{"id":7934,"date":"2020-01-23T18:20:23","date_gmt":"2020-01-23T16:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.media\/?p=7934"},"modified":"2020-01-24T21:11:02","modified_gmt":"2020-01-24T19:11:02","slug":"justin-suns-secret-projects-or-what-lies-beneath-tron-founders-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/justin-suns-secret-projects-or-what-lies-beneath-tron-founders-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Sun\u2019s Secret Projects, or What Lies Beneath Tron Founder\u2019s Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the moment of its inception, the Tron platform and its founder Justin Sun have garnered significant attention from news media within the crypto-industry. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for this, such as important technological releases or major acquisitions. There is also an abundance of much more controversial news hooks, surrounding the person of this Chinese entrepreneur.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Even if Justin Sun himself does not yet comment on this, there may be something of greater importance behind the recent acquisitions of technology startups worth millions of dollars than it may seem at first glance. A more careful analysis of the business empire Sun is building spawns some quite interesting theories.<\/span><\/p>\n

The latest significant news from the creator of Tron, other than buying a stake in the Poloniex exchange in November 2019, was the announcement of a new <\/span>decentralized stablecoin<\/span><\/a> backed with TRX and BTT tokens, which will presumably become a key part of a new <\/span>\u201csecret\u201d project<\/span><\/a> involving BitTorrent and DLive platforms. While BitTorrent joined the Tron ecosystem back in 2018, the DLive blockchain content sharing platform was the last major acquisition of Tron\u2014the <\/span>statement<\/span><\/a> was made at the end of December 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Along with EOS, Tron is considered to be one of Ethereum’s main competitors. In 2019 Tron-based decentralized applications totaled almost a million active users according to <\/span>DappReview<\/span><\/a>. While this is half as much as Ethereum has, if Justin Sun\u2019s plans for a project involving BitTorrent and DLive are implemented, and there will be at least the expected 100 million new users, the market may change significantly. And not only for the TRX token.<\/span><\/p>\n

Justin Sun himself, in his characteristic flamboyant manner, regularly whips up this intrigue on social media. On Twitter alone, he has over 2 million subscribers. Ignoring for the time being concerns about the authenticity of Justin\u2019s subscribers (a number of sources <\/span>claim<\/span><\/a> that over half of his followers may be fake), this is, in either case, a very impressive audience.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what are Justin Sun\u2019s goals? Not much can be said for sure, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

As we know, they have encountered unrelenting opposition from the authorities. But while Facebook and Telegram can be safely defined as \u201cheavyweights\u201d, each their step being very closely scrutinized, the same can not be said about Tron even if its user base exceeds 100 million people. Could that be a part of San\u2019s plan? Eschew attracting increased regulatory attention, launch the online money and hope that the snowball will gain enough momentum to be impossible to stop.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who is Mr. Sun?\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

Justin Sun was born on July 10, 1990, in the Chinese province of Shandong. His parents made sure that he was able to attend prestigious educational institutions. From 2007 to 2011, Sun studied at Beijing University, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in history. Coincidentally, Jihan Wu, the founder of Bitmain, the largest manufacturer of mining equipment, also studied at Beijing University.<\/span><\/p>\n

From 2009 to 2010 Justin Sun also studied humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and from 2011 to 2013 he studied at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA, receiving a master’s degree in political economy. 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 successfully operating on the Chinese market.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHupan University made a huge impact and difference to me and the company. Without Hupan, Tron will not be what it is today. My entrepreneurship was enlightened and developed there,\u201d<\/i><\/b> said Sun in April 2019, as he <\/span>donated<\/span><\/a> $1,5 million to the University.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tron\u2019s creator is believed to be Jack Ma\u2019s protege and the photo with the founder of Alibaba takes a special spot on Sun\u2019s Instagram.<\/span><\/p>\n

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According to Sun, he began investing in cryptocurrencies back in 2012, when he acquired his first Bitcoins. His interest in new technologies and his business acumen led him to Ripple Labs in 2013. For three years, Justin Sun worked as the representative of the California-based fintech company in China.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also in 2013, having previously secured funding from several well-known venture funds, he created the Peiwo application, which quickly became the largest voice messaging software in China. Many years later, in February 2018, Peiwo <\/span>added support<\/span><\/a> for the TRON cryptocurrency, so millions of the app\u2019s users got the opportunity to monetize their activity on the network.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2016, Sun left Ripple Labs to focus on developing his own decentralized application platform, which later became known as Tron. By the time the Tron Foundation, the company behind the project, was created, Sun had been on Forbes China’s \u201c30 Under 30\u201d lists for three consecutive years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tron Platform<\/b><\/h2>\n

Tron, or \u201cLas Vegas on the blockchain,\u201d as it was aptly dubbed in the aforementioned DappReview analytics report, has been announced as an open-source protocol designed to create a decentralized ecosystem of entertainment apps and content. Users would be rewarded in the project’s native cryptocurrency, Tronix (TRX), for uploading or selling content on the network and the platform itself was supposed to be compatible with blockchains and smart contracts of other projects.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tron\u2019s crowdfunding campaign lasted only three days (from August 31 to September 2, 2017) and easily reached the goal of <\/span>$70 million<\/span><\/a>, selling 40% of the estimated issue of TRX tokens (100 billion). This almost coincided with the ban on ICOs introduced in China, after which many cryptocurrency companies moved to other countries. In Tron\u2019s case, it turned out to be the United States. Since then, the project has been managed from the city of San Francisco.<\/span><\/p>\n

Initially, the platform employed Ethereum\u2019s ERC-20 tokens, <\/span>starting<\/span><\/a> the migration to the main network of its own blockchain on May 31, 2018. Unlike Ethereum, where, according to Justin Sun, \u201cminers were fighting with developers,\u201d Tron used a consensus algorithm based on <\/span>Delegated Proof of Stake<\/span><\/a>, where the functions of coin holders with voting rights and of transaction validators were separated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since Tron started based off Ethereum and followed its development path, the virtual machine (TVM), smart contracts and TRON token standards are compatible with Ethereum, which greatly simplifies the migration of projects between these blockchains. Moreover, Tron is quite aggressive in its niche within the cryptocurrency market, luring developers of competing projects to \u201csave them from the collapse\u201d, as Sun himself once said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Accusations of Plagiarism<\/b><\/h2>\n

From the very start, the project ran into fierce criticism, being accused of numerous instances of plagiarism in its white paper. Among others, in January 2018 such accusations were levied by representatives of Protocol Labs, the company behind the development of the Filecoin project.<\/span><\/p>\n

Juan Bennett, the Protocol Labs CEO, said that almost the entire Tron whitepaper was copy-pasted from elsewhere without a single link to other projects, including IPFS, and that no meaningful response was received from the authors of the document.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Wow! Absurd! TRON's "paper" is mostly copied from other projects, or is super basic p2p passed off as original. Zero references.<\/p>\n

Archived that PDF in IPFS, in case they take it down: https:\/\/t.co\/jv7EuSYenL<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/GbiL7MUrnc<\/a><\/p>\n

— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) January 7, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n