Duke Law Lecturer Argues Trump-Linked 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’s WLFI token may constitute an unregistered security, in a blog post published Friday. Reiners argues that despite World Liberty’s claims that WLFI is a pure governance token, it does not qualify as a digital commodity under the SEC’s recent token taxonomy and is likely subject to SEC scrutiny. He notes that the token was sold to finance a centrally controlled crypto business and marketed with the Trump family name, with approximately 25 billion WLFI tokens sold before the protocol was built—factors that create a reasonable expectation of profit under the Howey Test used by the SEC to determine securities classification.