World Liberty Financial Proposes Vesting Overhaul for 62.3 Billion WLFI Tokens, Would Require Insiders to Burn 10%
World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a DeFi platform with ties to former U.S. President Donald Trump, has submitted a governance proposal to restructure the vesting schedules of approximately 62.3 billion locked WLFI tokens, according to a summary of the proposal reported by The Block and corroborated by Bloomberg and CoinRepublic. The plan would require team members and advisors to permanently destroy 10% of their allocated holdings as a condition of participating in the new vesting structure. The proposal was flagged for community input on April 15, 2026, after a week of compounding controversies that erased roughly $700 million in market value and pushed the token to an all-time low.
The proposal targets tokens currently sitting under a cliff-vesting arrangement. Cliff vesting means the entire allocation unlocks in one event after a waiting period, creating concentrated supply risk. The new structure would replace that with linear vesting, meaning tokens release gradually over time. Of WLFI's 100 billion total token supply, only about 24.67 billion are currently in circulation. The 62.3 billion tokens covered by this proposal represent approximately 82.7% of what remains locked. The balance of roughly 13 billion locked tokens falls outside the scope of this proposal.
Insiders, including team members and advisors, collectively hold around 33.51 billion WLFI tokens, roughly 33.51% of total supply. Separately, the Trump family entity DT Marks Defi LLC controls approximately 22.5 billion WLFI tokens and is entitled to 75% of revenue from all token sales. The entity also owns approximately 60% of WLFI the company. Whether DT Marks Defi LLC's token holdings are counted within or are additive to the broader insider allocation has not been independently confirmed.
A 10% insider burn would permanently remove an estimated 3.35 billion tokens from eventual circulation, a structurally deflationary outcome if the proposal passes. That figure is based on 10% of the 33.51 billion team and advisor allocation; the final burn total may differ depending on how DT Marks Defi LLC's holdings are ultimately classified.
A Proposal Shaped by Crisis
The vesting overhaul did not emerge from routine housekeeping. It follows a series of events in early April that shook confidence in the project.
On April 9, CoinDesk reported that WLFI had deposited 5 billion WLFI tokens as collateral on Dolomite, a lending platform co-founded by WLFI adviser Corey Caplan, to borrow $75 million in stablecoins. The position pushed the Dolomite lending pool for USD1, WLFI's stablecoin, to nearly 100% utilization, effectively preventing ordinary depositors from withdrawing their funds. WLFI accounted for roughly 55% of Dolomite's $835.7 million in total supplied assets at the time.
Then came a public break with Justin Sun, founder of Tron and WLFI's largest single external investor at approximately $75 million. Between a frozen wallet holding 595 million WLFI tokens and an additional 2.4 billion in locked tokens, Sun represents one of the project's most significant outside stakeholders.
The 595 million-token wallet had been frozen in September 2025 through a smart contract upgrade that introduced freeze capabilities not present in the original September 2024 token contract.
On-chain analysts confirmed that a single externally owned account controls the freeze function. WLFI said the action was part of a broader freeze targeting 272 wallets linked to phishing attacks.
Sun rejected that explanation publicly. "Every action taken by the WLFI team to extract fees from users and to treat the crypto community as a personal ATM is illegitimate," he wrote, according to CoinDesk.
In a separate post on X, he described WLFI's structure as "a trap masquerading as a door," according to the Japan Times.
Sun also stated, according to CryptoSlate, that one person held the unilateral power to freeze any token holder's assets.
WLFI said the team "only intervenes to protect users, never to silence normal activity" but did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CoinDesk.
Co-founder Zak Folkman also did not respond to a request for comment.
Token Metrics at a Glance
WLFI is currently trading around $0.083 (as of April 15, 2026), down approximately 68% from its all-time high of $0.2577 set on September 2, 2025.
The token touched an all-time low of $0.07714 during the April controversies.
Market capitalization sits in the range of $2.5 to $2.64 billion, with a fully diluted valuation of roughly $7.88 to $8.05 billion.
The project raised approximately $760 million across public token sales since its October 2024 launch.
WLFI operates several products, including World Liberty Markets (a lending platform) and World Swap (a planned remittance service). Its USD1 stablecoin, a full-reserve instrument backed by US Treasuries and cash equivalents and custodied by BitGo, reached a market cap of about $4.9 billion in early 2026, surpassing PayPal's PYUSD. USD1 is deployed across BNB Chain, Ethereum, Solana, and Tron.
Regional Stakes: South Asia and Africa
The governance uncertainty has direct implications beyond the United States. In January 2026, Pakistan's virtual asset regulator signed a memorandum of understanding with SC Financial Technologies, a WLFI affiliate, to explore integrating USD1 into Pakistan's cross-border payment infrastructure.
Pakistan receives more than $27 billion in annual remittances and ranks among the top five countries globally for peer-to-peer crypto volume. India and Bangladesh, two of the world's largest remittance corridors, are also potential markets for WLFI's World Swap remittance product, making governance confidence in the project relevant across the broader South Asian region.
If this vesting proposal signals a genuine shift toward governance transparency, it could reinforce Pakistan's commitment to that agreement. If it stalls or fails, regulators evaluating USD1 as a settlement layer will have fresh reasons for caution.
In Africa, USD1 is deployed on Tron, the dominant stablecoin network across West and East African peer-to-peer markets in countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania. Retail participants in these markets typically access projects through mobile wallets and exchanges such as Binance, Yellow Card, and Quidax. For communities that have experienced losses from insider-heavy token projects, a mandatory 10% burn could represent a meaningful accountability signal. The public dispute between WLFI and Tron founder Sun complicates any WLFI-Tron integration going forward.
What Comes Next
The proposal is currently in a pre-vote community feedback phase, consistent with how WLFI handled its January 2026 staking proposal, which passed with 99.12% approval.
As of April 15, 2026, no formal governance vote date had been announced.
Retail early adopters had been threatening legal action and demanding token unlocks before this proposal surfaced, according to Bloomberg and CoinRepublic.
Whether the community accepts the 10% insider burn as sufficient accountability, or pushes for more structural concessions, will shape both any eventual vote outcome and broader institutional confidence in WLFI's USD1 stablecoin ambitions across emerging markets.