Sui Partners with Trump-Backed World Liberty Financial in Blockchain Expansion

Layer 1 blockchain platform Sui today unveiled a strategic collaboration with World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol linked to President Donald Trump.

Sui revealed the partnership in a blog post, stating that the collaboration will focus on developing innovative blockchain applications and assets. Following the announcement, the SUI token surged to $2.86 with a market capitalization of $8.9 billion, marking a 15% increase over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

Under the agreement, Sui’s blockchain technology will be integrated with WLFI’s financial strategies, with Sui’s assets incorporated into WLFI’s "Macro Strategy," a strategic token reserve aimed at supporting DeFi projects.

Growing Intersection

“We are very excited to work with Sui and explore the innovative opportunities this collaboration presents,” said Eric Trump, Web3 Ambassador at World Liberty Financial, and the President’s son.

“We chose Sui for its American-born innovation combined with impressive scale and adoption. It is a natural complement to our mission of bringing decentralized finance to more Americans,”

Zak Folkman, co-founder of World Liberty Financial, said. “Given our plans to support foundational DeFi assets in the coming months, collaborating with Sui was an obvious decision.”

However, not everyone is happy about the partnership, with some community members expressing disappointment. Prominent crypto investor Mike Dudas shared on X that WFLI is a “pay to play [scheme] at this point.”

He added that this is “not what I was told it would be (a DeFi gateway to introduce new users to crypto).”

Unprecedented Growth

The partnership follows a period of significant growth for Sui, which recently surpassed $70 billion in decentralized exchange (DEX) volume, making it the sixth most active chain for trading, and accumulated over 67 million accounts. The blockchain currently boasts a total value locked (TVL) of $1.25 billion, ranking at ninth versus other chains and reflecting a 180% increase from this time last year, according to DeFiLlama.

Meanwhile, WLFI, which was introduced by President Trump a few months ago as a DeFi initiative, recently expanded its portfolio by adding six new cryptocurrencies.

As part of this expansion, WLFI purchased $21.5 million in cryptocurrency, including $10 million in Ethereum’s ETH, $10 million in Wrapped Bitcoin, and $1.5 million in Movement tokens, according to intelligence platform Spot on Chain. WLFI’s portfolio currently totals to around $81 million, according to Drops Tab.