The similarities between Justin Sun, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Do Kwon are striking. All three have outsized ambitions, SEC case files, and have gambled with Bitcoin, and all three have sat at the top of crypto trading empires that could cause cascading problems across the industry if they were to implode. Thankfully, that has only happened to two.
Justin Sun has done nearly everything the crypto industry has to offer, and his influence in the space is on a scale matched only by few. His Tron blockchain now matches the total value locked (TVL) in Do Kwon’s Terra blockchain right before it collapsed. This is worrying considering recent talk of alleged foul play at Huobi, the crypto exchange Justin Sun is thought to control.
Adam Cochran, a crypto researcher, said Huobi’s executives are being questioned by Chinese police in part because the exchange is insolvent and Justin Sun used the exchange as a personal piggy bank. This is reminiscent of Sam Bankman-Fried’s TradFi-style shenanigans, similar political ambitions, and similar savior washing.
Tron USDT is an asset of particular importance to the Asia-based crypto trading scene, and USDT is of course the stablecoin with the biggest market capitalization by far. Sam Trabucco, former co-CEO of Alameda, was grilled about those tether mints on CDTV. The same team at ChainArgos that found discrepancies between Binance USD (BUSD) issued on Ethereum and BUSD issued by Binance and pegged on the BNB Smart Chain are now raising similar issues about Tron-issued USDT and Tron-pegged USDT.
If trust were to completely erode for Tron-pegged USDT, it could lead to a death spiral, and maybe take down many other tokens and projects along with it. Justin Sun, the personality with so much seemingly in common with SBF and Do Kwon, might truly cause carnage far beyond anything either of them could even imagine.