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World Liberty Financial co-founders Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff responded publicly on Wednesday to a federal lawsuit filed by Justin Sun, dismissing the case as a meritless attempt to deflect attention.
Eric Trump, the president’s son and a co-founder of the Trump-family-backed DeFi project, posted on X that the lawsuit was “ridiculous,” adding: “The only thing more ridiculous than this lawsuit is spending $6 million on a banana duct-taped to a wall,” referencing Sun’s widely publicized purchase of Maurizio Cattelan’s banana artwork.
Zach Witkoff, another co-founder and son of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, said the suit was “a desperate attempt to deflect attention from Sun’s own misconduct.” He added that World Liberty “looks forward to getting the case thrown out promptly.”
Sun filed his complaint on Tuesday in the Northern District of California. He alleges that operators of World Liberty Financial used an embedded smart contract blacklist function to freeze roughly 4 billion WLFI tokens, remove his governance voting rights, and threaten to permanently burn his holdings.
According to the filing, the freeze was used as leverage to pressure Sun into continuing to invest and to mint the project’s USD1 stablecoin on terms he found unacceptable. Sun also alleges that “World Liberty is on the verge of collapse” and raises doubts about whether the project holds sufficient reserves to back USD1.
Sun’s complaint says World Liberty blamed him privately for a 40% WLFI price crash on September 1, 2025, the first day the tokens became tradable. The filing also describes allegations that Sun short-sold perpetual futures and acted as a straw purchaser, which Sun disputes as unsupported.
Sun’s complaint states he invested $30 million in WLFI in 2024 partly because of the Trump family’s association with the project, and that he built his position to approximately $75 million before the dispute escalated.
Sun, who settled separate SEC fraud charges for $10 million in March 2026, said in a post on X that the lawsuit targets specific project operators rather than President Trump himself.
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