A federal judge in San Francisco on Thursday kept TRON founder Justin Sun's individual claims against World Liberty Financial in a public courtroom, declining the Trump family crypto venture's request to route the whole dispute into private arbitration.
The forum decides how much of the dispute becomes visible. Proceedings under the American Arbitration Association rules the contracts invoke are confidential, while a district court docket is public. The case turns on the blacklist function World Liberty added to the WLFI contract in August 2025 and used days later to freeze the 600 million tokens Sun had been cleared to trade.
Sun described the outcome in a post on X written in Chinese. "The judge ruled that all of my individual claims will remain in open court," he wrote, in translation. The judge also rejected World Liberty's position that every claim brought by his two corporate plaintiffs belonged in arbitration, Sun said, and directed the parties to work out which claims stay and which go.
The docket in Sun v. World Liberty Financial LLC shows Judge James Donato set argument on the arbitration motion for 11 a.m. Thursday in Courtroom 11 of the Northern District of California, and that two transcript orders were filed the same day. No written order resolving the motion had been entered as of the docket's last update, leaving Sun's account as the only public description of what the judge said.
