Original author: Jaleel Jialiu
Editors note: In the past few years, Justin Sun has almost become the last survivor of the cryptocurrency industry. Whether it is regulatory suppression, market collapse, or the successive fall of cryptocurrency leaders, he has always been at ease and firmly stood at the center of the industry. Recently, his name has once again become the focus of discussion, and it is still full of drama.
First, he bought a banana at a sky-high price of $6.2 million. This outrageous luxury purchase made headlines in major mainstream media. Recently, he has been very proud and has hooked up with the family of US President Trump. Yesterday, Justin Sun and Huobi founder Li Lin exchanged fire, accusing him of concealing financial loopholes during the delivery process, leaving a funding hole of $30 million, which he had to fill out of his own pocket. Whether it is the financial dispute with Li Lin or the $6.2 million banana, the essence of these stories still revolves around one core: wealth, power and influence. This is also the most exciting microcosm of the currency circle in the past ten years, and Justin Sun has always been at the center of this drama.
The editor-in-chief of CoinDesk, a well-known American crypto media, was fired before Christmas.
What led to his dismissal was an article that was removed by his parent company. In this article, the author ridiculed Sun Yuchen to the extreme. Compared with the revealing the truth that CoinDesk is good at, it is more like a personal attack. The article collected the negative information about TRON and Sun Yuchen in the past two years, and used I watched Sun Yuchen eat the most expensive banana in the world, I really dont understand as the title. After all, who doesnt like to see the media mock the rich? According to CoinDesk employees, Sun Yuchen went over and pressured them to delete the article, which directly led to the dismissal of three employees of CoinDesk, the most well-known crypto media in the United States, including editor-in-chief Kevin Reynolds.
From Suns perspective, this is indeed worthy of anger. Because TRON is one of the only two top sponsors of the Consensus Hong Kong conference to be held in March, and the Consensus conference is one of CoinDesks main sources of income. Anyone who encounters such a situation where someone takes their money and scolds them would probably not be able to remain calm, not to mention that this article does not have as detailed evidence as the article that CoinDesk published when it exposed the FTX problem.
In 2022, it was CoinDesk that fired the first shot at FTX, which was at its peak at the time. After an article disclosed the balance sheet of crypto market maker Alameda, the currency circle caused a butterfly effect, the crypto market plummeted, and many institutions collapsed. No one expected that CoinDesk itself would be crushed by the dominoes. Genesis, an important source of income for DCG (CoinDesks original parent company), went bankrupt in the aftermath of FTXs collapse, which eventually led to DCG selling its media CoinDesk at a low price. The new owner is the trading platform Bullish. It was this Bullish that removed the controversial article and fired the editor-in-chief of CoinDesk.
Compared to Huobi, which Justin Sun bought two years ago, the Bullish trading platform does not seem to be a familiar name. Most people know Bullish because of EOS.
In 2018, there was a company called Block.one that raised $4.2 billion. As the parent company, they created the old star public chain EOS and launched a year-long ICO. A few years later, Block.one separated from EOS, and Block.one, which left with $4.2 billion, created a trading platform that took a compliant route, which was Bullish.
In the era of the public chain craze, TRON and EOS, which launched ICOs at the same time, were entangled but sympathetic. At that time, the combined market value of TRON and EOS was less than 10% of Ethereum (currently the second largest public chain and cryptocurrency after Bitcoin). The best way to defeat Ethereum was to temporarily ally. Sun Yuchen also said in an interview that year: TRON is Liu Bang, EOS is Xiang Yu, and Ethereum is the Qin Dynasty. He wants to kill Ethereum first, and then share the world with EOS.
Today, seven years later, no one would have thought that the current crypto world would overturn many people’s perceptions.
Today, using that metaphor to look at the cryptocurrency world, the Ethereum Qin Dynasty mentioned by Justin Sun is still there, but EOS, the Xiang Yu, has already committed suicide. The market value of EOS is only 5% of TRON. As a public chain, EOS is undoubtedly a failure.
But the parent company behind EOS cannot be considered a failure. What many people don’t know is that EOS’s parent company Block.one is the company that currently holds the second largest number of Bitcoins after MicroStrategy (the listed company that currently holds the most BTC), with a total of 160,000 BTC. Not only that, Block.one also owns nearly $2.2 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds. It should be noted that most of MSTR’s BTC were purchased through additional stock issuance. As a listed company, MSTR’s BTC belongs to all public market investors, while Block.one, as a non-listed company, all its assets are real. How did the money to purchase these assets come from in the first place? Back in 2017, EOS started ICO fundraising and raised $4.2 billion in funds, which was Block.one’s start-up capital. In the following years, Block.one did not invest all the money in development, but hoarded a large amount of assets. The largest expenditure in these years was the $24 million fine to the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), and this money was definitely worth the money, which immediately solved the problem of EOS’s failure that year. The issue of privately raising funds from the public without registering with the regulatory agency, as the popular saying goes, has completely put Block.one ashore. To this day, the company has become a compliant crypto tycoon without any legal risks.
From the perspective of cash flow is king, Block.one is very successful today, just as almost no one remembers what MicroStrategys main business is. Even though EOS has been in decline in 2019, Block.one is still able to survive today with its $16 billion worth of Bitcoin reserves, and has launched its own trading platform Bullish, and is seeking listing and licenses in Nasdaq and Hong Kong.
After EOS, the trading platform, the most liquid and profitable track in the cryptocurrency circle, has become the main business of its parent company after winning without doing anything for five years. This is another decision made by EOS and TRON at the same time.
In 2019, Justin Sun acquired the famous cryptocurrency trading platform Poloniex. After taking over, Justin Sun quickly removed the strict KYC and used this method to significantly increase the number of users on the platform.
In addition to Poloniex, in 2022, Justin Sun also acquired Huobi for approximately US$1 billion, which caused the price of HT (Huobi trading platform token) to surge by nearly 50% in a short period of time.
In July 2021, Block.one launched the trading platform Bullish. After an initial investment of $100 million in cash, 164,000 BTC and 20 million EOS by Block.one, and another $300 million in strategic investment, Bullish Global now has more than $10 billion in cash and digital asset capital. Among the well-known investors who led the $300 million financing are PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Hong Kong tycoon Richard Li.
Bullishs positioning has been clear from the beginning: scale is not important, but compliance is important, because Bullishs ultimate goal is not to make a lot of profit in the crypto world, but to be listed on the U.S. stock market.
Before its official operation, Bullish reached an agreement with Far Peak, a listed company, to invest US$840 million to acquire 9% of the companys shares and conduct a US$2.5 billion merger to achieve a curve listing and lower the traditional IPO threshold.
Bullish’s CEO is a professional manager named Farley, who has a very strong compliance background: he was appointed as the Chief Operating Officer and President of the New York Stock Exchange, during which he performed well and established deep connections with Wall Street giants, CEOs and institutional investors. Another thing worth mentioning is that during his tenure at the New York Stock Exchange, under his leadership, the trading platform created a Bitcoin index and made a private equity investment in the Bitcoin wallet then called Coinbase.
However, compliance is more difficult than they imagined. After the US regulators expressed a signal of crackdown, Bullishs original merger and listing agreement was terminated in 2022, and the 18-month listing plan was temporarily shelved. Bullish has also begun to consider other compliance paths, such as acquiring FTX, and currently concentrating resources in Hong Kong and submitting an application for a virtual asset trading platform license to the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission. Bullish now has 260 employees worldwide, 110 of whom are based in Hong Kong, and the rest are distributed in the United States, Singapore, Gibraltar and other places.
This approach of starting from scratch can ensure compliance from the beginning, but the disadvantages are also quite obvious, and the efficiency is low. While Huobi is rapidly attracting users around the world, Bullish is still worried about its own trading volume and brand awareness.
Like most trading platforms, Bullish has also bought some media services. In a paid feature report by the Wall Street Journal, Bullish claimed that since it began operations in November 2021, its trading volume has exceeded $300 billion, and it has always ranked among the top three in the world in terms of Bitcoin and Ethereum spot trading volume.
However, objective data does not seem to confirm the slogan. According to data from Coingecko, within 24 hours, Bullishs normalized trading volume (excluding suspicious wash trades commonly seen on cryptocurrency trading platforms) rarely exceeds US$40 million per day. At the time of writing, Bullishs 24-hour trading volume was US$27 million, which is a large gap from the average daily trading volume of US$700 million reported by Bullish.
Whether it is the industrys largest trading platform Binance or the largest compliant trading platform in the United States, Coinbase, their trading volumes far exceed Bullish. How big is the specific gap? Even Huobis trading volume in the past 24 hours is almost 100 times that of Bullish.
In addition to its own poor operations, Bullishs excessive focus on compliance is also one of the reasons for its slow development. The most obvious example is that all stablecoin trading pairs on Bullish use USDC (a stablecoin created by Circle and Coinbase in 2018) rather than USDT (Tether, created by Tether, is the earliest and largest stablecoin, with a current total market value of US$130 billion).
As USDT has been subject to more supervision by the US SEC in recent years, the team is considering moving its headquarters to El Salvador, and its dominance has declined. The compliant USDC has seen a surge in trading volume in the past six months. According to Kaikos latest report, USDC trading volume on CEX in 2024 is on the rise, reaching a record high of $38 billion in March, far higher than the average level of $8 billion in 2023. Another well-known trading platform, Bybit and Bullish, account for 60% of USDC trading volume on the trading platform, and are the two largest USDC centralized trading platforms.
But no matter what, USDT is still the overlord of the crypto world today. As of press time, the total issuance of USDC is 46 billion, while the total issuance of USDT is 140 billion.
When USDT was first established, Tether chose to release USDT on Bitcoins second-layer protocol Omni Layer. However, after users used it, the problems were very obvious. The speed of Omni was still too slow, and the OMNI version required at least 4 USDT to transfer, and sometimes even as many as 10, which was very uneconomical for small transactions.
Therefore, Tether turned to Ethereum, which was in the limelight at the time (the second largest public chain after Bitcoin). Ethereum solved this problem to a certain extent, but faster speed and lower handling fees are the permanent pursuit, so Tether began to try to issue USDT on more public chains, so that later in the crypto industry, everyone regarded the issuance of assets by USDT on a certain public chain as a sign that the public chain was recognized by the mainstream industry. After all, USDT is real money, and so many assets are cast on a public chain, proving that Tether, an industry giant, recognizes the security and ease of use of this public chain. Moreover, the real on-chain users and handling fee income brought by USDT are also what all public chains are eager for, and Tron and EOS saw this at the time.
In April 2019, Tether issued the TRC-20 version of USDT on TRON. No one knows how Justin Sun got Tether.
Six months later, EOS issued 5 million USDT on its belated mainnet. Optimistically speaking, the EOS version of USDT transactions has gone a step further, with faster speeds and much faster arrival times than TRON. However, the speed of the crypto industry is much faster than that of traditional industries, and the fork in the road is here. A lot can happen in six months.
Comparison of various versions of USDT at that time
Since the deployment of the Tether contract in April 2019, TRON has gradually begun to focus on the publicity and promotion of USDT, and has launched promotional activities such as hundreds of millions of yuan in interest subsidies.
At that time, Justin Sun and CZ were still in the honeymoon period of mutual success, and they cooperated very well. The good brother Binance came out to support TRON and launched an event - deposit TRC 20-USDT to enjoy 16% annualized return. In addition to Binance, many trading platforms including OK and Huobi announced their support for TRC 20-USDT.
Justin Sun himself frequently speaks out on Weibo, posting TRC 20-USDT related Weibo posts almost every day, and has put a lot of effort into promoting TRON to become the dominant stablecoin public chain.
USDT issued on the Tron blockchain will soon become the worlds largest stablecoin, Justin Sun said confidently about this.
On the other hand, EOS is taking its time, completely wasting its unique advantages. Brock Pierce, one of the co-founders of Block.one, is also the co-founder of Tether. It is obvious that EOS has the upper hand because it is close to the water.
So much so that an early EOS community KOL was heartbroken: I have always attached great importance to USDT and its development. At the beginning, what I was most looking forward to in the EOS ecosystem was the EOS version of USDT, but Block.one did not promote it, and the top trading platforms did not promote it either. It was not launched until Bitfinexs eosfinex went online, but it was too late.
Moreover, EOS needs to lease various resources and fill in memo notes when transferring money, which makes some new users completely confused. The operation experience is not as convenient as Ethereum and Bitcoin, which is also the reason that affects the popularity of EOS.
“As demand grows, more EOS-USDT may be issued. But hundreds of millions or billions of US dollars will never be issued, because the value of the entire EOS network or the value transmitted is limited,” said an analyst at the time.
So, just like that, EOS missed the best opportunity to kill TRON. Now, data from Tether’s official website shows that as of the time of writing, the number of USDT issued on the EOS chain is 85.25 million, while this number on TRON is 59.7 billion.
Data source: USDT official website
On October 22, 2020, an EOS wallet insider wrote a Block.one Manifesto that bitterly criticized the EOS ecosystem problems and instantly spread across the Internet. In the long and impassioned article criticizing Block.one and BM, TRON founder Justin Sun was unexpectedly praised: I admire Justin Sun for his role as a foundation. Regardless of whether he is a plagiarist in the eyes of technical people like BM, at least he is responsible for TRX holders and is contributing to the Tron public chain with real actions, especially in terms of operation and promotion and support for the Tron project.
Today, USDT has already become a veritable peer-to-peer digital cash, realizing Satoshi Nakamotos vision before BTC. Russian senior officials use USDT to bypass trade controls to purchase materials. Since the sanctions were fully implemented in 2022, Russian companies engaged in bulk transactions such as nickel, steel, and timber have faced various challenges: collecting commodity payments, purchasing equipment and raw materials, etc. However, USDT, which is pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio, is difficult to be sanctioned, providing support for Russias international status.
Argentina, in the Western Hemisphere, has the highest percentage of people using cryptocurrency. But Argentines are not playing the cryptocurrency lottery, nor are they trying to get rich through the next hot token. What they usually buy and hold is USDT, a stablecoin that maintains a 1:1 price with the US dollar, with a market value of $138 billion. It is regarded by most citizens as a safe means of wealth storage, helping to resist Argentinas inflation rate of up to 276%.
Cryptocurrency exchange points can be found everywhere in Argentina. Image source: Twone, Uncommons
Not only Argentina, but also locals in Turkey, which is also facing a high inflation and currency crisis, also hold a large amount of cryptocurrencies to fight against the severe depreciation of the Turkish lira, and USDT is also the first choice.
A local cryptocurrency exchange point in Istanbul. Image source: Reddit
Some foreign traders in Yiwu, China, will also use USDT to settle their foreign exchange earnings. A research team once conducted a survey in Yiwu and found that almost all merchants received inquiries from buyers about whether they could use encrypted payments. Compared with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which have greater price fluctuations, Tethers USDT stablecoin is pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio, which is convenient for calculating and settling payments for imports and exports.
In Cambodia, there is a gray market version of Alipay product with a local official background - Huione Pay. The platform was founded in 2014 and initially started as a foreign exchange exchange. Its headquarters is located on Norodom Boulevard in Phnom Penh, just a few steps away from the Royal Palace, which is the most prime location in Phnom Penh. USDT is the most important channel for Huione Pay in foreign exchange and guarantee business.
Huiwang Group Headquarters
In addition, USDT is widely used in these markets, such as purchasing scientific Internet payment channels and purchasing Twitter fans platform payment channels.
For example, iFan, the pirated video platform most loved by international students, includes USDT payment in its membership recharge channels, and the only network option it supports is TRC-20, which is the token format of USDT on the TRON network. In addition to TRON, USDT is currently running on many other mainstream chain networks. However, iFan only supports the TRON network, and even the official offers a 20% discount when paying in this way.
Aiyifan is widely used among overseas Chinese. It may be the pirated video website with the largest number of users in the world. In 2020, it had more than 6 million independent users. It ushered in a big explosion after the epidemic, and now the user scale is at least 10 million. An in-depth user of Aiyifan introduced to us.
Today, many USDT transfer needs are met by TRON. Until November last year, TRON had the largest USDT issuance among all chains. The other chain with the largest USDT issuance is Ethereum. Although Ethereum’s USDT issuance has recently exceeded TRON’s for the first time, the difference is still small, only $600 million.
According to the blockchain data platform Dune , on the TRON network, both USDT cross-chain receiving and sending volumes are higher than other networks. TRONs daily receiving and sending volumes are around 7 million US dollars, while Ethereums is around 600,000 US dollars, which is almost 11 times that.
Data source: Dune
When Bitcoin was still in the process of becoming a financial trading asset through ETF, USDT had already realized the Mass Adoption often pursued by the Web3 community before Bitcoin, and TRON became the biggest beneficiary after Tether. Related reading: Redefining Tron: A USDT-only Chain , Why did the market value of TRX skyrocket? TRON: TRONs stablecoin hegemony .
In the stablecoin market, TRON is the undisputed King of Guanzhong. Looking back five years later, this decision has laid the foundation for 99% of TRONs market value.
The larger the transaction volume, the more revenue it will generate. In terms of revenue, TRONs total revenue in 2024 was $2.12 billion, with a single-day total revenue record of $21.66 million. In the first week of the new year in 2025, TRON generated $43.74 million in fees, surpassing Ethereums $30.63 million.
Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro
In the face of the current popularity of TRON, Tether has contributed to the decline of EOS. In June last year, Tether decided to stop issuing USDT on EOS, stating that it would give priority to supporting community-driven blockchains, implying that EOS has no community support.
This is the glory of one city and the fall of another city.
After the launch of the EOS mainnet, it did not perform as expected. Instead, vulnerabilities frequently appeared, and even a special code audit security industry was born due to the frequent code vulnerabilities. BM also arbitrarily changed the EOS Constitution, which triggered a serious credit crisis in the community. The development of EOS took a sharp turn for the worse, the user base shrank, and major developers left one after another. The price of EOS tokens plummeted from $23 in May 2018 to $0.6 now. Although gambling and high-risk applications attracted a large number of users in the middle, the value they generated was far less than that of TRON, and game applications were not as popular as those on Ethereum.
EOS had already committed suicide in 2019, and now many OGs in the cryptocurrency circle agree with this statement. Management errors are also one of Block.ones biggest problems. From the perspective of BM, the founder of EOS at the time, he was Cao Mao, the Emperor of Wei, and BB, the founder of Block.one, was Sima Zhao. Block.ones senior management appointments were entirely based on personal relationships. Important positions such as the Chief Strategy Officer and the Head of Communications were held by BBs childhood friends or family, lacking external challenges and professional perspectives.
The final outcome can only be BMs departure, the continuous decline in technology development and code quality, and the EOS market performance plummeting. Block.one is even preparing to sell a huge amount of EOS. Now the entire EOS ecosystem, from investors to developers to nodes, can no longer sit still. Everyone is very dissatisfied with Block.one.
EOS Foundation, as a community representative, began negotiations with Block.one. However, over a month, the two sides discussed various options but failed to reach an agreement. Finally, EOS Foundation, together with 17 nodes, revoked Block.ones power and kicked it out of EOS management. Without its parent company, EOS is becoming more and more like a DAO.
After EOS and Block.one separated, the EOS community engaged in a years-long lawsuit with Block.one over the ownership of the funds raised, but to date Block.one still has ownership and use rights to the funds.
How Block.one will use the $4.2 billion raised for the EOS ICO that year is undoubtedly the issue that everyone is most concerned about.
On March 19, 2019, BM revealed part of the answer in an email to Block.one shareholders: As of February 2019, Block.one held assets (including cash and invested funds) totaling US$3 billion.
Of the $3 billion, approximately $2.2 billion was invested in U.S. government bonds, which were also referred to as “liquid fiat assets” in the email.
Some of the investment funds can be found in public information: game company Forte, NFT platform Immutable, and resort hotels in Puerto Rico, U.S. In short, the companies invested in have one thing in common: they have little to do with EOS.
Before Bullish became a core business, Block.one still had a trump card in hand, Voice, a social product based on EOSIO smart contracts, which is also the only product with business relationship with EOS. In order to build Voice, Block.one invested $150 million. In addition, the biggest expense was to buy a domain name with $30 million. The seller was MicroStrategy, the listed company with the most Bitcoin mentioned above.
But it seems to be a curse of fate. The first press conference of Voice lasted half an hour, and the content was not as expected. There were many disappointed voices, which caused the price of EOS to fall. More than half a year later, when the Voice iOS version was launched on the Apple Store, various failures and Bdangsugs occurred again. The Voice official website page showed Error 1020 and said that the website was using security services to protect itself from online attacks. EOS holders were completely disappointed, and Voice finally announced in September 2023 that it would be gradually closed.
Projects launched by Block.one
The thunder is loud but the rain is small, which seems to be the consistent style of Block.ones investment projects. After this, Block.one has no large investment actions and has begun to lie flat. Today, Block.one has 164,000 bitcoins in its account, which means that its net worth has increased fivefold from 3 billion in 2019 to 16 billion US dollars now, which can be called a master of liquidity management.
While Block.one is hoarding Bitcoin, Justin Sun is jokingly called the E Guard trading master. In 2020, Justin Suns on-chain assets remained at around US$300 million, but in just one year this number increased 23 times to US$7 billion.
Data source: Arkm
“If Justin Sun doesn’t have a professional investment research team, then he is a very successful trader.” Someone in the community commented on him: “Selling at the top and buying at the bottom are both Justin Sun’s strengths.”
In addition to selling more than 100,000 Ethereum at a price of $3,674 in the past few months, he quickly sold nearly 39,000 ETH from June to July last year when the price of ETH was hovering around $1,870, and the price then fell all the way to around $1,500.
In addition to trading, Sun Yuchen, who has been active on social media for several years, is also an on-chain degen, active in the field of DeFi (decentralized finance), and is very good at arbitrage and mining. Simply put, DeFi mining is a bit like the high-interest fixed deposit of traditional finance. Users can earn income by depositing their own cryptocurrencies into the fund pool of the decentralized trading platform.
A typical operation of Justin Sun in 2024 was that he bought Pendles PT token in June. In just two days, he invested 33,000 ETH (about 60 million US dollars), accurately allocating it to different DeFi projects, such as Ether.fi, Puffer and Kelp, and the yield of each project was considerable.
Sun Ges previous position in Pendle, from Aunt Ai
Taking the yield of the traditional financial market as an example, the yield of US Treasury bonds is usually between 3-5%, while the interest rate of bank deposits is even lower, which may be less than 1%. In contrast, the yields of several DeFi mining that Sun Ge participated in may seem a bit radical to traditional financial people: Ether.fi: By holding to maturity, Sun Yuchen can earn a 1% return in 22 days, which is an annualized 17.33%; Puffer: The annualized yield of this investment is higher, reaching 18.93%; Kelp: Slightly lower, but still has an annualized yield of 14.33%.
Just like Sun Yuchens investment style, compared with Block.ones somewhat flat operation, TRONs development seems to be more drastic. Judging from the progress of TRONs project, Sun Yuchen has invested a lot of money and resources in the past few years, and finally succeeded in making TRX enter the 10 billion US dollar market value club.
TRONs daily revenue has increased 2,000 times from $1,000 in 2020 to $2 million in 2024. In this round of bull market, there are not many old-fashioned altcoins that have set new all-time highs. The only ones that can be named are SOL, BNB, TON and OKB. TRX is one of them, and it even set a new all-time high earlier than Ethereum.
Today, TRON’s market value is 20 billion US dollars and EOS’s market value is 1.5 billion US dollars, which is only 1/3 of the amount raised that year.
The amount of money raised by TRON that year was only one-tenth of that raised by EOS.
Let’s go back to 2017, which is when these two public chains started.
At that time, the cryptocurrency circle had experienced the ICO boom and the 94 crash, ushering in the year of regulatory liquidation for cryptocurrencies. The price of Bitcoin fell from a high of $19,870 to a low of around $3,000. Ethereum began preparing for the 2.0 upgrade two or three years after its launch. Binance became the worlds largest trading platform, and Solana was still two years away from its launch.
It was 2017, and Ethereum’s two major competitors almost appeared on the historical stage at the same time. Sun Yuchen, who had just turned 27, put down his original social APP, found a few classmates from Peking University, and borrowed the support of the big guys behind him, and returned to the cryptocurrency circle with great ambition to create a TRON chain; on the other hand, BM, who was criticized by even Satoshi Nakamoto, sold his first two projects and joined hands with marketing expert BB to plan to create the first generation of Ethereum killer and blockchain 3.0.
In August 2017, TRON launched its ICO two months later than EOS, but ended fundraising nine months earlier than EOS because “9.4” was coming. Chinese project owners and trading platforms were silent and hurriedly fled, vowing that they would never work in blockchain again, from their 18th generation ancestors to their ten thousandth generation descendants.
In his later recollections, Justin Sun described the scene at the time: Those outside demanding a refund were just like the scenes in The Walking Dead or Train to Busan. Once the glass door opens, youll be trampled to death. The community called on Justin Sun to return the money quickly, and those who came to block the door held knives to their necks. Either you bleed, or I bleed, and return Ethereum to us immediately.
That was the most difficult period for TRON. Almost all the early team members left, and all the partners resigned due to concerns about their personal safety.
My six-year entrepreneurial journey, the first three years were basically wasted like this, Sun Yuchen said. At the end of the ICO, TRON raised a total of $400 million, and after the withdrawal, there was not much left.
Some are happy, some are sad.
On the other hand, EOS, which has both superb technology and idealism, raised $4.2 billion during the one-year ICO period. Not only that, they were well prepared at the regulatory level and had a good team of lawyers to protect them. During the ICO, the audience was mostly Chinese and Korean, and the amount of financing in the United States was relatively small. In the end, when the SEC pursued it, Block.one only paid a fine of $24 million. It was very lucky, because Telegram and TON, which were targeted by the SEC at the same time, had their $1.7 billion coin issuance plan directly stopped. Because the team members are all American, the 94 regulatory incident in China had almost no impact on EOS.
The treatment was completely different. I just stole a corn, but they attacked me with a cannon, Sun Yuchen described his situation at the time.
EOS had a smooth first year. However, starting from the second half of 2018, the price of EOS continued to fall to new lows, and there were repeated rumors in the community that BM was leaving EOS, until BM really left in 2019.
It is said that some large holders were extremely angry at the time, especially those who had followed BM since 2013. After feeling abandoned by BM, they turned their love into hatred. They set up a telegram group to discuss how to deal with BM, and some even offered a reward of 100 bitcoins to assassinate BM through the dark web. This made BM quickly join the EOS community TG group again, where he frequently gave advice to the community, and he did not dare to show up in real life for a long time.
Coupled with the strong supervision of the US SEC, EOS and Block.one have not dared to make any big moves in recent years and have been restricted in their actions.
Speaking of regulation, this is something Sun Yuchen is somewhat proud of: I am very good at dealing with regulators. After all, except for Sun Yuchen, no one may know the truth and details of the year. How did he deal with the 94 regulation? Was he really under border control at the time? Did he go to South Korea because he heard about it? How did he get around the border control in the end?
But in all versions of the story, there is one thing in common, that is, Justin Sun understands regulation very well. On July 25, 2019, Justin Sun sent an apology letter, thanking the care and expressing apologies, and nine times mentioned the leaders and regulatory agencies who care about me. In addition, Justin Sun began to look for a place to stay in tiny countries around the world: in 2021, he served as Grenadas permanent representative and ambassador to the WTO; he was elected Prime Minister of Liberland (a micro-country that is not recognized internationally).
Recently, Justin Sun has been in high spirits.
Unlike the small countries he had previously approached, he recently hooked up with the worlds largest country, the family of US President Trump. Last November, Justin Sun announced that he would purchase $30 million worth of World Liberty tokens, and this World Liberty is not small, it is a Defi project launched by the Trump family.
For ordinary investors, buying and holding World Liberty tokens is not very attractive, and they cannot share in the companys profits or resell them. It is said that 75% of the first $30 million raised went directly into Trumps company account, which looks more like a donation than an investment. In other words, this is a good time to make political donations.
Therefore, when the first round of World Liberty token sales was full and the second round of supplementary sales was launched, TRON DAO continued to increase its chips and invested another US$45 million, with a total investment of US$75 million.
Sun Yuchen, the top of the list, successfully became a consultant for the project, and World Liberty gradually purchased TRX tokens to enrich its treasury. There are also rumors that the virtual currency $TRUMP issued by Trump on the eve of his inauguration as president also has the shadow of Sun Yuchen, but Sun Yuchens attitude on his personal social media is noncommittal.
Judging from the current results, compared with other big names in the cryptocurrency circle, Sun Yuchen is indeed flexible under regulatory pressure. The fate of FTX founder SBF is destined to spend time in prison, and CZ has temporarily bought out the issue of freedom in the future with $4.3 billion and a few months of prison life. TRON users are all on-chain, without the KYC form of the trading platform. The only problem that regulators can find is the sanction funds and money laundering issues in its USDT transactions. But because the issuer of USDT is Tether, and Tron only provides infrastructure, in any case, before Tether faces regulation, network service providers will not face problems before Tether.
Eight years ago, Sun Yuchen returned to China to start a business. In his speech, he said, My standard for measuring a person is how much money he makes. He said it, and he did it. Leaving behind the lofty image of a young literary man, Sun Yuchen began to embark on a pragmatic and almost cold path of making money.
Eight years later, 35-year-old Justin Sun currently has $2 billion worth of assets in his on-chain wallet, and it is rumored that his net worth is $100 billion. He can spend $6.2 million to buy a banana artwork. He has maximized the use of rules, leveraged resources, and won his own coin explosion game.
What is even more interesting is that at every fork in the road, EOS and Block.one, which have always gone against TRON, have 164,000 bitcoins worth $16 billion on their accounts today.
Fate has achieved a kind of absurd different paths leading to the same destination. TRON and EOS have also written a tale of two cities in the crypto era.
