Really. This couldn’t possibly happen to. . . a nicer bunch of people — on both sides.

You may recall, that during Trump 1.0, Justin Sun paid $4.6 million — in an online charity auction — just to have a one hour lunch with Warren Buffett, in Omaha. Mr. Sun hoped to convince Mr. Buffett that crypto- was not “rat poison, squared“. He failed.

Mr. Sun was then sued in 2023, by the SEC — on allegations of fraud, wash-trading, and illegal promotion of crypto assets (Tronix and BitTorrent). Those charges were settled for a small sum, at the SEC, within this past 12 months, under Trump 2.0 — after Sun had “invested” ~$45 million in WLFI, a Trump family-affiliated (purported) crypto- multi-platform.

Then the people at WLFI locked up his “investment” — preventing him from being able to sell it — or so he claims. WLFI is likely to say they’ve locked everyone — into their “positions” — and no one can sell. The question is… what did the contracts allow / prohibit? [The full and fair disclosures of SEC rules (free of material omissions) arguably do not govern these crypto- investing contracts — it is caveat emptor, or so the MAGA-administration asserts.]

Mr. Sun says he was promised liquidity, and in short order. That plainly has not happened [but does he have that promise in writing?]. Thus the 52 page fraud suit, in California’s northern federal District courts:

…World Liberty repeatedly claimed its mission was to promote the “liberty” provided by DeFi, summed up in the gold paper as “the ability to transact privately and without intermediaries.” The gold paper decried the “centralized control” of “traditional financial intermediaries,” lauded the “freedoms that decentralized assets provide” and the benefits of “peer-to-peer systems of transactions,” and pledged to make DeFi “readily available to mainstream Americans.” To those ends, the gold paper announced World Liberty’s plan “to launch the World Liberty Financial Protocol (‘WLF Protocol’), a US-based decentralized platform, that is intended to offer users with information about and access to certain third party DeFi applications, based on American ideals of liberty, privacy, and freedom to transact.” The gold paper thus boasted that World Liberty was “intended to be more than a decentralized finance platform” and was “committed to democratizing access to DeFi and fostering mass adoption of DeFi and cryptocurrency….”

As part of World Liberty’s professed goal to “to democratize finance,” the gold paper explained, “$WLFI tokens represent a right to vote on certain WLF Protocol matters.” According to the gold paper, token holders could “submit proposals[,] discuss them and vote on WLF Protocol changes, marketing initiatives, new features, and more.” Indeed, the gold paper noted that World Liberty was “required in its bylaws to defer to certain token holder votes.” The gold paper further stated that the “WLF Governance Platform is community-governed through the $WLFI token” and that “World Liberty Financial governance is divided into two categories of votes,” the first of which was “[a]pproved upgrades to the WLF Protocol.” The gold paper thus described $WLFI as “the governance token at the heart of World Liberty.” In fact, the gold paper claimed that because $WLFI tokens were initially locked from trading and conferred “no right of return or other distribution,” the “sole utility of holding $WLFI is governance of the WLF Protocol….”

Pop the popcorn, folks. And me? I’m waiting for Mr. Sun to say under oath, in a deposition, that he feels he did not get the full value of “the bribe” he agreed to pay — and did pay. . . to Trump, and his minions. Stay tuned. Grin.

नमस्ते