Duke University Scholar: WLFI May Be an Unregistered Security; Questions SEC’s Independence in Launching Investigation
According to The Block, Lee Reiners—a lecturer in law at Duke University and former examiner at the New York Federal Reserve—published a post on May 8 stating that WLFI, the governance token issued by the DeFi project World Liberty Financial—which is closely associated with the Trump family—may constitute an unregistered security.
Reiners cited the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) recently released token classification framework, arguing that WLFI is not a “pure digital commodity” and therefore falls under SEC regulatory scrutiny. He contends that WLFI was publicly presold—approximately 25 billion tokens—prior to the protocol’s launch and was marketed leveraging the Trump family’s brand, leading buyers to reasonably expect profits—a key element of the SEC’s “Howey Test” for determining whether an asset qualifies as a security.
Regarding decentralization claims, Reiners referenced litigation filed by Justin Sun, noting that World Liberty unilaterally froze Sun’s tokens and revoked his governance rights—revealing a high degree of centralized control. Additionally, he highlighted clear conflicts of interest: the project borrowed $75 million in stablecoins from the Dolomite protocol, using 5 billion WLFI tokens as collateral; notably, a co-founder of Dolomite also serves as an advisor to World Liberty, and part of the borrowed stablecoins flowed directly to World Liberty itself.