Recently, I’ve seen news about Sun Yuchen again. This guy has indeed made a name for himself in the crypto world. At 35, he became the head of a publicly listed company, with his hands on seven or eight businesses and projects. His net worth is said to exceed $43 billion. This set of business logic is worth studying.

Sun Yuchen first got exposed to Bitcoin while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Back then, BTC was only around $10, and he started by testing small amounts. After joining Ripple’s China team in 2013, he accumulated his first pot of gold. In 2017, he decided to go it alone and, together with a classmate from Peking University, founded TRON.

TRON’s success story is quite inspiring. That year, the ICO raised $400 million in one go, but then they ran into the “9.4” policy. Domestic project teams and trading platforms were so scared they were nearly terrified to death. Sun Yuchen admitted that almost all of his first three years of entrepreneurship were basically wasted, but he didn’t give up. The turning point came in 2019, when Tether decided to issue a TRC-20 version of USDT on the TRON network. This move directly laid the foundation for TRON’s market value today.

Today, the USDT transfer volume on TRON accounts for over 98% of the total on-chain amount across public chains. Daily on-chain revenue exceeds $2.1 million, and annualized revenue reaches $770 million. TRON’s total market cap has already reached $26.96 billion, steadily ranking among the top tier of major public chains worldwide.

Besides the public chain, Sun Yuchen also spent $140 million in 2018 to acquire BitTorrent, turning this former download tool into a blockchain-based transformation. He then launched the BTT token. Users can pay with BTT to get faster download speeds, and uploaders can also earn rewards by seeding. Although BTT’s performance is currently fairly steady and in line with expectations, in an era when meme coins are all the rage, it still does pretty well.

He also didn’t miss out on the trading platform space. First, he supported Poloniex to spin off from a certain large exchange. In June 2022, he officially acquired Poloniex, with daily trading volume of about $500 million. In the same year in October, he also bought a stake worth $1 billion in a certain long-established trading platform, becoming its de facto chief executive, with daily trading volume reaching $2.4 billion.

Stablecoins and cross-chain assets are another important pillar of Sun Yuchen’s crypto landscape. USDD is the decentralized stablecoin he personally helped lead. Its current on-chain market value is about $432 million. TUSD may not be formally under his personal name, but through multi-party on-chain evidence, his shadow controlling stake is essentially confirmed. Its current market cap is about $495 million. WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin) is a heavyweight in cross-chain assets. Its market cap has reached $8.15 billion. TRON DAO Reserve has held a huge amount of Bitcoin long term, using WBTC to support the stable operation of USDD.

He also ventured into the NFT field. In 2021, he established the APENFT Foundation, aiming to connect traditional art with the NFT world. Later, he launched the APENFT Marketplace, a TRON-based NFT trading market specifically responsible for digitizing top artworks and splitting and issuing NFTs. Sun Yuchen also personally photographed collections such as the “Digital Zodiac Animal Heads” and donated them directly to the foundation. The platform’s token NFT currently has a market value of about $420 million.

What’s interesting is that Sun Yuchen’s relationship with the United States is quite complicated. He studied in the U.S., and he was investigated by the FBI for many years because TRON was used for black-market fund flows. But in the past two years, it seems he has found a new breakthrough—building close ties with the Trump family. He invested $75 million in a certain project one after another, becoming a core advisor, and he also became the largest holder of a certain token of that project, holding 1.43 million tokens. It’s said that Trump only attended for half an hour at the related dinner, and the second half almost became his personal show.

In an interview, Sun Yuchen said that he is a bridge between the crypto industry and the president, and also a bridge for future U.S.-China communication. His original intention is to establish a good relationship with the Trump family and bring more people from the traditional world into the blockchain world.

Overall, Sun Yuchen’s combination of tactics really has been quite effective. From TRON to BitTorrent, from trading platforms to stablecoins, and to the NFT trading market—within less than 10 years, he built a crypto empire spanning multiple fields. And now he’s using $100 million to take TRON public on NASDAQ. This guy’s story is still ongoing.