Duke Law Lecturer Argues Trump-Connected World Liberty Financial Issued Unregistered Security

According to Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow at Duke University and former Federal Reserve Bank of New York examiner, World Liberty Financial may have issued an unregistered security, despite the project's claims that WLFI is a pure governance token. Reiners argued in a blog post on Friday that WLFI does not qualify as a decentralized commodity under the SEC's recent token taxonomy.

World Liberty sold approximately 25 billion WLFI tokens out of a 100 billion total supply through public presale rounds. Reiners contends that buyers likely invested with reasonable expectations of profit—a key component of the Howey Test used by the SEC to determine securities status. He noted the token was marketed before the protocol was built and leveraged the Trump family name, factors that could create profit expectations under SEC guidance.