CEO of TRON Justin Sun (Steven Ferdman/Getty Images)

Expensive banana purchaser and crypto founder Justin Sun just tripled the amount invested in Trump’s cryptocurrency

Thanks to Sun’s investment, World Liberty Financial hit its (revised) $30 million target, passing a threshold for Trump to be eligible for payouts.

Jack Raines

11/26/24 1:49PM

Here’s a fun one: Justin Sun — the TRON cryptocurrency founder who was sued by the SEC in March 2023 under allegations of a market-manipulation scheme involving celebrities Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, Austin Mahone, Michele Mason, Lil Yachty, Ne-Yo, and Akon — invested $30 million in Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial, becoming the cryptocurrency’s largest investor.

(In case you need reminding, Sun is the guy who just paid $6.2 million for a banana taped to a wall.)

We are thrilled to invest $30 million in World Liberty Financial @worldlibertyfi as its largest investor. The U.S. is becoming the blockchain hub, and Bitcoin owes it to @realDonaldTrump! TRON is committed to making America great again and leading innovation. Let's go! pic.twitter.com/cISTsVYP1f
— H.E. Justin Sun 🍌 (@justinsuntron) November 25, 2024

For context, on October 15, World Liberty Financial launched with the goal of “onboarding Web2 users to Web3 with the Trump brand,” according to its “gold paper”:

“A key part of our mission at World Liberty Financial is to leverage the global reach and recognition of the Trump brand to bring as many Web2 users into the world of Web3 as possible. Inspired by ‘Chief Crypto Advocate’ Donald J. Trump, we aim to introduce DeFi to a broader audience that may have previously been unfamiliar or hesitant to engage with decentralized assets and cryptocurrency.”

The project hoped to raise $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, but through three weeks, even after Trump’s election win, its fundraising efforts were lackluster. By November 6, for example, the project had only generated $14.8 million in sales, less than 5% of its expected $300 million, and it revised its fundraising target to $30 million.

There were a couple of issues facing the project from its inception, including that the sale was limited to accredited investors (which minimized retail participation), and the coin was only available on WLF’s website. With a $30 million investment, Sun effectively tripled the total outside capital put into the project.

With respect to this project, that $30 million number is pretty significant, because WLF needed to raise at least that much money for Trump to receive any proceeds from the project. From the project’s gold paper (emphasis ours):

“$30 million of initial net protocol revenues will be held in a reserve controlled by a WLF Multisig to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations. Net protocol revenues include revenues to WLF from any source, including without limitation platform use fees, token sale proceeds, advertising or other sources of revenue, after deduction of agreed expenses and reserves for WLF’s continued operations. The remainder of net protocol revenues will be paid to DT Marks DEFI LLC, Axiom Management Group, LLC WC Digital Fi LLC, which are entities affiliated with our founders and certain service providers (‘Initial Supporters’).
World Liberty Financial agrees that DT Marks DEFI LLC will receive 22.5 billion $WLFI tokens and a right to receive 75% of the net protocol revenues as defined in the services agreement after deduction of agreed operating expenses and the initial treasury reserve.”

DT Marks is a Delaware-based company whose owners and principals include Donald Trump. That vehicle is in line to receive 75% of net protocol revenues after accounting for the initial $30 million of reserves, and Justin Sun’s investment pushed it over that threshold.

So what, exactly, is WLF planning to do? According to the gold paper, it will “help safeguard the US Dollar’s future as the global reserve currency,” though what exactly that looks like has yet to be determined. Additionally, WLF holders don’t have voting rights on the governance of the project and the coins are nontransferable, meaning that those who invested can’t sell them.

While Sun told Bloomberg that the investment is “not related to any political purpose,” the project doesn’t appear to have any purpose at all besides sending 75% of protocol revenue to Trump’s Delaware shell company and 25% of protocol money to a Puerto Rican LLC, Axiom Management Group. But who knows, maybe WLF is going to prove to be an integral part of a strong US dollar.

Sage D. Young6/16/26

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/16/26

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets,” Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were “very oversold” following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. “Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.”

“Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.