Produced by Radar Finance and | Zhang Kaijing, editor| deep sea
"If some shameless US foreign media continue to spread bottomless rumors about me, I do not rule out countering it by means of running for the president of the United States!"
On March 10, the US technology media The Verge reported that according to the investigation of a number of former employees of Sun Yuchen's company, it was learned that Sun Yuchen was suspected of insider trading during the Tron period, and was also suspected of fraud and money laundering during Poloniex, and now the INTERNAL Revenue Service, the FBI, etc. have intervened in the investigation, and Sun Yuchen may use the citizenship of other countries to evade legal sanctions.
In this regard, Sun Yuchen sent 5 microblogs in a row to refute the rumors and emphasized his identity as Grenada's ambassador to the WTO. According to the data, Grenada is located in North America and was blacklisted by the European Union in 2017 as a tax haven.
"This is all a fake trick done by those who are red-eyed, in order to discourage Brother Sun from running for the next US president." Some netizens joked.
Sun Yuchen's life experience can be called "magical". On the one hand, there are countless "glamorous" labels hanging on him: Peking University bachelors, Penn masters, Davos Forum global outstanding youth, China's post-90s entrepreneurial leaders, Ma Yun's disciples... On the other hand, he has repeatedly caused a lot of buzz because of the huge amount of money, the most famous one is the company that auctioned Buffett's charity luncheon for about $4.57 million. However, behind the rich people's design, Sun Yuchen is also deeply involved in the question of "harvesting wealth, realizing and running away".
One investor once described Sun Yuchen as "a successful entrepreneurial actor." So this time, how many points should "Brother Sun"'s rumors be believed in him?
Refuting the "FBI Investigative Theory"
On September 4, 2017, the People's Bank of China and seven other ministries and commissions jointly issued the Announcement on Preventing the Financing Risks of Token Issuance, which completely stopped the issuance of various virtual currencies and required the issued virtual currencies to make arrangements for liquidation.
Since then, ICOs (raising funds for cryptocurrency projects, similar to public offerings in IPOs) have become a tool for financial fraud, pyramid schemes, and other illegal and criminal activities in the country. For a time, the currency circle was full of noise.
However, according to The Verge's report, Sun Yuchen seemed to have received the news in advance, accurately completed the sale of the Tron coin TRX issued by his company Tron the day before the announcement, and fled to Seoul, South Korea, and then settled in San Francisco.
It is worth mentioning that the "Tron" project was also just created by Sun Yuchen in July 2017.
From the end of December 2017 to the beginning of 2018, the price of tron coins soared from two cents to about 2 yuan, and Sun Yuchen took the opportunity to sell 6 billion tron coins and successfully cashed out 300 million US dollars. The next day, the price of tron coins plummeted by 20%, and countless "leeks" complained.
However, cashing out only once is clearly not enough. Tron's headquarters in Beijing contains an insider trading team led by a technocrat whose main task is to ensure that the price of TRX reaches the level that Sun wants. Every time Sun Yuchen announces good news, he will first prompt the team to buy, and then sell for profit after the price soars.
As for the funds for "market making", they come from rich "big households" outside the tron.
According to a number of experts in the intersection of U.S. financial law and cryptocurrencies, the maximum penalty for insider trading by Sun Yuchen and Tron's Beijing headquarters, if confirmed, is 20 years in prison.
Here also leads to another crisis of Sun Yuchen. The ban on insider trading applies to financial products known as "securities," but it is currently in doubt whether cryptocurrencies meet the criteria for "securities," and if cryptocurrencies qualify as "securities," then they must be registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and selling unregistered cryptocurrencies to the public is a crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison in the United States.
To ensure Tron's legitimacy, Sun also hired Labhart, who had worked in the SEC compliance department for eight years, as chief compliance officer. Perhaps it is labhart's confidence, Sun Yuchen conducted another ICO after the acquisition of BitTorrent, and the new token is called BTT.
In 2019, Sun Yuchen continued his "risk operation". He acquired a cryptocurrency exchange called Poloniex.
Poloniex was once one of the world's largest digital currency exchanges, but after being acquired by Circle in 2018, trading volumes plummeted due to the enforcement of rules to eliminate illegal activities, fraud, and more.
Sun Yuchen's purpose is to restore Poloniex's previous barbaric growth. It first moved Boston-based Poloniex to the Seychelles, where cryptocurrencies have little regulation, and then, in order to quickly acquire new customers, it required the company to build an automated system that would pass no matter what ID a user submitted.
On this basis, Sun Yuchen has also evaded government supervision by changing his citizenship and opening a large number of bank accounts around the world. He had exchanged $1 million in investment for citizenship in malta and had claimed in court that he was a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean islands. In the United States alone, Sun Yuchen has 13 bank accounts and 8 accounts in Malta. A former employee of Sun Yuchen's company said: "He thinks taxes are stupid. ”
Taken together, Sun's allegations include wire fraud, conspiracy or intent to commit wire fraud, fraud, money laundering, spending booty from criminal enterprises, unregistered securities and lying, aiding and abetting crime, and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
As Grenada's ambassador to the WTO, I am based in Geneva, neither american nor U.S. green card, do not live in the United States, and do not involve any U.S. tax matters at all." In the face of accusations from the US media, Sun Yuchen completely denied it.
Master or actor?
Although Sun Yuchen's rebuttal was very quick and decisive, there were still many ridiculous voices in the comment area. Radar Finance and Economics found that since his fame, Sun Yuchen's style and the controversy between him and his coercion are like two sides of the same coin, always standing side by side.
Sun Yuchen when he was a student can be described as a model of counterattack. In the first two years of high school, his grades were not outstanding, and he was even evaluated by his teachers as only "three books of material". However, during the third year of high school, Sun Yuchen suddenly began to strive to be strong.
In order to be able to go to a good university, Before the college entrance examination, Sun Yuchen participated in the new concept essay competition, when Han Han and Guo Jingming were "in charge", Sun Yuchen successfully discovered the "trick" of "rebellious literature" after analyzing a number of award-winning essays, and finally won the first prize, with the help of score reduction admission qualifications into the department of Peking University Chinese.
"Be sure to be the first, and if you can't be the first in an area, immediately replace the next one." After entering the university campus, Sun Yuchen resolutely implemented his life creed, and after his freshman year, he transferred to the history department of "easy to get high scores", and by the time he graduated, his grade point ranked first in the whole department.
Although the body has been transferred to the history department, Sun Yuchen's heart is still a literary heart. He had followed Hu Shi's example in writing the "Weekly Review", and had also published a series of articles pointing directly at the Business System of the Northern Congress, saying that "this is a cruel idea of comprehensively controlling the institutionalization of students", and also attracted the solidarity of Meng Fei, Liang Wendao, Li Ao and dozens of media follow-up reports, and finally the president of Peking University was forced to apologize under pressure.
Sun Yuchen, who became famous in World War I, and Jiang Fangzhou, a representative of the post-90s generation, appeared on the cover of Asia Weekly together, and he also changed the name of his renren network to "Sun Yuchen| cover character of Asia Weekly" at the first time.
Sun Yuchen's literary dream stopped here, and during his study at the University of Pennsylvania, after he and his friends founded "New New Youth", the article "Veterans Don't Die, 1949" published by Shen Shiqi of Princeton University was identified as plagiarism. After the incident, the editorial board of "New New Youth" as a whole believed that the plagiarism was true and apologized to Shen Zhiqi. But Sun Yuchen himself has always denied plagiarism, saying that the two texts are only similar in style.
After the disillusionment of the "rebellious literati", Sun Yuchen became a "post-90s entrepreneurial leader".
In 2013, Sun Yuchen returned to China to start a business as the chief representative of Ripple Labs, a Silicon Valley Internet finance company in Greater China. At the same time, Bitcoin ushered in a small bull market, and Sun Yuchen was also awarded the title of "Global Outstanding Youth" by the World Economic Forum.
However, Sun Yuchen, who has just started a business, was splashed with cold water by Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan. Many years later, Sun Yuchen revealed in the circle of friends that in 2014, Wang Xiaochuan pointed out that he was a "liar" in a program, and firmly stated that he "will definitely fail, and it is a shame to record a program together."
From the content sent by the circle of friends, it can be seen that Sun Yuchen has always been grumpy about this matter. But Wang Xiaochuan's voice did not fall, Bitcoin opened a bear market, Sun Yuchen had to change the stranger's social networking, and bought the Accompany me App, began to dormant.
Without the help of virtual currency, Sun Yuchen still earned enough eyeballs in the market. He was not only shortlisted for Forbes' 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 in China in 2015, but also became the first batch of students of Lakeside University founded by Jack Ma under the recommendation of investors, and the only post-90s among the students.
Since then, Sun Yuchen has also called himself "Ma Yun's apprentice", which once triggered a warning from Ali, but in the hearts of most netizens, the relevant impression has long been buried.
In 2017, the concept of blockchain was hot, and Sun Yuchen finally waited for the opportunity to become a "big man in the currency circle". During the year, he founded the blockchain project "Tron Tron" and successfully sold TRX for $70 million before regulatory policy was issued.
In order to give his own project platform, Sun Yuchen thought of "rubbing" the heat of the public chain boss Ethereum. On Twitter, Sun Yuchen listed 7 reasons why the tron is superior to Ethereum, but this move was ridiculed by Ethereum founder V Shen for plagiarism.
At that time, researchers at Digital Asset Research (DAR) found multiple instances of code copied from other projects in Tron codebase, and said that it appeared that Tron developers had plagiarized Ethereum's code in other projects and modified file names, making the source of the code difficult to identify. But in this regard, Sun Yuchen denied it.
In 2019, Sun Yuchen photographed Buffett's lunch and became famous for a while. At one point, he launched a "three-year contract" with Wang Xiaochuan on Weibo, "Look at the time of June 2022, Tron and Sogou market value is high or low? Bet 100 Bitcoins. ”
In this regard, Li Yan, a partner of Panda Capital, said that Sun Yuchen's strong shooting of Buffett is to throw Chinese face to the world, which undoubtedly conveys a very wrong message to the world. Wang Sicong forwarded a news that "Sun Yuchen photographed Buffett's lunch, the table was full of leeks", with the text "This is not a stupid X".
Spending money is like dirt, and assets are a mystery
In fact, although Sun Yuchen has always been a high-profile image on social media platforms, his value, assets and even whereabouts have become more and more confusing in recent years.
Regarding Sun Yuchen's "first bucket of gold", one of the theories that is currently widely circulated is that it was obtained by speculating in Tesla's stock and speculating in Bitcoin.
Recalling that period of time, Sun Yuchen once said: "I use my own tuition to invest, my family is not particularly rich, study abroad at least 300,000 yuan a year, in case of failure, the consequences are very serious, but at that time I believed in my own judgment, our school also has the society to study Tesla, I myself have a certainty, added leverage to invest in Tesla." After investing in Tesla, Sun Yuchen began to speculate in Bitcoin again, and there are reports that its income has reached seventy or eighty times.
This directly changed the trajectory of Sun Yuchen's life. According to Sun Yuchen's own words, he originally wanted to become a lawyer and enter Wall Street, but "I calculated that my investment may have earned all the money I had made in the first 20 years of my career as a lawyer, which is one of the reasons why I started a business. "
In recent years, Sun Yuchen's "money throwing" behavior in social media has become increasingly active.
In February 2019, Zhao Yu's "seeing righteous courage to oppose being detained" incident became a social hot spot, and Sun Yuchen announced in a high-profile weibo that he would provide Zhao Yu with a total of 10 million yuan of support, but according to reports, Zhao Yu only got 100,000 yuan in the end.
In November of the same year, the media exposed that NetEase's sick employees were laid off, and Sun Yuchen jumped out again, saying that "I have all the money for NetEase's departed employees to see a doctor", and also thanked the majority of netizens for giving him a little opportunity to do things.
Not only that, Sun Yuchen also made the classic line in "The Richest Man in Xihong City" "Who has dreams?" "Shine into reality. After the NetEase incident, many netizens on Weibo opened the miserable mode, and as a result, Sun Yuchen really gave 17 netizens 50,000 yuan each.
In 2021, Sun Yuchen spent more than $78 million to buy the Swiss artist's sculpture "Nose", $10.5 million to buy an NFT head, $28 million to get a seat on the "New Shepard" spacecraft, and will complete the space flight in the fourth quarter of this year.
So far, Sun Yuchen's value has not yet been confirmed by an exact figure. Radar Finance noted that as of the last week of 2021, the circulating market value of Tron has reached $7.8 billion.
However, behind Sun Yuchen's wealth, many small scattered blood have no return.
An investor who reported Sun Yuchen during his "coin throwing" period said: "I saw the myth of 100 times the tron coin enter the coin circle at the end of 2017, and since then I have begun a nightmare life. All kinds of god operations, all kinds of losses, until the end of 2018 lost 600,000. This complains to myself for being stupid, the whole process is to buy bitcoin first, then mainstream coins, then altcoins, and finally the contract burst, step by step into the pit. I advise friends who have not entered the currency circle, do not enter, this is not a place for you to stay, do not be curious, do not want to get rich. Don't see the big V forward and want to come in and see, curious to kill the cat, this is the advice of a person who has failed. ”
Where will Sun Yuchen go? Radar Finance will continue to pay attention.
Note: This article is the original of Radar Finance (ID: leidacj). Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.