Justin Sun Lays Golden Eggs for Trump As Crypto Crony
By Tom Kagy | 31 Mar, 2025

A Chinese crypto billionaire finds elevated status in the US by pouring a hundred million dollars into Trump's fledgling crypto venture.

You might recall the taped banana that sold for $6.2 million in a Sotheby's art auction in late November 2024.  The buyer was Justin Sun. To cap off his grotesque display of excess wealth, just ten days later Sun ate that banana in front of a group of Hong Kong reporters.

The point of this costly publicity stunt?  Sun, 34, wanted to let the world know that he's already worth many billions (between $8 and $30 billion depending on whether you believe him or Forbes' gimlet-eyed estimate), and to sensationalize the investment he was making in Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial (WLF).

To most the WLF website looked like an unpromisingly amateurish effort at creating a crypto platform.  The giant picture of Trump plastered wall to wall on the homepage prompted cynics to see it as merely a form of digital panhandling, an appeal to Trump true believers to make donations by buying tokens of no use or value. 

To Justin Sun, who had already proven himself to be a brilliant and unscrupulous crypto promoter, the WLF platform, no matter how crude, backed by the name and likeness of a sitting US president, was the dream vehicle for persuading Chinese with landlocked yuan assets to buy borderless crypto assets. 

“I see WLF as a strong player in the financial technology space,” Sun declared upon making his initial $30 million investment in WLF in November, a couple weeks after Trump's election.  Sun called Trump a one-man “cheat code” for crypto, someone who would accelerate the appreciation of crypto investments linked to his name.

And Sun lost no time reshaping WLF into another one of his high-flying crypto ventures.

Trump remains prominent on the WLF homepage which declares "a New Era of Finance — Be DeFiant", adding, "The only DeFi platform inspired by Donald J. Trump. Shape the future of decentralized finance by owning WLFI tokens."  As of late March those tokens were advertised for sale at $0.015 apiece.

The site's "Meet our Team" section introduces the visitor to "the passionate minds shaping the future of finance," namely Donald Trump as Chief Crypto Advocate and Eric, Donald Jr and Barron Trump as Web3 Ambassadors.

Also listed as co-founders are Steven Witkoff and his sons Zach and Alex.  Witkoff is the real-estate investor and complete diplomatic novice tapped by Trump to be Special Mideast Envoy as well as his proxy in negotiating with Putin on ending the Ukraine war.

Part of Sun's initial $30-million WLF investment seems to have gone toward retaining three Asian blockchain experts whose technical savvy gives WLF the industry creds as a trustworthy state-of-the-art crypto platform.

The first is Rich Teo, a Singporean investment analyst lately focusing on crypto projects.  He is described as "Stablecoin & Payment Lead".  

Sandy Peng is simply listed as "Scroll".  Scroll is a company she co-founded that develops zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) blockchain technology, an emerging open-source solution to the problem of verifying crypto transactions without disclosing any private data.  

Ryan Fang is listed simply as "Tomo Wallet", the name of a company he founded to develop a wallet integrated into the Telegram messaging app to let users send, receive and swap crypto assets across borders and platforms.  Telegram is used by about a billion people around the world, especially those who want to keep their communications inaccessible to governments.

Together these Asian team members reassure knowledgeable investors, especially Chinese citizens seeking to evade stringent anti-crypto laws, that their transactions are totally private and out of reach of national authorities.  WLF is now another crypto platform that enables the kinds of non-traceable cross-border financial transactions traditionally prosecuted by the US for money laundering or financing terrorist or other illicit activities.

Trump's amateurish WLF platform attracted Sun for another key reason: it gave Sun the opportunity to ally himself with the man with ultimate authority over the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  

In 2023 the SEC had sued Sun for selling unregistered securities and engaging in "wash" (non-profitable pro forma) trading in 2018 and 2019 as a way to pump up the value of his TRX blockchain token.  Sun was accused of having ordered employees of his TRON and BitTorrent (now Rainberry) platforms to create thousands of fake accounts with which to make hundreds of thousands of trades while secretly paying celebrities like Akon, Soulja Boy, Lindsay Lohan, Ne-Yo and Jake Paul to tout his tokens.  Most of the celebs settled out of the SEC suit by paying settlements of over $400,000 each.

The SEC suit created other problems for Justin Sun.  It prompted Coinbase to delist wBTC, a so-called wrapped bitcoin created and controlled by Sun.

"Mr. Sun’s affiliation with — and potential control over — wBTC presented an unacceptable risk to [Coinbase] customers and the integrity of [the Coinbase] exchange,” Coinbase declared in a court filing.

All the more reason Sun spent so freely and, as it turned out, effectively, to cultivate the Trump connection.  Seeing that his initial $30 million November investment inspired a massive number of investments into WLF, multiplying the value of the Trump family's stake, in December Sun invested another $45 million.  It was like handing over a $33 million check directly to the Trump family as the master investment agreement provided that 75% of any revenues above Sun's initial $30 million investment would go directly to the Trump clan. 

On January 17, likely at Sun's urging, WLF multiplied its leverage of the Trump brand by launching the Trump meme coin $Trump into which Sun pumped several more million dollars.  The token's launch, along with the launch of $Melania, were rushed to ensure they took place prior to Trump's inauguration to avoid any violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause which prohibits elected officials profiting from their office.

In late March WLF launched USD1, a stablecoin, to compete against Tether's well-established USDT and Coinbase-backed USCD.  The value of stablecoins is pegged to the dollar but competes against the dollar as a medium of financial transactions.  

Sun's WLF investments have realized little actual monetary return to date due to the tie-up agreement that prevents sale of his assets, but they have produced a $350 to $400 million windfall for the Trump family, according to recent estimates by Financial Times and Forbes.

Sun's strategy of allying with Trump has translated into long-term returns.  In March Sun bragged that the launch of $Trump had added a million new users to his HTX crypto exchange.  Attesting also to Sun's shrewd assessment of the power of the Trump connection, Chinese authorities did nothing to stop $TRUMP from trending on social media, presumably for fear of alienating Trump, despite the fact that cryptocurrency is banned in China.

On January 23 Trump validated Sun's strategy by signing an executive order that tilted the crypto landscape to favor Sun by signaling the intention to eliminate the regulatory oversight the SEC had been seeking to impose over activities promoting digital assets.  Trump's order also outright preempted the creation of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on the ground that it would impinge on financial privacy.  That rid crypto investments, especially in stablecoins, of an important potential downside to crypto's long-term prospects.

To sweeten the pot even more for the crypto industry, Trump ordered the establishment of a national crypto reserve using seized digital assets — an implicit but clear signal that privately created digital assets would enjoy government support similarly to central-bank currencies.

One might wonder why a US president would promote elusive crypto assets as a substitute for traceable currencies, especially as the widespread use of crypto in place of sovereign currencies tend to facilitate financial crimes while also tending to lower the value of the dollar on which much of American prosperity is based.

On February 26, a month after Trump's executive order, the SEC asked a federal judge to put its suit against Justin Sun on hold.  This was merely one of many blessings befalling Sun in the wake of his WLF investments.

Trump's unseemly crypto dealings hasn't gone unnoticed.

“Now anyone in the world can essentially deposit money into bank account of President of USA with a couple clicks,” tweeted Anthony Scaramucci, former Trump White House communications director, after Trump's January launch of the $Trump meme coin. “Every favor — geopolitical, corporate or personal — is now on sale, right out in the open.”

In early March Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy amplified that sentiment on the floor of the Senate, pegging WLF as “Trump posting his Venmo for anyone to secretly wire him as much money as they want.” 

Trump is careful to avoid direct contact with Sun but his sons Eric and Donald Jr., as well as Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, have no such qualms about meeting with Sun.  They and his Asian technical appointees to the WLF team give Sun ample opportunity to convey suggestions on building up WLF and its related coin assets.

Sun's Trump connection seems to have been more than skillful exploitation of the value of a business partner who happens to be US President.  It also has a fanboy dimension.

Yuchen (original Chinese name) Sun entered his teens in a China shedding communist ideology under reforms ushered in by Deng Xiaoping.  Along with other young Chinese, Sun had become an avid fan of Trump's Apprentice TV series.  At that time he couldn't have known that Apprentice had given Trump a lifeline he desperately needed with which to pull out of the deep financial hole into which he had plunged during the early 1990s.  Recessionary pressures had forced Trump to file six bankruptcies, one for each of his various Atlantic City and Las Vegas casino and hotel ventures.

Perhaps with an eye toward following in his idol's footsteps, after graduating from Peking University with a history degree, Sun went to the University of Pennsylvania and earned a masters in East Asian Studies.  While at Penn Sun became interested in cryptocurrencies and began investing in bitcoin.

Over the next decade Sun achieved meteoric success, in large part by becoming a protege of Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance.  The two had met in 2015 while Sun was working at Ripple, the predecessor to Blockchain.com.  Inspired by Zhao Sun developed the Tron blockchain platform and the TRX token as a faster, cheaper way to transact on blockchain.  

In August 2017, Binance hosted Tron’s $70 million ICO just a few days before China banned cryptocurrencies.  Sun was widely criticized because his Tron whitepaper directly lifted verbatim  many pages from Ethereum's seminal whitepaper.  But thanks to backing from Zhao's industry-leading Binance platform, Tron quickly won acceptance as a credible and cost-effective platform for global peer-to-peer transactions.  

Tron got another big boost in 2019 when Binance offered a 16% annual interest on USDT hosted on Tron.  Tether's USDT being the world's leading stablecoin, Sun's Tron platform surged to an estimated 300 million global users transacting $500 billion in monthly transactions, making Tron one of the world's top two or three platforms for peer-to-peer payments.  And making Sun a certified billionaire.

His success with Tron and TRX allowed Sun to buy BitTorrent (later renamed Rainberry) for $140 million and launch the BTT token, another cash cow.  The two platforms and tokens made Sun one of the kingpins of the crypto industry, with more than enough means to buy influence and protection in small Caribbean nations with convenient air access to the US.

By 2021, perhaps in response to evolving legal concerns, Sun set aside running his crypto ventures to focus on his appointed role as Permanent WTO Representative of Grenada, a tiny West Indies island nation about the size of Oxnard but with only about half the population.  Sun played the role to the hilt, living in Geneva and being addressed as His Excellency.  

The official WTO post in Geneva conferred diplomatic immunity, an important benefit for a man facing SEC investigations.  It would certainly have posed barriers to efforts at extradition to the US, China or other jurisdictions.

In March 2023 Grenada's ruling party lost the election and Sun was forced to step down from his WTO post.  Sun quickly found an alternative — having himself named Prime Minister of the Free Republic of Liberland, a 2.7-square-mile micronation located on a mostly empty flood plain on the Croatian side of the Danube River.  Liberland's economic plan features the goal of becoming a global cryptocurrency center.

Lacking infrastructure and diplomatic recognition, however, Liberland seemed unlikely to afford Sun any actual diplomatic or sovereign immunity.  Nor does it afford even a habitable residence due to its lack of infrastructure.  Due to its location even Liberland founder and President Vit Jedlicka is often prevented from accessing his micronation by the Croatian authorities who control the area around Liberland.

Trump's election win in November aligned perfectly with Sun's knack for engineering sovereign backing.  No doubt Sun knew about Trump's propensity for using government power and policy to reward those who provided financial support to his campaign and to him through his family.  Sun was by no means the only crypto player who saw the opportunity to cultivate Trump's favor with financial tribute.  The WLF site's homepage makes it clear that anyone who buys WLF tokens will "instantly gain a voice in shaping the future of DeFi."

There's no way to learn the names of people who poured an estimated $400 million in tribute payments by buying WLF tokens.  It's likely one was Sun's mentor Zhao who is anxious to position himself as a Trump crony. 

In late 2023 Zhao's Binance had paid $4.3 billion to the US government to settle 13 charges that included money-laundering, terror-financing, operating an unregistered exchanges and sale of unregistered securities. Then in April of 2024 Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to implement an adequate know-your-customer (KYC) program to prevent money-laundering and other use of the Binance platform for illicit activities.

Knowing that the Trump administration had suspended the civil suit against his protege Sun for illegally promoting Tron and TRX tokens, Zhao knows that becoming a Trump crony is the best way to ensure smooth operations in the US.  In late 2024 Zhao sent feelers to Trump family members.  In essence Zhao is offering the Trump family a stake in Binance in exchange for a presidential pardon.

It will be interesting to see the extent to which Trump embraces this new style of transnational cronyism enabled by his heated embrace of decentralized finance.  Essentially, this means that the US will be more hospitable to the highly speculative crypto industry from which Trump has already earned hundreds of billion dollars in profits for simply lending his name, and implicitly, his presidential authority, to crypto assets.