Where is Justin Sun’s money?
Justin Sun is one of the most important people in cryptocurrency, with incredibly varied investments and holdings across the ecosystem. A crypto billionaire who effortlessly moves between launching new blockchains (usually forks of existing blockchains), launching new DeFi protocols (usually forks of existing DeFi protocols), and purchasing or advising any exchange, stablecoin, or company that will have him.
However, despite — or perhaps because of — this extremely active strategy, it’s impossible to determine exactly how wealthy Sun is. Here, Protos has attempted to detail Sun’s known holdings to demonstrate their size and interrelated nature.
Sun’s bitcoin
Sun may be a bitcoin whale but Protos was nevertheless unable to identify his holdings on-chain. He issued tethers on Bitcoin’s Omni layer before the stablecoin launched on Tron but addresses associated with that activity don’t lead to substantive bitcoin holdings that can be clearly attributed to Sun.
CoinDesk has previously revealed that Sun held $580 million of his bitcoin with Valkyrie Investments, a firm in which he’s one of the biggest shareholders. At the time, his bitcoin represented over 90% of the assets at Valkyrie Digital Assets.
Significantly, this also represents the largest holding of a single cryptocurrency that Protos was able to identify for Sun.
Read more: Tether Papers: This is exactly who acquired 70% of all USDT ever issued
Sun’s Ethereum wallets
There are several addresses tagged as connected to Justin Sun on Etherscan.
The first is 0x3DdfA8eC3052539b6C9549F12cEA2C295cfF5296 which at the time of writing contains 133 ether valued at approximately $246,000. This wallet also holds more than $40 million worth of Sun’s own stablecoin USDD, several million dollars worth of CRV tokens, and 11 WBTC.
The wallet also regularly interacts with Aave and holds aTUSD, aWBTC, and aUSDT. Sun owns hundreds or tens of thousands of dollars worth of many other tokens in the wallet. Blockscan highlights that the address is also in use on a variety of other chains, notably BSC, where it holds around $5 million worth of TRX, an additional $32 million USDD, and $2 million in BTT.
On the BitTorrent chain, this address holds somewhere in the region of $1.5 million USDD.
The second address associated with Sun is 0x621Fe33CCF74038dB90B18365cb450d677D4b3D8. It contains a de minimis amount of ether and other tokens and hasn’t been used in over 50 days. This wallet used to hold roughly 15,800 stETH, which have been submitted into the withdrawal queue.
Blockscan highlights that the address is in use on other chains, but there are no more meaningful assets associated with it.
The third address is 0x611F97d450042418E7338CBDd19202711563DF01, which contains slightly less than a single ether as well as some small amounts of assorted other tokens. Notably, it also has 20,000 staked ether in the Lido withdrawal queue. This address is also in use on a variety of other chains, but none of them have significant amounts of assets. It recently sent 45 million USDD to 0xBCb742AAdb031dE5de937108799e89A392f07df1, which used wrapped staked ether to take advantage of the increase in the DAI Savings Rate.
The fourth address, 0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132, holds over 3,000 ether valued at nearly $6 million alongside a variety of other tokens, including nearly $1 million worth of ZRX.
It also has 13,000 staked ether in the Lido withdrawal queue and uses stETH to borrow DAI in order to take advantage of the DAI Savings Rate. Predictably, it’s in use across other chains, but none of them have significant assets.
Sun’s Tron wallets
After finishing his stint at Ripple where he led the development of their Chinese business, he eventually decided he should start his own blockchain.
Tron, which raised approximately $70 million in its initial coin offering (ICO), started as a fork of Ethereum, with minor changes and a plagiarized whitepaper.
He has since drained or abandoned most of the Tron addresses we were able to confirm he issued tether to, making it harder to identify his current holdings.
However, one that has been used more recently, TGddFQCnL913P6tpKdcwXxQTb3tgx5SAsp, contains about $2 million worth of TRX, as well as a de minimis amount of other tokens.
Another address, TT2T17KZhoDu47i2E4FWxfG79zdkEWkU9N, is commonly associated with Sun but he’s denied controlling it. It holds over $100 million in TRX, a massive quantity of stUSDT, interacts with Huobi and Poloniex, and was the first user of TrueUSD on Tron.
Beyond the large quantities of TRX, this wallet also has $16 million worth of USDD, $5 million worth of TrueUSD, $16 million worth of JUST, $2 million worth of BTT, and a variety of other tokens.
A Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit against Sun alleges that he and the entities he controls engaged in wash-trading and market manipulation of the TRX token, which they allege is a security.
Read more: The crypto bromance of Binance’s CZ and Tron’s Justin Sun
WBTC may be unbacked
WBTC on Tron, like other forms of wrapped bitcoin, involves tokens being issued on a blockchain by an entity that is supposed to be responsible for custodying the assets backing the tokens.
Just Cryptos, a product advertised on JustStable, describes these tokens and notes that Poloniex holds the backing. However, it provides no clarity on how to verify that sufficient bitcoin is held to reserve these tokens.
Protos has reached out to Poloniex, but they were not willing to provide the addresses which store the bitcoin for this product. Protos hasn’t identified any backing for these tokens at this point.
stUSDT has no DAO
Staked tethers (stUSDT) are a new product that claims to be governed by the RWA DAO in collaboration with the JustLend DAO. Tethers are invested by the DAO in various yield-generating assets in the real world and this yield is paid back to users.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems.
- Protos has been unable to identify any decentralized or autonomous organization associated with this project; as far as we can tell, the RWA DAO doesn’t exist.
- The JustLend DAO has no governance proposals or discussions we were able to identify related to the launch of stUSDT and the RWA DAO.
- There’s no disclosure provided on what assets this project is currently investing in.
- Around 85% of this token is held at Huobi, with much of the remainder held in addresses assumed to be Sun.
Read more: ‘Someone’ is spamming thousands of addresses with stUSDT
Poloniex won’t disclose reserves
An investor group that includes Sun owns Poloniex. Back in November, Poloniex promised to provide a Merkle Proof of Reserves to demonstrate that it holds the assets it’s supposed to. Unfortunately, this has yet to occur, though Poloniex claims it’s still in progress.
As mentioned above, Poloniex also holds the backing for WBTC on Tron, as well as other ‘Just Cryptos,’ but doesn’t provide the addresses where users would be able to verify those holdings.
Huobi’s confusing mix of assets
Sun is an advisor to Huobi and seems likely to be its majority owner.
Huobi previously promised that it would probe third-party verification of its ‘proof-of-reserves,’ but it hasn’t. When Protos reached out, it explained that “after the release of the relevant announcement, we have connected with a third party, but then no third party can do this. So there are no third parties.”
Huobi has provided a Nansen dashboard, which it says shows the assets it holds. However, this dashboard raises additional concerns about the reserves. The exchange currently holds around $280 million worth of USDT; but it has much more stUSDT, totaling over $400 million.
Huobi claims to have 24,500 BTC, but unfortunately, 6,500 of those are WBTC on Tron, and no disclosure is provided on where those backing bitcoins are.
It was surprising that so many Huobi clients have apparently decided to convert their tethers into stUSDT and their bitcoin into WBTC, especially considering the problems surrounding both products.
DeFi protocols
SunSwap is basically UniSwap but on Tron. It’s governed by the SUN token, which currently has a market cap of roughly $50 million, according to CoinMarketCap. It’s not immediately clear how much of SUN Sun owns.
Similarly, JustLend is much like Compound but on Tron. It’s governed by the JUST token, which has a market cap of roughly $200 million, according to CoinMarketCap. Again, the precise amount of JUST Justin owns is not clear.
Then there’s JustStable. Similar to MakerDAO (but on Tron), it operates the USDJ stablecoin, which has a market cap of approximately $300 million. CoinMarketCap has shown that the token has consistently traded at a premium since FTX declared bankruptcy.
Sun bought the company that played a role in developing the BitTorrent protocol so that he could use the name for a multi-chain cryptocurrency bridge. This protocol is connected to the BTT token, which has a current market cap of around $440 million. This is down from a high of $2.6 billion.
An SEC lawsuit against Sun alleges that he engaged in wash trading and market manipulation of the BTT token, which they allege is a security. Again, it’s not immediately clear how much BTT Sun owns.
Read more: SEC sues Justin Sun over TRX, BTT, market manipulation
TrueUSD’s murky ownership
TrueUSD is a stablecoin that over the past year has seen its market cap more than double, from approximately $1.2 billion to somewhere in the region of $2.8 billion. This growth has been driven by new adoption, including Binance adopting TrueUSD as one of its zero-fee trading pairs.
Analysis by ChainArgos suggests that Sun was the single largest burner of TrueUSD.
Since Techteryx acquired TrueUSD in late 2020, there have been persistent rumors that Sun is its owner. However, it has regularly denied this claim. These denials have grown more complicated since the former CEO of TrustToken, now Archblock, has alleged in a pro se lawsuit that Sun attempted to acquire TrueUSD.
Additionally, it seems that there may be significant overlaps between the leadership of TrueUSD and other Sun-connected entities like BitTorrent.
Sun admits he’s a ‘partner market maker‘ for TrueUSD but has denied owning it.
USDD’s nonsense design
USDD is basically Terra, but on Tron. It currently has a market cap of $725 million. The reserves for this $725 million are made up of $415 million worth of BTC and approximately $150 million worth of TRX. Additionally, its peg stability module contains about $240,000 worth of TrueUSD.
These reserves are notably less than the current market cap of USDD.
Roughly $725 million TRX sits in addresses described as ‘burning accounts.’ The Tron DAO Reserve considers these to be collateral for USDD, despite being burned.
Burned TRX for USDD comes from those burning it in order to issue new USDD and seemingly could be re-issued if the partners wanted to redeem USDD.
The original version of the whitepaper said that by November 2022 it would release Tron v5, which would integrate USDD natively in a manner much closer to Terra, where anyone would be able to issue and redeem USDD for TRX.
The current whitepaper has completely abandoned this plan and instead relies on the USDD partners.
Read more: Justin Sun’s stablecoin USDD quietly loses peg amid FTX chaos
Animoca Brands and NFTs
Sun was an investor in Animoca Brands, a large web3 and NFT company. Crunchbase lists this as an exited investment for Sun.
He has also invested in a variety of notable NFTs, both directly and for the APENFT Foundation and the JUST NFT Fund. JUST NFT Fund focused on creating NFT records for existing high-value pieces of art, including a Picasso.
Conclusion
Sun is one of the most important figures in crypto, with fingers in numerous pies. He has exchanges, stablecoins, layer-1s, market-making firms, and a litany of protocols named after himself. This broad involvement has attracted attention, as Sun has been accused of market manipulation by the SEC and many of his holding fail to provide promised transparency, raising questions about how assets have been stored and used.
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