World Liberty Financial opens governance vote on 180-day rewards program for WLFI holders

World Liberty Financial kicked off a governance vote on Monday proposing a rewards program that would pay WLFI holders for doing something most token holders notoriously avoid: participating in governance.

The catch? You have to lock your tokens for at least 180 days and cast a vote at least once every 90 days. No locking, no voting, no rewards.

What the proposal actually requires

The program, which targets an October 1 launch date if approved, would require holders to deposit unlocked WLFI into a non-custodial protocol for a minimum of 180 days. During that lockup, participants need to vote directly on at least one ecosystem proposal every 90 days. Delegated votes don’t count.

Rewards would come from a dynamically funded pool sourced from ecosystem revenues rather than a fixed emission schedule. That means payouts fluctuate based on how much the protocol is actually generating, the size of the staking pool, and verified participation levels. The reward calculations update every two weeks.

Unclaimed rewards get redistributed among active participants. If someone locks tokens but ghosts on governance duties, their share flows to the people who actually showed up.

The proposal also caps voting power for any single participant at 5%, a guardrail designed to prevent whales from steamrolling governance decisions. World Liberty Financial has committed to holding at least one governance vote per calendar quarter, giving locked-up holders regular opportunities to meet their participation requirement.

Replacing an older, less demanding framework

This isn’t World Liberty Financial’s first attempt at governance incentives. A prior proposal approved on March 12 is being replaced by this new structure. The old framework rewarded holding without demanding much in return.

WLFI currently trades between $0.056 and $0.06, putting the market cap at roughly $1.8B. The token has a total supply of 100 billion, with somewhere between 24 billion and 32 billion in circulation. Those prices represent notable declines from 2025 peaks.

The math behind locking up

For current WLFI holders weighing the decision, locking tokens for 180 days removes them from circulation and eliminates the ability to sell during that period. The bi-weekly recalculation means the reward rate stays responsive to actual protocol performance rather than becoming a fixed, potentially unsustainable yield that inflates supply. And the redistribution of unclaimed rewards creates an additional incentive layer: the fewer people who participate, the larger the share for those who do.

The 5% voting power cap deserves attention too. In a protocol connected to the Trump family, concerns about concentrated influence are hardly theoretical. Whether this cap applies to wallets, to individuals, or to some other unit will matter enormously in practice, since splitting holdings across multiple wallets is trivially easy in crypto.