Justin Sun: the biography, career and crypto fortune of TRON’s founder

Early years and education

Justin Sun was born in 1990 in sparsely populated Qinghai province in west-central China.

The future TRON founder earned a Bachelor of Arts in History at Peking University and a Master’s in East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. While studying at one of America’s oldest institutions, he took an interest in cryptocurrencies and became an early bitcoin investor.

Sun also attended the Hupan business school under Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma. In 2011 he appeared on the cover of Yazhou Zhoukan, and in 2014 joined the “Young Leaders of Davos” programme.

Ripple and TRON

In late 2013 Justin Sun joined Ripple Labs as an adviser and chief representative in China.

In July 2017 he registered the non-profit TRON Foundation in Singapore. That September it conducted an ICO for TRX, billed as an “Ethereum killer”, just days before Chinese authorities banned such campaigns.

According to The Verge, Sun knew about the forthcoming ban and rushed the token sale to precede the official announcement. Soon after, he left China for the United States.

The ICO raised about $70m. The white paper, however, drew a wave of criticism—the crypto community identified borrowed sections from other blockchain projects without proper citations.

BitTorrent, Poloniex and Huobi

In June 2018 Sun acquired BitTorrent, known for its eponymous P2P protocol, for $140m. Under his leadership the firm launched the L2 solution BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) and a native token, BTT, with a supply of 990 trillion.

In late 2019 the entrepreneur became the owner of the cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex. According to The Verge, in 2021 the TRON founder demanded 300 BTC that users had mistakenly sent to wrong addresses, despite staff objections.

In November 2023 hackers stole $120m from Poloniex, and Sun offered to let them keep 5%, or about $6.5m, if they returned the rest within a week. On 17 November the exchange’s team announced the resumption of deposits and withdrawals.

Once a top trading platform, at the time of writing it ranks 134th among CEX on CoinGecko. Its trust score is 4/10, and its normalised daily trading volume is roughly $45m. Alongside blue chips like bitcoin and Ethereum, Poloniex lists many lesser-known crypto-assets, including projects from the TRON ecosystem.

Between 2018 and 2020 Sun obtained Maltese residency through investment.

In October 2021 the TRON founder took part in a $65m funding round for Hong Kong’s Animoca, the developer of blockchain games such as The Sandbox.

By February 2023 Sun became the largest private holder of stETH via Lido, with a balance of $500m.

In August 2024 he launched the SunPump platform, allowing users to create their own memecoins.

Justin Sun is also associated with HTX (formerly Huobi)—in comments to ForkLog, representatives of the exchange said he had joined the platform’s advisory board. The venue continues to hold its own in the market, though it has long since fallen out of the top ten of CoinGecko’s ranking.

The arrival of the USDD stablecoin

In April 2022 Sun announced an algorithmic stablecoin called USDD, backed by the native TRX token and a $10bn reserve of highly liquid assets. The “stablecoin’s” operating model initially mirrored that of UST in the Terra ecosystem, which soon collapsed.

“When the price of USDD falls below $1, users and arbitrageurs can send 1 USDD into the system and receive the equivalent of $1 in TRX. When the price of USDD exceeds $1, converting the equivalent of $1 in TRX into 1 USDD becomes advisable. Regardless of market volatility, the protocol will maintain the stability of USDD’s peg to $1 at a 1:1 ratio in a decentralised way, using algorithms,” the entrepreneur explained.

TRON DAO took over management of USDD and the provision of its “risk-free” annual yield at 30%.

Former Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon, now awaiting extradition from Montenegro to South Korea, voiced support for the “stablecoin”.

“Decentralised economies deserve decentralised money — every blockchain will run on decentralised stablecoins,” he predicted.

USDD launched on 5 May 2022. Beyond the TRON network, the asset also became available on Ethereum and BNB Chain via the BTTC cross-chain protocol.

Amid UST’s loss of its peg and Terra’s wider troubles, TRON DAO Reserve purchased BTC and TRX worth $61m to support the algorithmic stablecoin USDD.

Justin Sun soon pledged $2bn to prevent a collapse of the “stablecoin”. Commenting on Terra’s failure, he said the TRON ecosystem would not abandon USDD. He also stressed he was not involved in destabilising UST, which, in his words, was “killed by overly rapid growth”.

A shift in USDD’s collateral model

In June 2022 the TRON team announced a move to an “overcollateralised” model for the algorithmic stablecoin USDD to avoid a TerraUSD-style collapse.

“This was in the plan, but Terra/LUNA definitely sped up and reprioritised for our team,” Sun stressed.

Despite the change in model, that same month USDD lost its U.S. dollar peg and fell to $0.97 amid a crypto-market slump.

Thanks in large part to additional collateral of 700m USDC, as well as BTC and TRX worth $50m, parity with the dollar was restored.

In December that year, USDD again slipped to $0.97. To stabilise the system, TRON Foundation allocated $1.45bn.

In August 2024 USDD developers quietly removed from the asset’s reserves an address holding roughly 12,000 BTC. Sun did not comment on the disappearance of the bitcoins, but acknowledged that a collateral ratio “of more than 300%” is “not a very efficient use of capital”.

At the time of writing USDD ranks 111th by market capitalisation on CoinGecko. Even so, it remains one of the largest in its segment, behind only USDT, USDC, DAI, FDUSD and USDE.

Dinner with Buffett

In February 2020 Justin Sun finally met billionaire Warren Buffett, a meeting long in the making.

The TRON founder paid a record $4.5m to attend the charity dinner, which was also attended by Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, eToro chief Yoni Assia, Huobi CFO Chris Lee and Binance Charity Foundation head Helen Hai.

As Sun wrote, the dinner itself cost $515, but the $4.5m he had paid for it was worth it because the conversation with the legendary investor yielded “priceless insights”.

The TRON founder added that Warren Buffett received his first bitcoin, as well as 1,930,830 TRX—a number matching the investor’s date of birth.

The meeting had initially been scheduled for July 2019, but two days before the date TRON Foundation unexpectedly announced a postponement, citing Sun’s health problems.

Buffett is a staunch opponent of the crypto industry. Speaking about bitcoin, he has used terms such as “rat poison squared” and “an illusion with no unique value”.

High offices

In 2021 Justin Sun became Grenada’s ambassador and permanent representative to the World Trade Organization (WTO). To focus on his new role in Geneva, he stepped back from active management of his crypto projects, including TRON.

Sun pledged to fight for the interests of developing countries and to promote blockchain technology at the WTO, as well as to work on legitimising cryptocurrencies in Latin American countries after “El Salvador’s success”.

In March 2023 the TRON founder left his post as Grenada’s representative to the WTO after the party that appointed him lost elections.

In October 2024 Sun was elected “speaker of the congress” and appointed “prime minister” of Liberland, a self-proclaimed country on the border of Serbia and Croatia that claims a small tract of land on the Danube.

Legal troubles

In late 2019 former BitTorrent employees Richard Hall and Lukasz Jurasek filed a lawsuit against TRON Foundation CEO Justin Sun, the foundation and CTO Cong Li, accusing them of wrongful termination, labour-law violations and abuse of authority.

According to the plaintiffs, after the $140m acquisition of BitTorrent, the atmosphere at the company became hostile and management methods unacceptable. They also alleged physical violence and the ignoring of issues related to illegal content.

Hall and Jurasek said their dismissal was retaliatory and discriminatory, despite no complaints about their work. They sought $15m in damages for emotional distress and intolerable working conditions, as well as labour-law compliance.

TRON Foundation disputed the lawsuit, calling it unfounded.

In March 2023 the SEC charged the TRON founder and three of his companies with the unregistered offering of securities in the form of TRX and BitTorrent’s BTT tokens.

The regulator also concluded that Sun and his TRON Foundation, BitTorrent Foundation and Rainberry (formerly BitTorrent) manipulated the secondary market for TRX through “wash trading”.

Justin Sun’s crypto assets

In July analysts at Arkham Intelligence estimated Sun’s crypto holdings at $1.04bn.

“Justin Sun made most of his fortune as a founder and investor in the cryptocurrency market. He is known as the founder of TRON and the CEO of BitTorrent […], as well as the owner of the Poloniex exchange and an adviser to another exchange — HTX (formerly Huobi). Sun is also linked to the DeFi projects Just (JST) and Sun (SUN), parts of which he may own,” the researchers said.

As of February, Sun ranked fifth among the largest TRX holders. According to analysts, during the 2017 ICO, 34% of the coin’s issuance was allocated to the TRON Foundation, from which the project’s founder likely received the bulk.

From 2017 to 2023 the largest cryptoassets in Sun’s portfolio were bitcoin and Ethereum, not TRX. Between 2017 and 2019 ETH made up most of the businessman’s known holdings, Arkham claims.

According to OpenSea, Sun owns one NFT from the CryptoPunks collection and 36 non-fungible tokens in The Sandbox with a combined floor value of roughly $175,000.

He also spent $15m on buying Bored Ape Yacht Club on the Tron blockchain, which he uses as his profile picture on X. He paid another $10.5m for Tpunk#3442, which resembles the Joker.

At the time of writing (21 October 2024) the total value of Justin Sun’s crypto assets is about $1.4bn.

The TRON founder’s largest positions are $313.79m in TRX, $283.46m in stETH and $276.44m in USDD.