WLFI Pushes Buyback-and-Burn Plan Amid Early Market Losses
World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the Trump-linked DeFi project, has proposed a buyback-and-burn program to restore investor confidence following a rocky trading debut. The initiative would use all protocol-owned liquidity fees to purchase WLFI tokens on the open market and send them to a burn address, permanently reducing the circulating supply.
The token, which debuted on major exchanges including Binance, OKX, Upbit, Coinbase, and Bithumb, is trading around $0.23—down 24% in a single day—with a market capitalization near $6.39 billion, according to CoinGecko. At launch, WLFI briefly reached valuations above $40 billion on futures markets before a sharp sell-off.
The governance proposal specifies that the buyback-and-burn mechanism applies only to fees from WLFI’s own liquidity pools on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Solana, excluding third-party and community liquidity. Alternatives such as splitting fees between treasury reserves and burns were considered but rejected to maximize deflationary impact.
Supporters say the program shifts the narrative from oversupply to engineered scarcity, as more trading activity generates fees that fuel token burns. A separate community proposal, still under debate, suggests keeping 80% of WLFI tokens locked and staked with rewards drawn from the remaining 20%, though critics view this as redistribution rather than true yield generation.
Despite the challenges, WLFI has high-profile backing. Tron founder Justin Sun continues to endorse the project on X, calling it “one of the biggest and most important projects in crypto” and pledging not to sell his unlocked tokens. Arkham data shows WLFI’s treasury holds $13.78 million in TRX, while Sun controls roughly $693 million in WLFI, much of it under vesting schedules that reinforce his long-term commitment.
