Justin ‘T-Bills’ Sun prints $800M to himself

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—by Protos Staff

This year, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun has been on a streak of questionable decisions — but his brazenness seemingly became out of control on Friday, when he decided to mint over $800 million worth of his own stablecoin TUSD, put them into a lending protocol he named after himself, and burn them all.

Sun, a former Grenadian ambassador who has since seen that honor stripped away, raised eyebrows when he started multiple algorithmic stablecoins after the collapse of the Terra/Luna ecosystem. The Tron founder controversially decided to purchase crypto exchange Huobi and has been sued by the SEC for alleged market manipulation of his own tokens.

On Friday, however, Sun took the crypto cake by printing $815 million worth of his stablecoin TUSD. The funds were then sent to Sun-controlled Huobi — now curiously rebranded to HTX. These funds and an extra $40 million were then burned.

This caused a strange spike in the TUSD market cap. Only, the excitement didn’t end there; as pointed out by crypto sleuth DesoGames, the over $800 million in stables were used by Sun to print more stUSDT (or Staked USDT, another asset almost exclusively controlled by Sun), and then placed into JustLendDAO (which he also controls) to supposedly earn interest.

Just a little blip (via CoinGecko).

Read more: Where is Justin Sun’s money?

Nothing but t-bills, baby

On X, formerly Twitter, Sun was asked by Dylan LeClair to clarify the nature of TUSD reserves and where they were held, and to explain where its yield comes from.

LeClair received a one-word reply: “t-bills.”

At press time, Sun has failed to show what company has purchased these US treasury bills for TUSD, where their assets are being held, what durations these imagined ‘t-bills’ are, and how stUSDT is able to often offer yields higher than those offered by the US treasury.

In a statement to Blockworks, Sun said that the transactions were personal and had nothing to do with Huobi business.

“Printing! Moar!” Sun told the news outlet.

Update September 19, 8:40 UTC: Added credit and source to crypto sleuth DesoGames in fourth paragraph.

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