Secret projects of Justin Sun, or what may be hidden behind the creation of the business empire of the founder of Tron

Since its inception, the Tron platform and its founder Justin Sun have occupied a significant place inthe news agenda of the entire cryptocurrency industry. This happens both for completely justifiable reasons, such as important technological releases or major acquisitions, and for more controversial reasons, which are clearly not lacking around the figure of a Chinese entrepreneur.

However, even if Justin Sun himself out loud aboutHe doesn’t say this, behind the recent multimillion-dollar purchases of technology startups there may be something more than it seems at first glance, and a more careful analysis of the business empire he is building suggests rather interesting theories.

The latest significant news from the creator of Tron,In addition to the purchase of a stake in the Poloniex exchange in November 2019, there was the announcement of a new decentralized stablecoin backed by TRX and BTT tokens, which, as can be assumed, will become a key part of a new “secret” project involving the BitTorrent and DLive platforms. Let us remind you that if BitTorrent joined the Tron ecosystem back in 2018, then the blockchain platform for sharing video content DLive became the latest major acquisition of Tron — the corresponding statement was made at the end of December 2019.

Tron along with EOS is considered one of the mainEthereum competitors, and in 2019 decentralized applications based on it, according to DappReview, totaled almost a million active users. Perhaps this is half as much as Ethereum, however, if Justin Sun’s plans for a project involving BitTorrent and DLive are implemented, and he will attract the very announced 100 million new users, the picture on the market may noticeably change, and not only for the token itself TRX

Justin Sun himself in his characteristic shockingIn this manner, this intrigue is regularly fueled on social networks, where on Twitter alone the number of its subscribers totals about 2.1 million users. Leaving for the time being the percentage of their authenticity (a number of sources claim that half of Sana's followers may be fake), this is in any case a very impressive audience, which can be delivered with the necessary information at the right time.

What are the goals of Justin Sun? Nothing can be unequivocally stated, but judging by the infrastructure being created, it cannot be ruled out that his ambitions may extend to creating his own version of native Internet money, which giants such as Facebook and Telegram are currently working on.

The latter's attempts, as is known, encounteredopposition from the authorities, however, Facebook and Telegram can be safely classified as “heavyweights”, whose every step is under special scrutiny. It’s clearly impossible to say the same about Tron, even if its user base exceeds 100 million people, and who knows if that’s not what Sun’s plan is: to launch that same Internet money without attracting increased attention from regulators with the expectation that that the car will gain sufficient speed, after which it will be extremely difficult to stop it.

Who is Mister Sun?

Justin Sun was born July 10, 1990 in ChineseShandong Province. Thanks to the efforts of his parents, he was able to get an education in prestigious educational institutions. So, from 2007 to 2011, Sun studied at Peking University, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in history. By the way, the founder of the largest manufacturer of mining equipment for Bitmain, Cihan Wu, was educated at the same Peking University.

From 2009 to 2010, Justin Sun also studiedhumanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and from 2011 to 2013 he studied at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, receiving a master's degree in political economics. In 2018, he entered Hupan University, founded by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, to help entrepreneurs and business owners master the basic skills necessary for further development and promotion in the Chinese market.

“Hupan University has had a huge impact on me and the company. Without it, Tron would not be what it is today. My business was developed there, ”— Sun said in April 2019, when he donated $1.5 million to further develop the school.

Jack Ma, by the way, is considered the protégé of the creator of Tron, and it is a joint photo with the founder of Alibaba that takes pride of place on Instagram of the founder of Tron.

According to San, in cryptocurrencies he startedinvest in 2012, when he acquired his first bitcoins. His interest in new technologies and his innate enterprise brought him to Ripple Labs in 2013 - for three years Justin Sun served as the representative of the California fintech company in China.

In the same 2013, having previously enlistedfunded by several well-known venture capital funds, he created the Peiwo app, which quickly became China's largest voice messaging software. Looking ahead, we note that in February 2018, Peiwo added support for the TRON cryptocurrency, so millions of users of the application got the opportunity to monetize their activity on the network.

In 2016, Sun leaves Ripple Labs tofocus on developing its own platform of decentralized applications, which later became known as Tron. By the time the Tron Foundation, the company behind the development of the project, was in place, he had been on Forbes China's “30 Under 30” lists for three consecutive years.

Tron platform

Tron, or «Las Vegas on the blockchain», asDubbed in the DappReview analyst report mentioned above, it is billed as an open-source protocol designed to deploy a decentralized ecosystem of applications and entertainment content. For posting or selling content on the network, a reward is expected in the project’s native cryptocurrency - Tronix (TRX), and the platform itself is compatible with blockchains and smart contracts of other projects.

Tron fundraising campaign, duringwhich sold 40% of the estimated TRX token issue in the amount of 100 billion, lasted only three days (from August 31 to September 2, 2017) and without any problems reached the target of $ 70 million. Its completion almost coincided with the time entered in China has a ban on ICOs, after which many cryptocurrency companies have moved their activities to other countries. In the case of Tron, it turned out to be the United States of America - the last two and a half years the project has been managed from San Francisco.

Initially, the platform worked on the blockchainEthereum in the form of ERC-20 tokens, starting migration to the main network of its own blockchain on May 31, 2018. Unlike Ethereum, where, according to Justin Sun, “miners fight with developers,” Tron uses a consensus algorithm based on Delegated Proof of Stake, that is, a separation of functions between coin holders with voting rights has been implemented and transaction validators.

Moreover, since Tron started on the basisEthereum has followed its development path, the virtual machine (TVM), smart contracts and TRON token standards are compatible with Ethereum, which simplifies the migration of projects to this blockchain. Moreover, Tron is quite aggressively clearing a place for itself in the crypto market, luring away developers of competing projects in order, as Sun once said, to “save them from collapse.” platforms.

Accusations of plagiarism

Nevertheless, at the start, the project ran intofierce criticism, accused of direct plagiarism of his white paper. In particular, such statements were made in January 2018 by representatives of Protocol Labs, the company behind the development of the Filecoin project.

So, CEO of Protocol Labs Juan Benet said thatalmost the entire white paper Tron was copied without a single link to other projects, including IPFS, and that no proper response was received from the authors of the document.

In fairness, it should be noted thatTron was not a verbatim copy of white paper, but its content, vocabulary, and general structure were really very similar to those documents that had previously been prepared in Protocol Labs. For example, it described the Bitswap strategy from the IPFS document very close to the original, and experts also drew attention to the identity of the equations and formulas used.

Justin Sun tried to answer the questions posed by the community, but did so, according to most crypto enthusiasts, unconvincingly.

“The original version of our white paper waswritten in Chinese, and it contains all the detailed links. The English, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish versions were translated by volunteers. The translation omitted not only links, but also other important details. ”— he answered.

A few months later this story sanuVitalik Buterin also recalled. This happened shortly before the launch of the main Tron network, when Sun listed the seven main advantages of his platform over Ethereum. Buterin responded by saying the eighth “advantage”: the best ability to write white paper (Ctrl + C + Ctrl + V is more effective than manually typing new content on the keyboard).

Buy BitTorrent

In the summer of 2018, almost simultaneously withWith the launch of the main network, the Tron Foundation completed the acquisition of the BitTorrent platform, the operator of the popular uTorrent client, saying that this can be considered the beginning of the creation of a decentralized Internet of the future.

“With the integration of BitTorrent, TRON is committed toto free the Internet from the dominance of large corporations, return to people the right to access data and return to the vision of a free, transparent and decentralized network that existed at the beginning of the 21st century, which connects the whole world because the Internet belongs to people, ”Justin Sun then commented on the purchase of BitTorrent.

Token creation plans have also been announced.BTT, which, according to Sana, will give rise to true mass adoption of blockchain technology. It was originally thought that it would be used to reward users for distributing files on the BitTorrent and µTorrent torrent trackers, but the latest news means that its scope will most likely be wider.

There was, of course, a place for skeptics whowondered why another “shitcoin with no practical value” was needed, given that BitTorrent had previously worked quite well without any such innovations.

So, in January 2019, commenting on plansJustina Sana, former BitTorrent Strategy Director Simon Morris, said he had no idea how the Tron blockchain would handle the volume of transactions needed to tokenize the platform.

«Essentially, this is a marketing machine on a very thin layer of technology», —he said.

Morris also assessed Justin Sun himself, whom he had met several times before in the negotiation process and managed to get to know him well.

“It’s clear that Justin is very strong atmarketing. From this point of view, he is a very positive person. However, he does not have a technical vein, technically he does not understand anything. But what really bothered me was his approach to Trump-style things: if you are caught lying, you are responding to this double lie. It was this endless lie that made me come to the conclusion that nothing would work out with him, ”— said Morris, who left the company shortly after the sale of BitTorrent.

Be that as it may, another set goalwas implemented: on January 28, 2019, the BitTorrent crowdsale was held on the updated Binance Launchpad platform. Accompanied by increased excitement and technical problems, the campaign ended in less than 18 minutes, and as a result, 59.4 billion BTT tokens were sold for a total of about $ 7.2 million.

Technically, the BTT token was created on the basis of the TRC-10 standard, but it is also compatible with ERC-20. The total issue is 990 billion BTT.

Media scandals and allegations of involvement in scam

Justin Sun never hid hisadherence to aggressive marketing policies, which often turned into high-profile media scandals. For example, this happened in the case of the promised airdrop for $ 20 million and the Tesla car for its subscribers on Twitter in March 2019, when the winner was forced to be content with a ticket and a paid trip to the upcoming niTROn Summit in Seoul in late February.

Or as it was the same spring last year, when Justin Sun solemnly announced a partnership with the English football club Liverpool.

In theory, from a technological point of view, suchthe partnership could well have taken place, however, representatives of Liverpool quickly denied the news, saying that they did not know anything about such plans.

A lot of noise was made by the story of the failedlunch with billionaire Warren Buffett last summer. Then Sun paid at a charity auction for an annual traditional dinner with a legendary investor a record $ 4,567,888.

CEO Circle agreed to join himJeremy Allair, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, head of eToro investment platform Yoni Assia and Huobi exchange spokesman Chris Lee, however, two days before the scheduled lunch, the Tron Foundation unexpectedly announced its transfer.

The official reasons were namedSana’s health problems, although a number of Chinese media claimed that the founder of Tron was under investigation and could not leave China. There were also rumors that since November 2018, Sun allegedly has been hiding from the Chinese authorities, but he categorically denies them. In September, Sun promised to soon name a new date for lunch with Buffett, but so far this has not happened.

Curiously, health problems did not stopOn the day of the failed Buffett dinner, Sanu would attend a Tron Foundation-sponsored San Francisco party and even retweet a photograph taken by one of the participants.

However, if all these media scandals are possible into a certain degree, considered not entirely successful attempts by the self-PR, the situation with accusations of involvement in frankly fraudulent schemes is much more serious.

So, last summer Justin Sun underwentsharp criticism for the fact that he did not respond in time to the activities of the Chinese investment scheme Wave Field Super Community. Its organizers pretended to be Tron, copying the Chinese name of the platform, and the pyramid itself lasted about six months, collecting about $ 29 million from gullible investors.

All this time, representatives of Tron did notThey commented on such an initiative, until a critical point arrived and the deceived investors started active actions. There were also some misunderstandings: on July 8, 2019, they tried to forcefully penetrate the Raybo partner's Tron partner research center in Beijing, suggesting that they could get answers to questions about the fate of their investments there. The Tron platform itself was also called a scam.

“The victims were promised high returns frominvestment using the name Tron, BitTorrent and uTorrent. Tron officials express their sympathy with the cheated, but the company strongly condemns acts of violence that may result from events that are not under its direct control. ”— The Tron Foundation said at the time.

Justin Sun commented on the July events:

“Tron's mission is to advancefair and open internet that does not block discussion and dissent. The news disseminated in this situation did not help investors in any way, however, they damaged the Tron community, as the cost of the token fell due to fake news. ”

At the end of 2019, Justin Sun publicly supported the launch of the decentralized Just.Game application, which in a number of ways resembles a financial pyramid.

The new application is a game inwhich needs to send TRX tokens to a smart contract, and then publish a referral link on social networks. Users are rewarded for promoting the game. In the very first hours after launch, they sent 500 million TRX to the contract, about which San himself not only announced on his Twitter, but also published his referral link.

Users who watched the live broadcast fromSanom dedicated to the game claim that the creator of TRON invested 125 million TRX in it. Some have also suggested that the low number of active viewers may indicate that a significant portion of the entrepreneur's more than 2 million followers — fake accounts. Sun later deleted the said post from Twitter.

Where is Tron going?

As already mentioned, critics of the project andits founder speaks a lot, and often it is very justified. Much of it comes from the implacable bitcoin maximalists, who are convinced that sooner or later the Justin Sun and the Tron Foundation will fall into the spotlight of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or other financial regulators. At the same time, despite the inconsistency of the figure of the Chinese entrepreneur and the particularities of the business promotion policy that he has chosen, many community representatives agree that there was no frank violation of laws on his part.

For objectivity, it would be more correcttake a closer look at the technology itself and its potential, especially since it is still very young — that same notorious road map is designed until 2025 and includes several key stages. The project is currently in the second phase of Odyssey, dedicated to developing a community of entertainment content creators.

Third and fourth phases (Great Voyage and Apollo)will be associated with the launch by the participating projects of the network of new tokens and the conduct of personal ICOs. The fifth phase (Star Trek) will begin with the launch of a decentralized platform for games and market predictions. The final phase (Eternity) will address the issues of fundraising and monetization of projects on the platform.

It is also worth noting that the project is quitepays considerable attention to issues of overall platform security. This is also confirmed by the fact that in 2018, the Tron Foundation enlisted the services of a highly sought-after security engineer Jorge Guo, who in the past received numerous thanks from companies such as Google, Huawei and Qualcomm.

The seriousness of Tron’s intentions is also indicated by its willingness to invest in blockchain game developers. So, at the end of 2018, a special fund for $ 100 million TRON Arcade was launched for this purpose.

However, the main intrigue, as already mentioned,is whether Justin Sun will attempt to create native Internet money. Also, a possible collaboration between the Tron Foundation and the already mentioned Jack Ma from Alibaba cannot be completely ruled out. Such a move would be a big event for the entire market, and, having a positive impact on the price of TRX, would create enormous opportunities for both the creation of new projects… so, probably, for possible manipulations.

There is no definite answer to these questions, and at this stage it remains only to monitor the development of events.

Andrew Asmakov