Who Is TRON's Justin Sun?

Justin Sun, CEO of the Tron (TRX) Project, has announced he will run for Super Representative. The voting that started on June 26 aims to elect 27 Super Representatives that will play a key role in the company’s governance.

Writing on Tron’s Super Representative campaign website, Justin pledged his determination to run through the selection process on an equal basis with all others, something, he said, “ displays TRON's inclusiveness and openness as a decentralized and autonomous community.”

The Tron founder said the decision was a “completely personal action” and assured that the 33.2 billion TRX locked by Tron Foundation would not be participating in the election.

Over 60 candidates have so far announced their candidacy in the elections.

Born in 1990, Justin Sun obtained his Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania with a specialization in Political Economy. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree from Peking University and was the only millennial student in the first batch of entrepreneurs at Hupan University, from which he graduated just recently.

Before he started the ambitious Tron project, Justin founded China’s largest voice live streaming app Peiwo (which translates as “call me”) that became extremely popular with the Chinese youth. Sun has been the chairman and CEO of the company since 2013. With over 10 million global registered users and more than one million monthly active users, the Peiwo APP is the largest audio content community in China.

In December 2013 Justin Sun joined Ripple Labs as the first employee at Greater China. He successfully served as Chief Representative in Greater China and Advisor until 2016.

In 2017 Justin established the Tron Foundation, which claims it is “dedicated to building the infrastructure for a truly decentralized Internet.”

In February 2018 Peiwo and TRON announced the successful connection of TRX tokens and the Peiwo APP.

Justin Sun has been ranked among Forbes China "30 under 30" in both 2015 and 2017. At the age of 26 Sun made the 2017 Forbes Asia "30 under 30" list in the “Consumer Technology” category.

Issued annually, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list recognize 30 outstanding business and industry figures, young innovators and disruptors under the age of 30.

Justin Sun is often projected to become the next Jack Ma, founder, and CEO of Alibaba. He was personally invited to become one of less than forty students of Hupan University founded by Chinese tycoon Jack Ma. Ma himself was one of the lecturers, and led courses called “CEO 101.”

Sun graduated from the university in April 2018. His graduation thesis titled “The Birth of a Decentralized Internet” focused on the blockchain industry’s past, present, and future.

“Given that Sun is half the age of Jack Ma he has many years ahead of him to emulate the Chinese billionaire, succeed and also make a few mistakes along the way,” Roger Aitken writes on Forbes.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin blames Justin Sun for whitepaper plagiarism. The two entered a spat after Sun took to Twitter to list seven points proving that “Tron is better than Ethereum.”

Buterin then added an eighth point saying “Better white paper writing capability (Ctrl+C + Ctrl+V much higher efficiency than keyboard typing new content).”

Justin, however, didn’t give in to the provocation and thanked Ethereum for inspiring him to create a “better decentralized platform” and invited Buterin to review the Tron source code at the project’s Github repository.

Long before Buterin started trolling Sun on Twitter, Tron was accused of mirroring text from either the Filecoin or IPFS whitepapers.

Photo: CCN

On July 16 Sun announced a countdown to the launch of the TRON Virtual Machine, a lightweight, Turing complete virtual machine that will aim to provide millions of global developers with an “efficient, convenient, stable, secure and scalable” custom-built blockchain system.

Sun has also hinted at an expected launching of a “secret project” on July 30th, which, he says will result in 100 million active users using the TRON platform in the future and will be more significant than the mainnet launch.

by Bob Loxley