Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron (TRX) blockchain project, appeared on the cover of Forbes, which estimated the Chinese entrepreneur's capital at $8.5 billion.
The magazine also presented San as the "savior" of US President Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial (WLF) crypto project, which brought him a profit of $400 million.
World Liberty Financial is a crypto platform where users can borrow and lend crypto assets, create liquidity pools, and make transactions with stablecoins. It uses WLFI as a management token. In the documents on the project's website, Donald Trump is listed as the "main defender of cryptocurrencies."
His sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are "web3 ambassadors," and Barron holds the title of "DeFi visionary." The documents also state that none of the members of the Trump family, other affiliated persons and organizations is an official, director, founder, employee or operator of World Liberty Financial.
According to the "golden document" of World Liberty, Trump and his business partners should receive 75% of the net income of the project, including the sale of WLFI tokens, after deducting operating expenses of $30 million.
A few years ago, US regulators considered San to be a fraud, but after Trump's victory in the November 2024 presidential election, all claims against him were dropped. This happened after Sun became one of the first major investors in the World Liberty project.
In March 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Justin Sun and his companies with fraudulent market manipulation and the sale of unregistered securities.
Having received an investment of $30 million at the end of November, the WLF team appointed San as an advisor to the project. This investment coincided with the fact that dozens and then hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies began to arrive at WLF addresses with a peak on February 2, when, according to the Arkham analytical platform, there were more than $410 million in WLF addresses.
In the first weeks of its existence, the project could not boast of high interest from investors. About $11 million collected from WLF projects on the first day of the token sale remained virtually unchanged in the following weeks, until Sun's statement.
According to Forbes, a few weeks after the first investment, Sun invested another $45 million, and after the release of Trump's official memcoin, TRUMP— several million more.
About a month later, at the end of February 2025, it became known that the SEC, the Tron Foundation and the founder of the Tron blockchain, Justin Sun, filed a joint petition to the court requesting that the case initiated by the SEC in the spring of 2023 be suspended.
"Regulators think that everyone should obey them. Most of the rules come from the past, but they are used to regulate future activities. I want to be a builder of the future world. But first we have to imagine what the future world will be like," Forbes quotes Justin Sun.
As Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy noted at a Senate hearing in early March, "Trump, in fact, published his payment account so that anyone could secretly transfer him as much money as they wanted."
By mid-March, the project had raised $550 million from two sales rounds of WLFI, its management token, according to the company's own accounts, as Decrypt wrote. After deducting the costs of $30 million, Trump and his affiliated organizations receive 75% of the remaining amount ($390 million) as a fee to promote the project. These figures almost coincided with the estimate of Forbes, which named the amount of $ 400 million owed to Trump.
The fame of Justin Sun.
Justin Sun is known for founding the Tron blockchain, raising $70 million in cryptocurrency in 2017 to launch the platform through the Binance exchange, which raised funds.
When selling, the price of the TRX token was approximately $0.0019. According to Coingecko data on April 13, 2025, TRX is valued at $0.2475. Thus, the initial price of TRX increased 130 times, and the capitalization of the project amounted to almost $23.5 billion, which puts it in ninth place in the ranking of the largest cryptocurrencies.
In addition to TRX, Justin Sun is known for buying the Poloniex crypto exchange, as well as participating in the management of HTX (formerly Huobi). These and other lesser—known projects have helped create a huge amount of capital for San - according to "skeptical estimates" by Forbes, his assets amount to $ 8.5 billion, but "could be much more."
The Tron blockchain is known for being the main blockchain used to transfer the largest USDT stablecoin on the market from Tether. This also allowed Tron to become the second blockchain after Ethereum in terms of profitability in 2024: $2.2 billion versus $2.5 billion.
(Transactions ranging from $100 to $1,000 in separate blockchain networks from 2021 to March 2025. Source: Forbes)
"Whenever I talk about stablecoins, you can just assume that about 70% of them are USDT on Tron," said Chris Morris, co—founder and CEO of Yellow Card, which specializes in payments and money transfers.
