World Liberty Financial Proposes Phased WLFI Unlock After Holder Backlash

Key Insights:

• World Liberty Financial plans a governance proposal for a phased WLFI token unlock, with community input before a formal vote.
• The proposal avoids a full release, opting for a long-term vesting schedule to gradually unlock tokens.
• About 24.67% of WLFI supply is unlocked, while most remains restricted, limiting early buyers’ liquidity.
• Holder backlash is growing, with complaints over delays, legal threats, and concerns about treasury borrowing activity.

World Liberty Financial said its proposal to unlock WLFI tokens will first go through community discussion before moving to a formal vote. Rather than releasing all tokens at once, the plan would introduce a gradual vesting schedule.

The DeFi platform said on Friday that it plans to present the governance proposal next week. The proposal would apply to WLFI tokens held by early retail buyers and would set out a phased release structure.

Trump family-linked project World Liberty Financial said the next stage of WLFI’s unlock phase would begin with community feedback. After that, the proposal would move to a formal vote. It also made clear that the vote would not authorize an immediate full unlock. Instead, it would establish a longer-term plan to release tokens in stages.

For now, most World Liberty Financial (WLFI) tokens bought by early investors remain locked. Their transferability depends on governance approval.

Data from Tokenomist shows that about 24.67% of the token’s 100 billion supply has already been released, while roughly 75.33% is still locked or awaiting future unlock decisions.

That matters because WLFI’s utility is still largely tied to governance. As a result, the proposal could decide when early buyers are finally able to access liquidity. The issue has become more pressing as some holders grow frustrated with the long lock-up period and begin to threaten legal action.

Those concerns build on earlier decisions around token restrictions. On March 16, WLFI holders approved a proposal that added a six-month lock-up rule for certain transfers. That marked one of the project’s first formal steps in shaping how and when tokens could move.

World Liberty Financial’s original sale materials had already warned buyers that WLFI would not be transferable at launch and could stay locked indefinitely. Any future unlock, the project said at the time, would depend on a governance vote that could not happen until at least 12 months after the token sale. Even then, no timeline was guaranteed.

That minimum period has now passed. WLFI’s public sale began around mid-October 2024, which means the new proposal is arriving about 18 months after the initial launch. Across two funding rounds, the project raised at least $550 million from token sales.

Since then, some people who identified themselves as WLFI presale buyers have complained in public that most of their holdings are still locked. Their frustration appears to have grown as other parts of the broader token supply have already become transferable.

At least one self-identified buyer said legal notices had been filed and that claims were being pursued in both the United States and the Netherlands against World Liberty Financial and its backers.

At the same time, questions are also growing around the project’s onchain financial activity. One community member said in a post on X that the project’s borrowing had raised fresh concerns among token holders, especially around how treasury funds were being used. Onchain data shows that World Liberty Financial’s treasury borrowed about $75 million in stablecoins from Dolomite using WLFI as collateral.

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