WLFI sank to $0.18 following Sun’s wallet freeze, as up to 29% of holders sold all their tokens soon after the unlocking.
A recent transaction shows some of the WLFI holdings unlocked for Justin Sun may be blacklisted. Sun may have lost access to 540M unlocked tokens and a reserve of 2.4B vested WLFI.
Justin Sun made serious promises to hold onto WLFI and become one of the most serious backers for World Liberty Fi. Just days after receiving his unlocked tokens, Sun moved a small amount to HTX, the exchange where he has ultimate control. Reportedly, HTX only offered yield for holding WLFI, with up to 20% annualized.
However, on-chain data revealed a transaction where two of Sun’s wallets were blacklisted. The event was later confirmed by the tracking of Arkham Intelligence.
Reportedly, Sun moved more WLFI tokens and potentially sold, adding to the price drawdown from the past few days. Sun mostly interacted with the HTX hot wallet. The latest transaction sent WLFI to an intermediary address, a few hours before the blacklisting.
The blacklisting was seen as a drastic measure, since Sun was among the top project backers and helped close the presale rounds faster with large-scale purchases.
Soon after the blacklisting became public, a wallet identified as HTX48 started sending back WLFI to the token’s contract.
Sun denied the allegations that he has been dumping WLFI through his own exchange. Instead, he stated the token moves were experimental and had to test the exchange infrastructure.
On-chain researchers also discovered attempts to send WLFI to Binance. For now, the token is not even listed on the exchange, but the highly active transfers from wallets connected to Justin Sun further boosted the suspicions of plans to sell.
The suspicion against Sun was that on HTX, the token was somehow sold, essentially tanking the market price.
WLFI slid further to $0.18, losing over 40% since its initial post-unlock rally. The token was in price discovery mode, moving from DEX trading to more listings. HTX actually promised to be one of the token’s platforms.
However, HTX volumes were not reported. Most of the WLFI traffic still relied on Bitget and OKX, as well as Mexc and Gate.
The start of trading for WLFI did not see any team wallets cashing out. The Trump family DeFi project tried to be more careful in comparison with the handling of meme tokens. This time around, the project tried to discourage whales from cashing out.
WLFI also took another hit from a new reserve wallet that was revealed just during the unlock. A special reserve wallet has been created, which will only be spent based on community voting. World Liberty Fi still aims to discourage selling on the open market, though it cannot prevent some whales from realizing profits.
Based on initial data, 85,000 wallets held WLFI following the presale rounds. Of those wallets, 29% of buyers at the ICO sold completely. Another 10% sold some of their holdings. The remaining 60% of wallets were apparently true believers, still holding onto their WLFI.
Hyperliquid whales signal a bearish outlook for WLFI. 12 out of 19 whales hold short positions, which achieved higher unrealized profits.
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