Today, my counsel appeared in California federal court to oppose World Liberty Financial's @worldlibertyfi efforts to force our dispute into secret arbitration proceedings and seal documents from public view.
We argued forcefully that this case belongs in open court—and the Court agreed with us.
In a major victory, the judge ruled that all of my individual claims will remain in open court.
The judge also rejected World Liberty’s argument that all of the company-related claims should be arbitrated, and has ordered the parties to meet and confer about which of those claims should remain in court and which should go to arbitration.
This is a significant win.
World Liberty tried to push this case behind closed doors, and the Court said no.
Token holders deserve to see how projects treat the people who trust them. I believe that World Liberty would not be fighting this hard to hide their actions if those actions were defensible, and I will not rest until the community gets the transparency it deserves.
For those of you who are new to this dispute, I was one of World Liberty’s earliest and largest investors. I invested $45 million in World Liberty in return for $WLFI tokens because I believed the project’s claims about bringing decentralized finance to the public.
But as alleged in my Complaint against World Liberty, after my $45 million investment helped turn their struggling token sale into a $550 million raise, World Liberty secretly embedded a backdoor into the $WLFI smart contract that gave themselves unilateral power to freeze, restrict, and burn any holder’s tokens without notice or due process.
The Complaint further alleges that World Liberty used that power against me to illegally seize my property (specifically, my $WLFI tokens), and then threatened me with criminal referrals when I tried to exercise my legal rights. My lawsuit seeks hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
After initiating this litigation, I promptly obtained a court order prohibiting World Liberty from burning, destroying, reallocating, or otherwise permanently disposing of any of my tokens.
That order was necessary because, as I allege in my Complaint, World Liberty had both threatened to destroy my tokens and ensured it had the unilateral power to carry out that threat.
I now understand that World Liberty has implemented the same backdoor capabilities in its USD1 stablecoin. In my view, USD1 users should understand that World Liberty has given itself the technical ability to freeze or destroy their assets at any time—and that, as I allege in my Complaint, they have already shown a willingness to use those functions against $WLFI holders.
I am not the only victim of the fraudulent scheme by World Liberty alleged in my Complaint. While it is not my place to share other people’s stories without their consent, others have come forward to me privately to say that they too believe they were victimized by World Liberty, but they are concerned about coming forward publicly to file suit.
I understand their concerns.
As alleged in my Complaint, World Liberty has shown that they will retaliate against those who challenge them.
I also want to give investors a word of caution based on my own experience with bad actors in this industry. Before this dispute, I was defrauded by ARIA, which ran off with approximately $500 million in collateral backing the TUSD stablecoin.
While ARIA was insolvent and sitting on hundreds of millions in misappropriated funds, its agent Vincent Chok was simultaneously launching a new stablecoin called FDUSD through his company First Digital Trust.
That stablecoin ultimately collapsed in confidence, de-pegged, and saw its trading pairs stripped from the Binance exchange.
That experience taught me to look more carefully at the projects I invest in, and it is one of the reasons I now have serious concerns about World Liberty.
In my opinion, there is serious reason to be cautious about both $WLFI and USD1.
My claim against World Liberty is for hundreds of millions of dollars, and I have seen no evidence to suggest that they have the resources to satisfy a judgment of that magnitude.
The market capitalization of USD1 is reportedly $4 billion, but that is user money.
It is collateral that is supposed to back the stablecoins and cannot be used to pay a court judgment.
Aside from that collateral, I have seen no indication that World Liberty has sufficient capital to cover a judgment for hundreds of millions of dollars.
And that is just my claim. As noted, I understand that others could bring similar lawsuits.
Beyond those potential claims, World Liberty’s conduct gives me even more reason to question whether they can stand behind their obligations.
According to public reports, World Liberty deposited approximately five billion of its own $WLFI tokens as collateral on Dolomite, a lending platform co-founded by World Liberty’s own Chief Technology Officer. That reportedly amounts to nearly half its treasury and roughly 5% of the total token supply.
Through that arrangement, World Liberty reportedly borrowed at least $75 million in stablecoins, including its own USD1. As noted in my Complaint, industry analysts have drawn direct comparisons between this circular borrowing and the kind of leverage that brought down SBF’s massive fraud at FTX.
There is also the matter of World Liberty’s leadership. As I allege in my Complaint, World Liberty co-founder Chase Herro previously founded another DeFi protocol called Dough Finance, which claimed to have been the victim of a hack in which user assets were stolen.
But an investor filed a lawsuit alleging that no hack actually occurred and that Mr. Herro personally liquidated the platform’s assets into his own wallet.
According to public reporting, the vast majority of those funds remain missing to this day. As public reporting has documented, many of the same individuals who were involved in Dough Finance are now running World Liberty.
All of these things—my massive damages claim, the claims of others who have not yet sued, the Dolomite borrowing, and the Dough Finance litigation—raise serious questions in my mind about whether World Liberty and USD1 has enough money to satisfy a judgment, repay their debts, or make investors whole if there is a run on the bank.
I believe investors should ask whether World Liberty and USD1 has sufficient resources to meet all of its potential obligations.
Based on the publicly available information I have reviewed, I am not confident they do.
I urge investors to do their own diligence and proceed with extreme caution.