The crypto community has recently been embroiled in a voting dispute. World Liberty Fi(WLFI) submitted a new proposal at the end of the year, advocating to unlock 5% of the treasury holdings to promote USD1 growth. The seemingly reasonable proposal hides a hidden agenda—it was initially rejected in the vote until the project team and partners intervened to force a reversal.

What’s going on? Some crypto analysts have uncovered on-chain data from Bubble Maps, revealing that most of the wallets with the highest voting power are controlled by the project team or strategic partners themselves. A governance vote that appears open and transparent was actually manipulated behind the scenes. Even more shocking, WLFI’s power distribution is extremely uneven: the project team controls 33.5% of the total supply, strategic partners hold another 5.85%, while public sales account for only 20%. In other words, centralized holdings have far more influence from the start than dispersed token holders.

Can ordinary token holders get a share of the protocol’s revenue? The white paper provides a harsh answer—no. According to the rules, 75% of the protocol’s income flows to the Trump family, and 25% to the Vitkov family. After this vote passed, the project team was essentially using a “democratic show” to pave the way for their own sell-off, with locked tokens becoming victims, while protocol revenues continuously flow to the vested interests.

Currently, WLFI is trading around $0.1641, with a market cap of approximately $4.469 billion, and a fully diluted valuation reaching as high as $16.4 billion. This governance controversy also prompts a re-examination: when token distribution is overly concentrated, how much genuine meaning can democratic voting still hold?