Justin Sun: Tron’s Founder Was at the Center of It All

Everyone always has a lot to say about Justin Sun, but the founder of Tron, the third largest blockchain by market cap according to DeFi Llama data, tends to ignore the critics and focus on BUIDLing.

It's tough to write a story about Sun without first mentioning his wealth, however.

On-chain data tracked by Arkham Intelligence shows that Sun's crypto holdings are up by almost $700 million this year, from $1.5 billion at the start of the year to $2.2 billion today, making him crypto's richest person (at least identified person; Satoshi may have more wealth).

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.

Much of this is due to TRX's meteoric rise and the surge in stablecoins issued on the chain, an amount that now stands at more than $60 billion. For a brief time, there was more USDT on Tron than on Ethereum.

Certainly, some of this wealth goes to absurdities, such as when Sun ate an overpriced banana (although maybe you didn't get that the joke was mocking the old-wealth Art Basel socialite crowd). But there's also a seriousness to his investing.

The wBTC Controversy

Over the summer, BiT Global, a Hong Kong-based custodian that's partially owned by Justin Sun, signed an agreement with BitGo to jointly custody wrapped bitcoin (wBTC), one of crypto's most important sources of liquidity.

Of course, plenty was written about how bad this would be for wBTC because of Sun’s involvement and the dangers of centralization. As a result, major DeFi protocols threatened to remove wBTC from their platforms, and Coinbase delisted it shortly after the exchange launched its own wrapped bitcoin product on Base.

However, as BitGo CEO Mike Belshe pointed out in an interview with CoinDesk, the loudest critics of the tie-up aren't necessarily being intellectually honest. Anyone who knows the technicalities of how wBTC works — or the legal trust structure that underlies it — could easily dismiss the fear that Sun would have outsized control of it.

Sun is an easy target, and wBTC's critics took advantage of an opportunity to knock him down while pumping their own rivals to wBTC.

Despite wBTC’s importance as a key piece of crypto infrastructure and a source of liquidity, however, its revenue model based on the minting and redemption of the underlying asset earns BitGo less and less money every year. BitGo therefore needed new partners to scale wBTC, and Sun, with his deep pockets, was the one to do that.

Unfortunately, this nuance got lost in the ether — or in this case, the TRX.

However, nothing — not Sun’s loudest critics nor even the SEC — seems to be able to knock him off his perch as the king of crypto and DeFi. And with the incoming Trump administration's pro-crypto orientation, Sun's role atop the Web3 food chain now only appears to have been cemented.

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.