Justin Sun as a superstar in crypto: a brief success story

Today we will briefly look at the journey into crypto of Justin Sun, a multimillionaire and founder of one of the most successful blockchains, a master of aggressive marketing, author of viral tweets, and a talented negotiator who planned to convince Warren Buffett to invest in cryptocurrency.

Careers

• Ripple. From 2013 to 2016, he was the company’s representative in the Asian region. Ripple was the starting point for a young entrepreneur on the cryptocurrency market, and given the popularity of XRP at the time (the third coin on the market), it was a very strong start.
• Piewo. After quitting Ripple, San founded a voice messaging app, which became San’s first startup. The project quickly gained several million users in China, and a successful sale made the young entrepreneur rich. 
• Tron is Justin Sun’s biggest project. The Tron Foundation was registered in Singapore in July 2017, and a year later it held an ICO during which it raised $70 million. The blockchain itself launched in 2018.
  
  Despite the bright start of the project, if you look at the project today, it makes a contradictory impression. In fact, Tron today is almost an empty network with huge amounts of stablecoins, TRX, and native tokens of several platforms running around. The small number of live Dapps is compensated by the huge amount of stablecoins in this network: according to Tether, the Tron network has issued $37 billion USDT, which is $5 billion more than Ethereum.
• BitTorrent. In June 2018, Justin Sun acquired one of the popular P2P data exchange protocols, BitTorrent. The idea was to move BitTorrent to the blockchain, tokenize it, and improve the protocol.It was an attempt to introduce a utility token into an already popular project, thus integrating this project into crypto. The idea was very interesting and ambitious, but looking at the situation today, we see that this development direction failed.The native BTT token turned out to be useless for the protocol, and users continued to use BitTorrent, but without the token. In fact, the crypto component became unnecessary. However, during the bull run in 2021, the BTT token gave a great income to all holders of this token who bought it at the ICO. So at least in that aspect,  the project turned out to be a success.
• Poloniex. After the announcement of the investment (actually the purchase of the controlling stake), Justin Sun noted that Poloniex was planned to be used as a platform focused on Chinese users, but the tightening of regulation in China has nullified those plans. Left without development plans, Poloniex began to lose its leading market position and now, according to CoinMarketCap, takes 26th place in the overall ranking of exchanges.
• Huobi. Justin himself did not confirm the purchase of this exchange for a long time, but later in an interview, Justin called himself “probably the largest holder” of HTT tokens. Plans to develop the exchange are not advertised; the story is something like the purchase of Poloniex. Sun’s true role and influence in Huobi are still unclear, but judging by the exchange’s actions, he is involved in making key decisions.

Lunch with Warren Buffett

In July 2019, Justin Sun won Warren Buffett’s annual charity auction, selling the right to dine with the legendary investor. Sun paid $4.6 million for this modest meal, setting a record amount in auction history. 

According to Justin, there was talk of Tron, Bitcoin, Tesla, and more. It’s true that the young crypto startup was never able to convince the old-school investor to reconsider his attitude toward cryptocurrency, but the very expensive attempt to do so is telling.

Accusations

In 2023, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused Tron founder Justin Sun and his three companies of unregistered offerings of securities in the form of Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens. It is quite understandable that almost any modern crypto startup can be accused of such a thing, and Justin was chosen for the attack simply as a prominent public figure. 

Not surprisingly, Justin himself has completely denied the accusation. He also noted that the SEC’s regulatory framework for digital assets is “still in its infancy.”

While it’s too early to put an end to this story, it’s clear that events are just beginning and this creative biography isn’t over yet.