to amplify his lies,” the lawsuit reads. “His actions were coordinated, deliberate and aimed at burning World Liberty to the ground.”
In a Monday post on X, formerly Twitter, Sun called World Liberty’s lawsuit “nothing more than a meritless PR stunt.”
Sun, in his April 21 lawsuit, alleged World Liberty froze tens of millions of dollars of his assets – preventing him from selling them – and pressured him into buying $200 million worth of USD1, a second digital coin offered by the company.
“They wrongfully froze all of my tokens, stripped me of my right to vote on governance proposals, and have threatened to permanently destroy my tokens by ‘burning’ them — all without any proper justification,” he said in an April 21 post on X.
World Liberty addressed those claims in its own X thread Monday.
“When World Liberty exercised its right to freeze these tokens to protect the ecosystem, Sun didn't seek a good faith resolution,” World Liberty Financial posted Monday on X. “He called our governance a ‘scam,’ claimed we installed ‘backdoors,’ and accused us of treating the community as an ‘ATM.’”
Further, World Liberty accused Sun of making “prohibited straw purchases,” buying tokens “on behalf of other investors ” and “short selling.”
Sun was an early investor in World Liberty, pouring $30 million into the firm in November 2024, just two months after it was launched.
World Liberty Financial applied for a national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in January.
