How Tron’s Justin Sun built a crypto empire and a ‘$1.3 billion’ net worth

Justin Sun, the 33-year-old software engineer, has slowly built a crypto empire that has pushed his net worth to over $1.3 billion. This net worth makes him one of the richest people in the crypto industry.

Justin Sun has become a wealthy person

A closer look at Justin Sun’s crypto empire shows how successful he has been over the years. For one, while there are thousands of crypto projects, publicly available data shows that his is the second-most profitable.

According to TokenTerminal, Tron has generated cumulative fees of over $527.4 million in the past 180 days. This makes it second only to Ethereum, the juggernaut that made over $933 million. Lido Finance, Bitcoin, and Uniswap follow Tron.

Year-to-date, Tron has made over $902 million while Ethereum has generated over $2.1 billion and Lido Finance $560 million.

Tron, which hit a major milestoneof over 200 million users, has become the second-biggest DeFi industry player after Ethereum. JustLend has helped ito generate over $8.1 billion in assets.

As Tron celebrates reaching 200 million users, I want to extend a special shout out to @Tether_to and its developers. Remarkably, 34,500,061 users on Tron, which represents 17.2% of all our users, now hold #USDT.

— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) December 6, 2023

This growth brings Tron’s DeFi dominance to about 16% and is also bigger than popular chains like BNB, Solana, Arbitrum, and Polygon, combined. In addition, WINKLink has grown to become the second-biggest oracle in the world after Chainlink.

Further, Tron is the second-biggest player in the stablecoin industry. Its network has a volume of over $48 billion, with most of these coins being Tether and USD Coin. Further, Sun’s USDD stablecoin has maintained its peg and has over $724 million.

As such, it is clear that Sun has built a huge crypto empire. Tron alone has a total market cap of over $9.3 billion, making it the 11th biggest cryptocurrency in the world. BitTorrent’s BTT token has a market cap of over $858 million. This is notable since Sun acquired the software giant in a $180 million deal.

Justin Sun runs HTX, formerly knowna as Huobi

Further, Justin Sun operates as the default leader of HTX, formerly known as Huobi, one of the biggest crypto exchange in the world. According to CoinMarketCap, the exchange handled over $1.57 billion worth of crypto in the past 24 hours. Huobi Token, which Sun holds, is worth over $450 million.

All this has made Justin Sun a wealthy man. According to Arkham, his net worth stands at over $1.3 billion. This value estimates his crypto holdings, meaning that it excludes his portfolio holdings. It also excludes his Bitcoin investment.

It is unclear how many Bitcoins he holds but Coindesk reported that he held BTCs worth over $580 million with Valkyrie Investments. This means that his worth is much bigger than that.

To be clear. Sun’s empire has its risks. For example, its DeFi ecosystem is dominated by JustLend, which has over $6 billion in assets. As such, a major vulnerability would have a major impact. Further, stUSDT has over $2.21 billion in assets, which is risky for HTX, which holds most of these assets. In a note, an analyst said:

“As long as Huobi has substantially all their USDT at stUSDT, then the exchange’s fortunes are inextricably tied to the success of stUSDT’s platform. Any potential problems at stUSDT are now synonymous with problems at Huobi.”

Also, Justin Sun has been sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for fraud and other securities violations. The SEC alleges that he and his three companies for offering unregistered securities and manipulating the secondary market for TRX through wash trading. The SEC said:

“As alleged in the complaint, Sun and others used an age-old playbook to mislead and harm investors by first offering securities without complying with registration and disclosure requirements and then manipulating the market for those very securities.”

Sun has rejected these allegations and vowed to fight them in court.

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