A governance vote at World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a DeFi project marketed around the Trump brand, is drawing allegations of \u201cslow\u201d value extraction after a prominent trader claimed affiliated wallets pushed through a proposal while many public holders remained unable to access or vote with their tokens.<\/p>\n
DeFi^2 (@DeFiSquared), who describes himself as the #1 ranked trader on Bybit in 2023 and 2024, wrote on X that he was \u201cbringing up an alarming governance vote by World Liberty Fi this month that appears to be the start of a slow extraction of value from WLFI holders by the team.\u201d<\/p>\n
DeFiSquared wrote: \u201cWhat you see above appears to be a rigged vote, where the majority of top voters are indicated to be team wallets or strategic partner wallets by Bubble Maps. This is in contrast to the real voters lower in the screenshot, who have all been locked from accessing their WLFI tokens since TGE, and unable to vote on an unlock until the team allows it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The proposal at the center of the thread is what he calls the \u201cUSD1 growth proposal.\u201d He argues it reads as \u201cfairly mundane\u201d on its face, but says the governance sequencing is the tell: \u201cwhy would the team go out of their way to force this vote through, instead of voting on the WLFI token unlock that the majority of holders are asking for?\u201d<\/p>\n
His thesis hinges on WLFI economics<\/a>. DeFiSquared claims WLFI holders \u201care not entitled to ANY protocol revenue at all,\u201d and says the project\u2019s \u201cGold Paper\u201d specifies revenue routing: \u201c75% of protocol revenue goes to the Trump family, and 25% goes to the Witkoff family.\u201d In his framing, that creates a perverse incentive: \u201cIt\u2019s actually as crazy as it sounds: the team is forcing a vote to sell WLFI tokens at the expense of locked holders, in order to fund protocol revenue that goes only to themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n He also alleges the vote\u2019s outcome was manufactured late in the process. \u201cThis vote was actually failing by the time it reached quorum with a majority of votes rejecting the proposal, until the team \/ partners forced the vote through,\u201d he wrote, adding token allocation context: \u201cthe WLFI team is allocated 33.5% of all tokens and strategic partners another 5.85%, while the public sale was allocated only 20%.\u201d<\/p>\n Post-vote, he points to on-chain flows as corroboration, citing \u201cfresh transfers such as this one of 500 million WLFI tokens to Jump Trading<\/a>,\u201d while \u201cinvestor WLFI allocations remain forcibly locked.\u201d<\/p>\n DeFiSquared closes with a valuation and positioning call: \u201cit\u2019s difficult to see the intrinsic value behind a 17 billion dollar token that has no real governance power, no revenue share, and new foundation sell pressure occurring for their own benefit.\u201d He adds he has shorted WLFI \u201con and off since pre-market prices above $0.34,\u201d and expects continued downside \u201cdue to dilution, intentional extraction,\u201d and \u201cother factors related to Trump\u2019s final term in office.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n At press time, WLFI traded at $0.1608.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A governance vote at World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a DeFi project marketed around the Trump brand, is drawing allegations of \u201cslow\u201d value extraction after a prominent trader claimed affiliated wallets pushed through a proposal while many public holders remained unable to access or vote with their tokens. DeFi^2 (@DeFiSquared), who describes himself as the #1 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":128506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128505"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/128506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}