Justin Sun's cryptocurrency circle for 8 years, a story of encrypted two cities

Author: Jaleel Gallior , BlockBeats

Editor's note: In the past few years, Justin Sun has almost become the "last survivor" in the currency circle. Whether it is regulatory suppression, market collapse, or the successive fall of the tycoon circle, he has always been at ease and stood firm in the industry. center. Recently, his name has once again become the focus of the topic and remains dramatic.

First, he bought a banana for a sky-high price of US$6.2 million, and this outrageous "luxury purchase" made headlines among major mainstream media. Recently, I have been even more proud and have joined the family of US President Trump. Yesterday, Justin Sun had a firefight with Huobi founder Li Lin, accusing him of hiding financial loopholes during the delivery process, leaving a "funding hole" of $30 million and he could only fill the gap out of his own pocket. Whether it is a financial dispute with Li Lin or a $6.2 million banana, the essence of these stories still revolves around one core: wealth, power, and influence. This is also the most exciting microcosm of the currency circle in the past ten years, and Justin Sun has always stood at the center of this drama.

The editor-in-chief of CoinDesk, a well-known American crypto media, was fired before Christmas.

What caused him to be fired was an article that was removed from the shelves by his parent company. In this article, the author mocked Justin Sun. Compared to the "exposing the truth" that CoinDesk is good at, it is more like a "personal attack". The article puts together the negatives about TRON and Justin Sun in the past two years, and then uses the title of "I Watching Justin Sun Eat the Most Expensive Banana in the World, I Really Don't Understand" as the title. After all, who doesn't like it Watch the media mock the rich? According to CoinDesk employees, Justin Sun went to find him and put pressure on the paper to delete the article, which directly led to the firing of three employees of CoinDesk, the most well-known crypto media in the United States, including editor-in-chief Kevin Reynolds.

From Sun's point of view, this is really worthy of annoyance. Because TRON is one of the only two top sponsors in the Consensus Hong Kong Conference to be held in March, and the Consensus Conference is one of CoinDesk's main revenue. Anyone who encounters such a thing as collecting his own money and scolding himself may not be able to be calm. What's more, this article does not have as detailed evidence as Xiongwen when CoinDesk exposed the FTX problem.

In 2022, it was CoinDesk that "fired" the first shot towards the FTX at that time. After an article revealing the balance sheet of crypto market maker Alameda, the currency circle caused a whistling "butterfly effect", and the crypto market plummeted. Many institutions have collapsed, and no one expected that the overwhelming dominoes were overwhelmed by CoinDesk himself. DCG (CoinDes’s original parent company) was an important source of income. Genesis went bankrupt in the aftermath of the FTX explosion, which eventually led to DCG's Its media CoinDesk is sold at a low price. The new owner is the trading platform Bullish. It is this Bullish that removed the controversial article this time and fired the editor-in-chief of CoinDesk.

Compared to Huobi that Justin Sun bought two years ago, the Bullish trading platform does not seem to be a familiar name. Most people who know Bullish are because of EOS.

In 2018, a company that raised $4.2 billion was called Block.one. As the parent company, they created the "old celebrity public chain" EOS and started a year-long ICO. A few years later, Block.one "separated" from EOS, and took Block.one, which had taken $4.2 billion, to build a trading platform that took the compliant route, which was Bullish.

In those eras of public chains, TRON and EOS that started ICO at the same time were entangled but also sympathetic. Back then, the market value of TRON and EOS was not as good as 10% of Ethereum (Ethereum, the second largest market value public chain and cryptocurrency after Bitcoin). I wanted to defeat the mountain of Ethereum , the best way is to temporarily "alliance". Justin Sun also said this in an interview: "TRON is Liu Bang, EOS is Xiang Yu, and Ethereum is Qin Dynasty. He wants to kill Ethereum first and then divide the world with EOS."

And today, 7 years later, no one expected that the current crypto world pattern would subvert the perception of many people.

Today, if you use that metaphor to look at the currency circle, the Ethereum mentioned by Justin Sun. The Qin Dynasty is still there, but Xiang Yu, the EOS, has committed suicide. The market value of EOS is only 5% of Tron (TRON). As a public chain, EOS is undoubtedly a failure. of.

But the parent company behind EOS cannot be considered a failure. What many people don’t know is that EOS parent company Block.one is currently the second largest number of Bitcoins after MicroStrategy (MicroStrategy, currently the listed company with the largest number of BTC). , has a total of 160,000 BTC. Not only that, Block.one also has nearly 2.2 billion US dollars in US Treasury bonds. You should know that most of MSTR's BTC is purchased through additional stock issuance. As a listed company, MSTR's BTC belongs to all public markets. Investors, and Block.one, as a non-listed company, has all its assets. How did the money from the initial purchase of these assets come from? Back in 2017, EOS started ICO to raise funds and raise funds. $4.2 billion in funding, that's Block.one's start-up capital.

In the years that followed, Block.one did not put all the money into development, but hoarded a large amount of assets. The biggest expenditure in these years was a $24 million fine to the SEC (SEC), which The money is definitely worth the money, which solved the problem of EOS raising funds from the public without registering with a regulatory agency. According to the popular saying now, Block.one has completely arrived. Until today, this company has become The crypto-rich who is compliant and has no legal risk issues.

From the perspective of "cash flow is king", Block.one was very successful today, just like no one remembers what MicroStrategy's main business is. Even though EOS was already lonely in 2019, Block. One holds $16 billion worth of Bitcoin reserves and can still stay well today, and launches its own trading platform Bullish, which is seeking listing and licenses in Nasdaq and Hong Kong.

After EOS, the trading platform, the most liquid and profitable track in the currency circle, has become its current main business after its parent company's "five years of lying to win". This is another decision between EOS and TRON.

In 2019, Justin Sun acquired Poloniex, a well-known cryptocurrency trading platform. After taking over, Justin Sun quickly removed the strict KYC and used this method to significantly increase the number of users on the platform.

In addition to Poloniex, Justin Sun also acquired Huobi for about $1 billion in 2022, which caused the price of HT (Huobi Trading Platform Token) to soaring by nearly 50% in a short period of time.

In July 2021, Block.one launched the trading platform Bullish. After initially injecting $100 million in cash, 164,000 BTC and 20 million EOS by Block.one and completing another $300 million in strategic investment, Bullish Global now owns it. More than $10 billion in cash and digital asset capital. Among them, famous investors leading the $300 million financing include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Hong Kong tycoon Li Zekai.

Bullish's positioning was clear from the beginning, scale was not important, but compliance was important, because Bullish's ultimate goal was not to make much profit in the crypto world, but to list on the US stock market.

Before the official operation, Bullish reached an agreement with listed company Far Peak and others to invest $840 million to acquire 9% of the company's shares and conduct a $2.5 billion merger to achieve a curved listing and lower the traditional IPO threshold.

Bullish CEO is a professional manager named Farley, who has a very strong compliance background: he was appointed Chief Operating Officer and President of the New York Stock Exchange Platform, and performed well with Wall Street giants, CEOs and institutional investments. All of them have established deep connections. Another thing worth mentioning is that while serving in the New York Securities Trading Platform, under his leadership, the trading platform created the Bitcoin index and made private equity investments in the then-called Coinbase Bitcoin wallet.

However, compliance is more difficult than they imagined. After US regulators expressed a harsh signal, Bullish's original merger listing agreement was terminated in 2022, and the 18-month "listing plan" was temporarily stranded. Bullish has also begun to consider other compliance options, such as the acquisition of FTX, and currently focusing more resources in Hong Kong to submit a virtual asset trading platform license application to the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission. Bullish now has 260 employees worldwide, 110 of whom are Base in Hong Kong, and the rest are distributed in the United States, Singapore and Gibraltar.

This path from scratch can ensure compliance from the beginning, but its disadvantages are quite obvious and inefficient. When Huobi quickly attracts users around the world, Bullish is still worried about its own transaction volume and brand awareness .

Like most trading platforms do, Bullish has also bought some media services. In a paid special report by the Wall Street Journal, Bullish claimed that “the transaction volume has exceeded US$300 billion since its operation in November 2021, ranking among the top three in the world in Bitcoin and Ethereum spot trading volume.”

However, objective data does not seem to confirm the slogan. According to CoinGecko data, Bullish's "normalized trading volume" (excluding suspicious wash trades commonly found in cryptocurrency trading platforms) rarely exceeds US$40 million in daily trading volume within 24 hours. , the 24-hour trading volume of Bullish at the time of writing was US$27 million, which is a big gap from the average daily trading volume reported by Bullish.

Whether it is Binance, the largest trading platform in the industry, or Coinbase, the largest compliant trading platform in the United States, their trading volume far exceeds Bullish. How big is the specific gap? Even Huobi, the trading volume in the past 24 hours is almost 100 times that of Bullish.

In addition to the reasons for its poor operation, over-emphasizing compliance is also one of the reasons why Bullish is developing slowly. The most obvious example is that all stablecoin trading pairs on Bullish use USDC (by Circle and Coinbase in 2018. ) not USDT (the Tether coin created by Tether, is the earliest and largest stablecoin with a total market value of US$130 billion).

As USDT is regulated by more US SECs over the years, the team is considering moving its headquarters to Salvedo, with its dominance declining, and the volume of compliant USDC soaring in the last six months. According to Kaiko's latest report, USDC trading volume on CEX was on the rise in 2024, reaching an all-time high of $38 billion in March, well above the 2023 average of $8 billion. Another well-known trading platform Bybit and Bullish account for 60% of USDC trading volume on the trading platform, making them the two USDC centralized trading platforms with the largest trading volume.

But in any case, USDT is now the overlord of the crypto world. As of press time, USDC's total issuance was 46 billion, while USDT's total issuance was 140 billion.

When USDT was first established, Tether chose to release USDT on the Bitcoin layer two-layer protocol Omni Layer, but after users use it, the problem is very obvious. Omni's speed is still too slow, and the OMNI version requires at least 4 USDTs to transfer money. Sometimes there are even as many as 10, which is very unfavorable for small transactions.

Therefore, Tether turned to Ethereum (the second largest public chain after Bitcoin), which was in the limelight at that time. Ethereum solved this problem to a certain extent, but faster speeds and lower handling fees are permanent pursuits, so Tether began to try to issue USDT on more public chains, so that later, in the crypto industry, everyone used USDT. As a sign that this public chain has been recognized by the mainstream industry, USDT is real money. So many assets are minted on a public chain, proving that Tether, the industry giant, has recognized this The security and ease of use of public chains. Moreover, the real on-chain users and handling fee income brought by USDT is something that all public chains cannot afford, and Tron and EOS both saw this back then.

In April 2019, Tether released the TRC-20 version of USDT on TRON. No one knows how Sun Yuchen got the job done.

Six months later, EOS was lately launched on the main website, and 5 million USDTs were issued. Optimistically, the EOS version of USDT transactions went further, faster, and the arrival time was much faster than TRON. . But the crypto industry is much faster than the traditional industry, and the fork is at this time, and a lot can happen in 6 months.

Comparison of each version of USDT at that time

Since the deployment of the Tether contract in April 2019, TRON has gradually focused on USDT's publicity and promotion, and has successively launched promotional activities such as "Several millions of interest subsidies".

At that time, Justin Sun and CZ were still in the "honeymoon period" of mutual success. They cooperated well. The good brother Binance took the initiative to support Tron (TRON) and launched an event - recharge TRC20-USDT to enjoy 16% annualized income. In addition to Binance, many trading platforms including OK and Huobi have successively announced their support for TRC20-USDT.

Justin Sun himself has spoken frequently on Weibo, posting TRC20-USDT-related Weibo almost every day, and has put a lot of effort into promoting "TRON" to become the overlord of the public chain of stablecoin.

"The USDT issued on the Tron blockchain will soon become the world's largest stablecoin." Justin Sun was full of confidence when talking about this.

On the other hand, EOS is not too slow and completely wasted EOS. It has unique advantages. One of Block.one's joint creations, Brock Pierce, is also Tether's joint creations. EOS is clearly close to the water and gets the moon first.

So much so that the early EOS community KOL was heartbroken: "I have always attached great importance to USDT and its development. What I was most looking forward to in the EOS ecosystem was the EOS version of USDT, but unfortunately Block.one did not promote it, and the top trading platform did not promote it. It was launched only after Bitfinex's eosfinex went online, but it was too late. "

Moreover, when EOS transfers, you need to rent various resources and fill in memo notes, which makes some new users "Zhang Er Monk confused". The operation experience is not as convenient as Ethereum and Bitcoin, which is also the reason that affects the popularity of EOS.

"As demand grows in the future, EOS-USDT may also issue more. But it will definitely not issue hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, because the value of the entire network or transmission of EOS will be so much." An analyst at the time said that The master said so.

So, after letting the bullets fly for a while, EOS missed the best opportunity to kill TRON. Now, data from Tether's official website shows that as of the time of writing, the USDT issued on the EOS chain was 85.25 million. And this number is 59.7 billion in TRON.

Data source: USDT official website

On October 22, 2020, an EOS wallet insider exclaimed the EOS ecological problems with a "Block.one manifesto" that instantly spread across the Internet. In the long passionate and passionate criticizing Block.one and BM, Tron (TRON) Founder Justin Sun was unexpectedly "praised" by surprise: "In this regard, I admire Justin Sun very much. No matter whether he plagiarized the technology flow of BM or not, at least he holds it for TRX. The person is responsible for contributing to the Tron public chain with real actions, especially in operation promotion and support for the Tron project parties."

Today, USDT has long become a veritable "point-to-point digital cash", which has realized Satoshi Nakamoto's vision before BTC. Russian senior management uses USDT to bypass trade controls to purchase materials. Since the full launch of sanctions in 2022, Russian companies engaged in bulk transactions such as nickel, steel, and wood have faced various challenges: collection of goods, procurement of equipment and raw materials, etc. But USDT, which is pegged to the US dollar, is difficult to be sanctioned, providing support for Russia's international status.

Argentina in the Western Hemisphere has the highest population ratio using cryptocurrencies. But the Argentines are not playing cryptocurrency lottery games, nor are they trying to make a fortune with the next popular token. They usually buy and hold USDT, a stablecoin with a 1:1 price relative to the US dollar, with a market value of US$138 billion, is regarded by most citizens as a safe means of wealth storage, helping to resist inflation in Argentina up to 276% Rate.

Cryptocurrency exchange points everywhere in Argentina, source two, Uncommons

Not only Argentina, but also Turkish locals in the same high inflation-prone currency crisis, also hold a large amount of cryptocurrencies against the serious depreciation of the Turkish lira, USDT is also the first choice.

Local cryptocurrency exchange points in Istanbul, source from Reddit

Some Chinese Yiwu foreign traders will also settle foreign exchange through USDT after making foreign exchange. A research team once conducted a survey in Yiwu and found that almost all merchants received inquiries from buyers about whether they could use crypto payments. Tether's USDT stablecoin is a cryptocurrency with more price fluctuations than Bitcoin. Pegged to USD 1:1, it is easy to calculate and deliver payments for imports and exports.

In Cambodia, there is a "gray-product Alipay" product with an official local background - Huione Pay. Founded in 2014, the platform started with foreign exchange. It is headquartered in Norrodon Avenue in Phnom Penh, just a few steps from the palace and is the most golden location in Phnom Penh. In foreign currency exchange and guarantee business, USDT is the most important channel.

Huiwang Group Headquarters

In addition, USDT is widely used in these markets, such as purchasing scientific online payment channels and buying Twitter fan platform payment channels.

For example, Aiyifan, the favorite pirated video platform of international students, includes USDT payment in its member recharge channel, and its only supported network option is TRC-20, which is the token format of USDT on the TRON network. . In addition to TRON, USDT currently operates on several other mainstream on-chain networks. But Aiyifan only supports TRON network, and even when paying in this way, the official also offers a 20% discount.

"Aiyifan is used very well among overseas Chinese. This may be the largest pirated video website in the world with the largest number of users. In 2020, it had more than 6 million independent users. After the epidemic, it ushered in a big explosion. Now The user scale is at least 10 million. "A deep user of Ai Yifan introduced us.

Today, many USDT transfer needs are met by TRON. Until November last year, the USDT circulation on TRON had the largest number of all chains, and the other chain with the largest number of USDT circulation was Ethereum. Although USDT's circulation on Ethereum exceeded TRON for the first time recently, the data is still not much different, with only $600 million.

According to data from the blockchain data platform Dune , on the Tron TRON network, whether it is the USDT cross-link collection or the USDT cross-chain transmission, the data is on other networks. Tron (TRON) receives and sends daily around $7 million, while on Ethereum it is around $600,000, which is almost 11 times that.

Data source: Dune

When Bitcoin was still a financial transaction asset in ETFs, USDT had already realized the Mass Adoption that was often pursued in the Web3 circle before Bitcoin, and TRON became the biggest beneficiary after Tether.

In the stablecoin market, TRON is the well-deserved "King of Guanzhong". Looking back today five years later, this decision laid the foundation for TRON's market value of 99%.

If the transaction volume is large, then there will be more returns. In terms of revenue, TRON's total revenue in 2024 was US$2.12 billion, with a single-day total revenue record of US$21.66 million. In the first week of the 2025 New Year, TRON incurred $43.74 million in fees, exceeding Ethereum’s $30.63 million.

Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro

In the face of the current trajectory of TRON, Tether added another contribution to the loneliness of EOS. In June last year, Tether decided to stop issuing USDT on EOS, saying that it would give priority to supporting community-driven blockchain, which means it EOS has no community support.

"This is the glory of one city and the fall of another city."

After the EOS main network was launched, it did not show its strength as expected. Instead, it frequently appeared vulnerabilities, and even a special code audit security industry was created due to frequent code vulnerabilities. BM also arbitrarily changed the EOS "Constitution", which triggered a serious credit crisis in the community. EOS's development took a sharp turn for the worse, the user base shrank, and major developers left one after another. The price of EOS tokens plummeted from US$23 in May 2018 to US$0.6 now . Although "gambling and high-risk" applications have attracted a large number of users in the middle, they have far less value than TRON, and "gaming" applications have not been as popular as those on Ethereum.

"EOS committed suicide in 2019." Now many OGs in the currency circle agree with this sentence. Management mistakes are also one of the big problems of Block.one. From the perspective of EOS founder BM at that time, he was Emperor Wei Cao Mao, and BB, the founder of Block.one, was Sima Zhao. Block.one Senior management appointments are all based on personal relationships. Important positions such as chief strategic officer and communication manager are all held by BB's childhood friends or family, and lack external challenges and professional perspectives.

The final outcome is that BM will leave, technology development and code quality continue to decline, and the EOS market performance plummeted. Even Block.one is preparing to sell huge EOS. Now the entire EOS ecosystem, from investors to developers, and nodes, is even more unsatisfied with Block.one.

The EOS Foundation came forward as a community representative to start negotiations with Block.one. But over a month, the two sides discussed various plans, but no agreement was reached. Finally, the EOS Foundation joined forces with 17 nodes to revoke Block.one's power and kick it out of the EOS management. Without the parent company's EOS, it is becoming more and more like a DAO.

After EOS split from Block.one, the EOS community held several years of lawsuits against the funds for the initial ownership of the funds, but so far Block.one still has ownership and use of the funds.

How Block.one used the $4.2 billion raised for EOS ICO back then is undoubtedly the most concerned issue for everyone.

Part of the answer was disclosed in an email from BM to Block.one shareholders on March 19, 2019: As of February 2019, Block.one's assets (including cash and invested funds) totaled US$3 billion.

For these 3 billion miles, about $2.2 billion was invested in U.S. government bonds, and in the email, this part of the assets are also called "liquid fiat assets".

For some investment funds, you can find some in public information: game company Forte, NFT platform Immutable, and resort hotels in Puerto Rico. In short, the companies you invest in have one common feature: they have nothing to do with EOS.

When Bullish had not yet become the core business, Block.one also had a trump card in his hand, Voice, a social product deployed based on the EOSIO smart contract, which is also the only product with business relationship with EOS. To create Voice, Block.one invested $150 million, and the biggest expense was to buy a domain name for $30 million. The seller was MicroStrategy, a listed company with the most Bitcoin mentioned above.

But it seems to be a curse of fate. Voice's first press conference lasted for half an hour, with content lower than expected, and there were many disappointments, which caused the price of EOS to fall. More than half a year later, various faults and Bdangsugs occurred on the day the Voice IOS version was launched in the Apple Store. The Voice official website page showed "Error 1020", and said that the website "using security services to protect itself from online attacks." EOS holders were completely disappointed, and Voice finally announced in September 2023 that it would be gradually shut down.

Projects launched by Block.one

The thunder and raindrops are loud and the rain seems to be the usual style of Block.one's investment projects. After that, Block.one did not make a large investment move and began to completely lay down. Today, Block.one has 1.64,000 Bitcoins lying on its account, which means its net worth has increased from 3 billion in 2019 to 16 billion US dollars now, five times more, and it can be called a master of liquidity management.

Block.one is stocking up on Bitcoin, but Justin Sun is jokingly called the "E Guard" trading master. In 2020, Justin Sun's on-chain assets remained at around US$300 million, but in just one year, this number has turned. 23 times, reaching $7 billion.

Source: Arkm

"If Justin Sun does not have a professional investment research team, then he is a very successful trader." Someone in the community commented on him: "Escape from top and buying at the bottom are both Justin Sun's strengths."

In addition to selling over 100,000 Ethereums in the past few months at $3,674, he quickly sold nearly 39,000 ETH when the price of ETH hovers around $1,870 last June to July, and then the price fell all the way to Nearly $1500.

In addition to trading, Justin Sun, who has been active on social media for several years, is also a degen on the chain. He is active in the field of DeFi (decentralized finance), and has a good arbitrage and mining. Simply put, DeFi mining is a bit like the "high interest rate fixed deposit" of traditional finance. Users can earn profits by depositing their cryptocurrency into the fund pool of the decentralized trading platform.

A typical operation of Justin Sun in 2024 was that he purchased Pendle's PT token in June. In just two days, he invested 33,000 ETH (about 60 million US dollars) and accurately distributed it to different DeFi projects, such as Ether.fi, Puffer and Kelp, and each project has a considerable rate of return.

Brother Sun’s previous location in Pendle, from Aunt Ai

Taking the yields of traditional financial markets as an example, the yields of US Treasury bonds are usually between 3-5%, while bank deposit rates are even lower, possibly less than 1%. In contrast, the yields of several DeFi mining that Brother Sun participated may be a bit radical in the eyes of traditional financial people: Ether.fi: Through holding until maturity, Justin Sun can earn 1% return within 22 days. That is, annualized 17.33%; Puffer: The annualized rate of return of this investment is higher, reaching 18.93%; Kelp: slightly lower, but still has an annualized rate of return of 14.33%.

Like Justin Sun's investment style, compared with Block.one's slightly flat operation, the development of TRON seems to be more drastic. Judging from the progress of TRON's project, Justin Sun has invested a lot of money and resources in the past few years, and finally successfully made TRX a "10 billion USD market capitalization club."

Tron's daily income increased from $1,000 in 2020 to $2 million in 2024, up 2,000 times. In this bull market, there are not many "old altcoins" whose currency prices hit record highs. Only SOL, BNB, TON and OKB can be named. TRX is also one of them, even a step ahead of Ethereum to hit an all-time high.

Today, TRON has a market value of US$20 billion and EOS has a market value of US$1.5 billion, which is only 1/3 of the amount raised that year.

The money raised by TRON that year was only one-tenth of that of EOS.

Time went back to 2017, which was when these two public chains began.

At that time, the currency circle had experienced a major ICO explosion and a 94 plunge, and began the "year of regulatory liquidation" of cryptocurrencies. The price of Bitcoin fell from the highest of US$19,870 to the lowest of US$3,000. Two or three years after Ethereum was launched, it began to prepare for 2.0. With the upgrade, Binance has become the world's largest trading platform, and it is still 2 years away from the launch of Solana.

It was 2017, and Ethereum’s two major competitors were almost on the stage of history at the same time. Just now Sun Yuchen, who just celebrated his 27th birthday, put down his original social APP and found a few students from Peking University, borrowed the east wind from the big guys behind him, and returned to the currency circle with confidence, and wanted to make a TRON chain; on the other hand BM, who even Satoshi Nakamoto, took advantage of the first two projects and joined hands with marketing expert BB to build the first generation of Ethereum killer and blockchain 3.0.

In August 2017, TRON started ICO two months later, but ended fundraising 9 months earlier than EOS because "9.4" is coming. China's project parties and trading platforms were silent and rushed out, swearing that they would never do blockchain again from their ancestors to their descendants.

In later memories, Justin Sun described the scene at that time: "The people who asked for a refund outside were the same as the scenes in "The Walking Dead" and "Travel to Busan". As soon as the glass door opened, you were trampled to death." The community shouted Justin Sun quickly returned the money, and the people who came to block the door pressed their knife against their necks, "Either let your blood be released, or let me release my own blood, anyway, I will call Ethereum back to us immediately."

That was the most anxious period when TRON was in the middle of the day. The early teams were basically exposed, and all the partners left because they were worried about their personal safety.

"My 6 years of entrepreneurial experience was basically ruined in the first three years," said Justin Sun. At the end of the ICO, TRON raised a total of US$400 million, and there was not much left after the withdrawal.

Some are happy and some are sad.

On the other hand, EOS, which is both superb and idealistic, raised $4.2 billion during the year-long ICO period. Not only that, they were prepared early at the regulatory level and had a good team of lawyers to protect them. During the ICO period, most of the audience were Chinese and Koreans, and the amount of financing in the United States was relatively small. Finally, when it was pursued by the SEC, Block.one paid only a fine of $24 million. Fortunately, Telegram and TON, who were targeted by the SEC at the same time, were directly called off by the US$1.7 billion coin issuance plan. Because the team members are all American, the China 94 regulatory incident has almost no impact on EOS.

The treatment was very different, "I just stole a corn, but they blasted me with cannons." Justin Sun described his situation like this at that time.

The first year of EOS has been smooth sailing. But starting from the second half of 2018, EOS prices continued to fall and hit new lows. There were frequent reports in the community that BM was leaving EOS until 2019 BM really left.

It is said that some large holding investors were extremely angry at that time, especially those who had followed BM since 2013. After feeling BM's abandonment, they turned into hatred because of love. They built a telegram group to discuss how to deal with BM. Some people even offered rewards through the dark web. 100 Bitcoins assassinate BM. This made BM quickly join the EOS community TG group, giving advice to the community frequently, and for a long time he did not dare to show up in real life.

Coupled with the strong supervision of the US SEC, EOS and Block.one dare not make too many moves in recent years and are restricted.

Speaking of supervision, this is something that Justin Sun is a little proud of: "I am very good at dealing with supervision." After all, except Justin Sun, no one may know the truth and details of that year. How did he solve the 94 supervision? Was he really under border control at that time? Did he go to Korea after hearing the wind? How to bypass the edge control in the end?

But in all the story versions, there is one thing in common, that is, Justin Sun understands supervision very well. On July 25, 2019, Justin Sun sent a letter of apology, thanking and caring for me and expressing his apology, and said, "Caring for and loving my leaders and regulatory agencies." In addition, Justin Sun began to find a place to settle in "small countries" around the world: he served as Grenada's permanent representative to the WTO and ambassador of special orders in 2021; he was elected Prime Minister of Liberland (a micro-country not recognized internationally) Job.

And recently, Justin Sun is even more proud.

Unlike the small countries that have been in contact with before, he has recently joined the family of US President Trump, the world's largest country. Last November, Justin Sun announced that he would purchase $30 million in World Liberty tokens, which is a Defi project launched by the Trump family.

For ordinary investors, buying and holding World Liberty tokens is not very attractive, and it cannot share company income or resell. It is said that 75% of the first $30 million raised went directly to Trump's company account, which looks more like a donation than investment, in other words, a good time to contribute political donations.

Therefore, when the first batch of World Liberty tokens sold full and the second round of supplementary sales started, TRON DAO continued to increase its chips and invested again US$45 million, with a total investment of US$75 million.

The top brother of the list, Justin Sun, successfully became the consultant for the project, and World Liberty also gradually purchased Tron (TRX) tokens to enrich its treasury. There are also rumors that the virtual currency $TRUMP issued by Trump on the eve of his presidency also has the shadow of Justin Sun, and Justin Sun's attitude on personal social media is undeniable.

Judging from the current results, compared with other cryptocurrency giants, Justin Sun is indeed flexible under regulatory pressure. FTX founder SBF is destined to spend his life in prison, and CZ temporarily "buyed out" the issue of freedom after spending $4.3 billion and months of prison life. Tron users are all on the chain, without the KYC form of trading platform. The only problem that regulators can find is the sanctions and money laundering issues in its USDT transactions. But because the issuer of USDT is Tether, and Tron only provides infrastructure, network service providers will not face problems first before Tether faces supervision.

Eight years ago, Justin Sun returned to China to start a business and shouted in his speech, "My standard for measuring a person is to see how much money he makes." What he said and did. Leaving the aloofness of literary and artistic youth, Justin Sun began to embark on a pragmatic and almost cruel "making money".

Eight years later, 35-year-old Justin Sun currently has $2 billion worth of assets in his on-chain wallet, and it is rumored that his net worth is $100 billion. He can wave his hand and spend $6.2 million to buy a banana artwork. He has made the most of the rules, leverage resources, and won his own "explosive gold coins" game.

What is even more interesting is that at every fork in the intersection of the trail, EOS and Block.one, which are always contrary to TRON, are lying on their account today.

In this way, fate achieved a certain absurd "different paths and the same destination". TRON and EOS also wrote a story of the two cities in the crypto era.