Sun Yuchen: Blockchain patient
The madness of an era is condensed into the madness of one person.
Text: Liu Na, Wang Chan
Edited by Yang Lin
来源|36氪Pro(ID:krkrpro)
Cover source: Visual China
Escape
This summer, we tried to find Justin Sun in Singapore.
People familiar with him say he lives on the land-strapped island of Sentosa, a three-storey villa with a swimming pool, south of Singapore. Mr. Sun spends S$90,000 (about 480,000 yuan) a month on renting a luxury home.
The villa's floor-to-ceiling two-storey windows reveal a suspended pool that leads half to the edge of the mansion and half to the underground garage.
On the basement floor is the art collection, where Sun's former assistant revealed that his personal collection has long been worth more than 1.2 billion yuan. These include Picasso's 1932 masterpiece "Lying Nude with a Necklace" worth 20 million, Andy Warhol's "Three Self-Portraits" at Christie's in London for $2 million, and the sculpture of Swiss sculptor Giacometti worth 560 million.
The sun is dazzling in Singapore. During the day, the streets are quiet, and the occasional man in a suit or leather shoe is in a hurry in the heat. It is true that the climate conditions here are not as good as those in California, where he lived for a long time, and he left there only before rumors of an FBI investigation leaked out.
Before we went, Sun Yuchen had repeatedly expressed his willingness to talk to us, "I will finalize a time for you to come to Singapore this week", "I hope there will be no bad hospitality", but he has repeatedly delayed the meeting time and repeatedly broken the deadline he has set.
We decided to fly directly to Singapore. Standing on the street, send him a WeChat message, "Do you want to do the friendship of the landlord and invite us to have a cup of coffee?"
"About, about!" Sun Yuchen replied to the message almost immediately, "I'm here this week, depending on your time!"
"How about tomorrow afternoon?" sent the message, but never got a reply from him. It's like Farage looking for Marilyn Monroe on the streets of New York more than 60 years ago, and in the end we didn't see Justin Sun.
He once again completed a classic "escape performance", first patting his chest and promises, impressing the other party with enthusiasm, and then escaping from the environment that was not so favorable to him - just like when he disappeared from the election of the president of the Peking Student Union, pushed off the Buffett lunch he photographed, cashed out from Tron and Huobi, and left China and the United States one after another after releasing negative signals at the regulatory level.
There is no doubt that Sun Yuchen is the most controversial "entrepreneur" in contemporary China. He founded the blockchain platform TRON and took over Huobi, but because of his crazy harvesting, he became one of the most hated people by blockchain investors.
In the past decade, from "niche money printing machines" to "mass sickles", Chinese's impression of "digital currency" has plummeted – and Sun Yuchen has contributed to it. Today, "blockchain" has long been removed from the popular thesaurus of the Internet circle, and the people who pursued it back then have "crossed the dangerous shoal of digital currency, walked out of the garden of the metaverse, and are rushing towards the bright future of the AIGC model". However, history will remember all this. When a hundred years from now, our descendants will re-examine the rise of blockchain in China, and Justin Sun's name will definitely be mentioned.
The madness of an era is condensed into the madness of one person. To catch Sun Yuchen is to grasp the Chinese history of blockchain.
And now, when we mention Sun Yuchen's name, some people describe him as a "bad guy who does all kinds of evil", others think he is a "complete bastard", and some even say that they are waiting for the day when he is XX (here because of violence hides two words) on the streets.
Among the many Sun Yuchen, which one is the real him?
"We've been talking to a lot of your old acquaintances lately, and they've all said you're a jerk. So, are you?"
In the phone call before he fled, we asked him this, and Sun Yuchen struggled for a moment and replied:
"I think a lot of the people who scolded me were people who didn't make money from me," he said.
This is a typical Justin Sun-style answer. On people's phones and computers, he is good at playing a brilliant person in all kinds of crazy ways, but in the real world, he is Xi to avoid serious problems.
We try to add a bit of "analysis" to his actions, such as his upbringing, the industry he is in, and the psychological state that these experiences affect. Just like the famous psychologist Post pointed out in his article in "Psychopathology", people who are well-known in various fields are often more likely to suffer from mental illness.
Although on the phone, Sun emphasized that his state and emotions are busy and positive, his past behavior is difficult to describe as a "normal, healthy" adult.
He pursued something excessively and endured something excessively. After the cells and meridians are repeatedly torn and pulled, some abnormal characteristics begin to manifest themselves, and they wear away trust, freedom, and even everything other than money, leaving loneliness.
In the blockchain industry, Sun Yuchen is a veritable boss, and some people who are familiar with Sun Yuchen say that his worth is likely to be as high as tens of billions of dollars. But because of his presence, some bad tendencies are spreading at an accelerated pace — greed, selfishness, fear, and fame-seeking.
A strange "patient"
When you realize that there is something "not quite right" about this person, it is often observed from a litany of things that are out of place.
The Sun Yuchen seen by outsiders is often humble and polite, and he speaks sincerely. In winter, Sun Yuchen also wore a suit and combed his oily hair, looking decent and proper. "This dwarfs the reporters in heavy down jackets," many recalled. "He is not like a person in the Internet circle, but like a person in the financial circle. ”
Sun Yuchen seems to be a different person in the office, always showing irritability. "X your mother, you fuck X" is his mantra. A former TRON employee said that Sun Yuchen often scolded, "You XX know that you have to budget all day long, and your mother X will only spend money if she doesn't earn a dime."
Even in a city like Singapore, where work-life-balance is important, leaving work means not responding to work emails, Sun often assigns tasks late at night and asks employees to respond immediately.
But when others are busy, he is often idle. Even when he was in a meeting, Sun would refresh his social and video software over and over again, searching for his name on it almost obsessively — looking at all the topics related to him, flipping through comments, and often swearing in person.
Shortly before accepting our invitation, this "bastard" in everyone's mouth went to the Hong Kong Web3 conference. Knowing that Sun Yuchen was coming to give a speech, a blockchain industry group launched a "reward" crowdfunding, "looking for someone to come to the stage to give him two 'big pockets'". The news quickly reached Sun Yuchen's ears. On a WeChat screenshot circulating in the circle, he "warned" the security team, "If I am 'forced', I will only ask you."
Just in case, he set his security budget for the day at 80,000 USDT (a virtual currency), which is converted into nearly 600,000 yuan.
In hindsight, the episode may have just been an expensive marketing exercise. Justin Sun's friend, Du Jun, co-founder of Huobi and founder of Node Capital, told us that Justin Sun will never give up any means of marketing himself.
Click on any post about Sun Yuchen, and you can see a lot of criticism, ridicule and even cursing him in the comment area. His reputation is in a comical contrast to his positioning of himself.
His public relations team asked the media: "Whenever His Excellency Sun Yuchen himself is mentioned, his four positions must exist, and none of them are indispensable." They are," said His Excellency Mr. Justin Sun, Permanent Representative of Grenada to the World Trade Organization, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Member of Huobi Huobi Global Advisory Board, and Founder of TRON.
This is inevitably reminiscent of Daenerys Targaryen, the "Dragon Mother" in Game of Thrones, whose name is pronounced for three minutes every time she appears: daughter of the Mad King Aerys II Targaryen, the last heir of the ancient Targaryen dynasty, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne, Carrie of the Great Sea of Grass, the Shackle Chain Breaker, Queen Meereen, and the Mother of Dragons......
But as we have said, although His Excellency insisted that the outside world respect him, the outside world insisted on humiliating him.
At the end of the last century, the artist Andy Warhol predicted that "in the future, everyone will be a celebrity for 15 minutes." Now, this sentence has been reflected in reality. But Sun Yuchen made people see that celebrities are not all what you imagined.
"When you get rich, many people start to enjoy life. A blockchain exchange practitioner said that the "bigwigs" who are famous in the industry are extremely low-key, and even spend a lot of money to hire private detectives to help hide their whereabouts.
But Sun Yuchen is still hungry for exposure. At the beginning of this year, a new book, "Blockchain and the New Digital World", was released, which seriously introduced the impact of blockchain on the digital era.
The author's signature is Sun Yuchen, but a number of former Huobi employees confirmed that they hired graduate students as writers, and the "ghostwriting fee" was about 200,000 yuan. Because many publishers were reluctant to take it, the PR team ended up publishing it at their own expense.
Whether it is personable, irascible and rude, or conscientious, these labels are not so consistent with the public's perception of Sun Yuchen. In many people's perception, he should be black-bellied and cold.
If we believe that Sun Yuchen's state when he gets along with the people around him is closer to his true face, then a reasonable inference is that his impression in the public's mind is the result of his deliberate character for many years.
is like a person who is "confused" because of a fever, he has insisted on making remarks that do not conform to common sense and his cognitive level for many years, including but not limited to: Luo Yonghao was restricted from high consumption, and he issued a million annual salary offer to the former; When Xiaopeng users defended their rights, Sun Yuchen posted on Weibo and personally subsidized 1 million to help users hire lawyers; After Liu Qiangdong's Mingzhou incident, he claimed that he wanted to invest 100 million to make a movie, and the name was thought of, called "Mingzhou Chronicle".
There seems to be an inexplicable element in this Excellency, and it is difficult to see the consequences of approaching him. Just as there is only a thin line between a genius and a madman, "sickness" or "health" is often just a moment.
No one is sick all the time, but Sun Yuchen's madness makes him always look like a sick person.
Only "patients" can get rich in the blockchain
Sun Yuchen's ex-girlfriend recalled that a group of people ate coconut chicken, and Sun Yuchen would scoop most of the chicken into his bowl at one time at the first second of cooking, so as not to give himself a chance to eat it. "Later, the people who had dinner with him found out that he was doing the same business."
Many people know Sun Yuchen, and it started with an "illness" and a lunch.
In 2019, Justin Sun photographed Warren Buffett's lunch. The subsequent episode has been reported by countless media - before leaving, Sun Yuchen announced that he had canceled his meeting with Warren Buffett due to a sudden kidney stone. After that, Sun Yuchen publicly postponed the luncheon time several times.
Every time it is canceled or postponed, it is a double boiling of public opinion and the price of TRON, and the tricky play has achieved a complete victory.
Eventually, Mr. Sun met Mr. Buffett at a burger joint in a remote village in the United States — a person familiar with the matter told us that the two ate burgers instead of Buffett's classic steakhouse for lunch. Sun Yuchen gave Warren Buffett an Android phone with the TRON app installed in it. After the meeting, Sun Yuchen excitedly told the assistant that the chat was very pleasant, and that Buffett was already a virtual currency holder.
We have no way of knowing whether Buffett and Justin Sun met late, but what is certain is that after that meeting, Buffett repeatedly criticized virtual currency, and completely stopped the "Buffett Lunch" event in the following year.
What an embarrassing fact.
When Warren Buffett boarded the private jet and left, he didn't know if he was silently reciting his famous words in his heart, terrified of Justin Sun's greed. But Sun Yuchen, an escaped artist, can win Buffett with an empty city plan for his own reasons. "Not everybody can show pathological madness like him all the time," his former assistant told us.
Since he was a teenager, Sun Yuchen has shown his "weakness" more than once, but he can always skillfully get what he wants from it.
Born in 1990, Justin Sun started an alternative life shortly after entering Peking University, where he was radical and always publicly criticized the school's management system.
Because of his large supporters, he ran as an independent candidate for the presidency of the Peking Student Union. Again, it's a frenzy that first goes on and then disappears on campaign day. The only difference is that the reason for Sun Yuchen's disappearance that time was not illness, he claimed to have been "imprisoned" by the school Youth League Committee for more than ten hours.
The image of "victim" followed, but it allowed him to accumulate more fans. Subsequently, with the rise of Weibo, he learned to "public knowledge" and "big V" to discuss social current affairs, and frequently called for "saving the country".
Because he was worried about being expelled from Peking University, Sun Yuchen applied for graduation a year ahead of schedule, and then entered the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. During his stay in the United States, he continued the style of the domestic period, founded magazines, and wrote spicy reviews. But it didn't take long for his article to be pointed out as serious plagiarism, and many people came back to it.
In the midst of the controversy, Sun Yuchen was "sick" again, and there were rumors of suicide, which finally ended with the closure of the magazine.
Disheartened, Mr. Sun joined the Penn Investment Association, hoping to meet some wealthy Americans. There, he tried to increase leverage to speculate in stocks and coins, entered the blockchain industry, and experienced the fun of making money.
The story of the twist and turn was born. In 2013, he returned to China and obtained the support of IDG Capital to establish Ripple Technology, the predecessor of TRON.
The popularity of the teenager Sun Yuchen bears the imprint of the times - the Internet has extended the youth of that generation, "because of the attributes of young people, out-of-character voices are more likely to be heard," said a person who came into contact with Sun Yuchen during his time at Peking University. It wasn't until a few years later that some people began to reflect on whether the use of radical means to gain fame was a sample worth Xi.
But Sun Yuchen obviously didn't have time to reflect, and his aggressive style of play was soon brought into a new world by him. There, he put away his "weak" side and began to show a "sickly" smile.
In the blockchain industry, Sun Yuchen is an "early riser". But no matter how soon or later you join this industry, you will inevitably escape the fear brought by two "viruses" - one is called "shrewdness" and the other is called "snobbery".
In the murderous killing field of virtual currency, there are few scythes sharper than Sun Yuchen.
In the early years, in Sun Yuchen's TRON team, there was a technical expert named Xu Baolong. Every time Sun Yuchen announced good news, he would let Xu Baolong's team buy quickly, and when the price soared, they quickly shorted to make a profit.
In 2017, TRON was banned shortly after its creation. On September 4 of that year, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) issued the Announcement on Preventing the Risks of Token Issuance and Financing (hereinafter referred to as the "94 Announcement"), completely halting the issuance of virtual currencies and requiring the withdrawal of the issued virtual currencies.
However, Justin Sun "coincidentally" completed the issuance and sale of TRON the day before.
Sun Yuchen, who was abandoned by the policy, at least there are still users left. But soon, users also came back to their senses.
In November 2017, TRON landed on overseas exchanges and issued TRX coins. At first, the market price of a TRX was only 1 cent. However, since the end of November, the market has recovered as the price of bitcoin has continued to rise, and by December, the price of TRX has been pulled up to 2 yuan.
It was discovered that more than 50% of TRX is stored in the same wallet, and the proportion of "retail investors" circulating in the market is only 9%. It was also discovered that Justin Sun's wallet transaction records showed that he sent 200 million TRX to Binance and other trading platforms every day to exchange for Ethereum, which lasted for 19 days. Someone calculated afterwards that according to the currency price at the time, Sun Yuchen cashed out about 12 billion yuan (there are also accounts that Sun Yuchen only cashed out 2 billion yuan).
The large-scale sell-off soon led to a stampede run, and the price of TRON plummeted by 20% in an instant. Again, "coincidentally", Sun Yuchen ran before the crash.
He was always the fastest runner, just like he was when he ate coconut chicken.
10 months after the establishment of TRON, Sun Yuchen claimed that he was worth 10 billion. But then the wealth of a group of people is gone, and only self-deprecation remains, "Brother Sun smiles, life and death are unpredictable".
The origin of this phrase goes back a few years. Once Sun Yuchen did a live broadcast and endorsed a coin. Some netizens left a message in the live broadcast room, "Brother Sun, don't laugh, I'm so scared." Sun Yuchen was disdainful, "I can see your three melons and two dates?"
A few months later, the investors who bought the coin were trapped in a high position, and "the situation can only be described as a loss of money".
Even after taking over the Huobi business, Sun Yuchen did not give up the "three melons and two dates" of retail investors. A number of industry insiders have accused us that Sun Yuchen has repeatedly used Huobi to "prick the needle" - this is also known as "directional blasting", through server delays, downtime, modification of K-line misleading investment and other means and manipulation of the currency price, so that users can maliciously liquidate their positions.
"The money he earns from 'needle piercing' is not enough for his hourly salary, but he just wants to earn it." An investor in the currency circle who has been in contact with Sun Yuchen said.
Fear spread, and users began to flee the Huobi exchange, which was supposed to be the strongest barrier to collapse.
Everything is like the reincarnation of Justin Sun's young road to fame, and he has once again completed a success that seems to be achievable without too much cost and cost, but is difficult for most people to achieve. In interviews in his early years, he mentioned many times that the family education he received from childhood to adulthood was that no matter what he did, he "must win".
The road to winning is full of ups and downs, and the most difficult thing is to break through people's "hearts". Not everyone can "ignore" in one way or another.
Sun Yuchen's choice to change industries, the ending is not different.
In addition to blockchain, he used to have a "Accompany Me App". It was a stranger social software that he acquired shortly after returning to China, focusing on anonymous chats, girls can choose to pay for calls, and the profit model is simple and rude.
"Accompany me" has made Sun Yuchen a lot of profits, but the soft service policy is hugely risky. A few years later, Sun Yuchen turned off "Accompany Me" and told people around him that this kind of heavy operation business is "not cost-effective enough".
But this is Sun Yuchen's closest to "normal" entrepreneurship, even if "lust" is the same as speculating in virtual currency, it is valued because it is an addictive thing.
An unconfirmed detail is that an old acquaintance of Sun Yuchen said that someone told Sun Yuchen's fortune in his early years, "saying that he is not suitable for pragmatism, but for retreat." After showing his strength in the blockchain industry, this matter was once said to others by him as a kind of "it is inevitable that it will happen". Justin Sun's Douyin has 420,000 followers, and the TRON he founded has hundreds of millions of accounts (as of 2022). Perhaps the encounter between the master of retreat and virtual currency is really a historical coincidence.
Disease Outbreak: Trust Dies
In the winter of 2017, in the courtyard of Beijing's East Second Ring Road, a KTV called "I If" was closed to the public, and the warm-colored lights were ambiguous. Between the staggered plans, Sun Yuchen, a new star in the currency circle, and Xu Zijing, a celebrity in the currency circle at that time, chatted very speculatively.
Xu Zijing, nicknamed "Martian", was a dazzling star in the blockchain industry at that time. At that time, HSR, the Martian coin, was also one of the hottest coins.
According to people who used to be very close to Sun Yuchen, Sun Yuchen talked about ideals, HSR and the future of TRON all night, "Xu Zijing felt that Sun Yuchen was terrible in the future, and he liked him very much." At the end of the conversation, "the two decided to swap coins", the above-mentioned person said, "Sun Yuchen's statement afterwards is that the Martian exchanged 140,000 HCASH (HSR) for 333 million TRON coins, and the two completed the exchange on the spot."
The happy party lasted until two o'clock in the morning, and Sun Yuchen said that he was going back to the company. When Xu Zijing sent him to the gate of the courtyard, he did not forget to praise Sun Yuchen's dedication and diligence with the people around him.
Then—according to the picture described by the above-mentioned person—Sun Yuchen went out, turned a corner, leaned against the wall, and sold all the HSR that Xu Zijing had just redeemed at the mouth of the alley.
According to people familiar with the matter at the time, 36Kr told Sun Yuchen that Sun Yuchen earned nearly 30 million yuan by selling HSR. This directly led to a sharp drop in the price of HSR. When Xu Zi woke up the next day, HSR had already triggered a stampede down, and "this coin was weak."
The incident has not been publicly reported, and the above scene has been described by many people who are familiar with Sun. And the Martian Xu Zijing chose to remain silent when he faced 36 Krypton and asked if the incident was as described above.
At first glance, this sounds illogical, why do Martians trust Sun Yuchen so much? To outsiders, this is like exchanging more liquid dollars for Zimbabwean currency, or taking Alibaba's equity for start-ups.
But insiders weren't surprised. Around 2017, it was very popular in the currency circle to exchange coins and endorse each other, "There are too many coins in the hands of Martians, and Sun Yuchen has a bunch of titles, which can also convince others." Perhaps more crucially, "the people who exchanged coins with the Martians before all had a moral bottom line, which made him overestimate human nature."
"If in a disaster movie, Brother Sun must be the one who will do everything to survive to the end." People who are familiar with Sun Yuchen commented, and the implication is that he is selfish enough and greedy enough.
These two personalities have indeed helped Sun Yuchen pave the way for wealth. But in the long run, it is like two defects that eventually penetrate into the blood, helping the subject to wear out an important emotional relationship - trust.
"He has no friends or allies in the world, and once there is a disagreement in cooperation, it must be that he cheats the other party, and he will be happy because he has cheated the other party, and he will also have a sense of intellectual superiority. Ma Jiajia, Sun Yuchen's only public girlfriend, told us.
To make matters worse, people see a new sample – at the end of the known story, the selfish and greedy go unpunished.
Liu Ming, Sun Yuchen's senior at Peking University and an early employee of TRON, is also one of his old enemies. TRON's first white paper was written by Liu Ming.
On the phone with us, Liu Ming claimed that in addition to the white paper, there was also the opening report of Sun Yuchen's graduation thesis (on blockchain) at Lakeside University, "which I wrote, but Sun Yuchen later said that it was his own work."
In his opinion, he is one of the founders of TRON - when the company was preparing to launch the ICO, there were only 5 people in the team, and except for Liu Ming, no one knew about blockchain and ICO. He recalled that when the roadshow arrived in Changsha, a colleague in Beijing called him and asked, "What is ERC20?" ERC20 is the standard for issuing tokens on the smart contract platform Ethereum, and his colleagues were completely unaware of this concept, which surprised Liu Ming.
But the "veteran" soon almost went to prison. At the time of the release of the "94 Announcement", Sun Yuchen was in South Korea, and he stated in the live broadcast that the proceeds obtained from the issuance of coins in China would not be returned. This means that the employees who remain in the country face huge legal risks, "we are all going to jail, and he doesn't care about our situation and feelings at all".
In the end, under the pressure of Changpeng Zhao, He Yi and others, the founders of Binance, Sun Yuchen returned the bitcoins obtained from the ICO. However, because the private placement part has been cashed out, industry insiders speculate that Sun Yuchen used the money from the sale of the "Martian" HSR coin to fill the gap.
But the former partners eventually parted ways. According to Liu Ming, when the TRON project was successful, it was already very valuable, and Liu Ming hoped to land the share that he had verbally negotiated with Sun Yuchen before, "I didn't want more, just about 5%." But Sun Yuchen refused, and the two parted unhappily.
And the industry "big brother" and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who once had some personal relations with Sun Yuchen, could not escape the selfish side of the former.
In May of this year, Binance launched a mining project where users can mine using BNB and TUSD (two stablecoins).
On the same day, Sun transferred a huge amount of TUSD to the mining project in ten transactions, which led to a large part of the mine being mined by Sun Yuchen - a disguised exclusion and expulsion of other medium-sized and small players. Later, Changpeng Zhao mocked Sun Yuchen on social networking sites, and the latter responded in the air, saying, "I made a mistake, I hit a few more zeros."
"It's embarrassing for people to see this kind of thing, and when it's time to make money, Brother Sun doesn't look at who the other party is, and the bottom line is very low," said a former TRON executive.
As a result, controversy formed, and some people who could still understand Sun Yuchen also began to defect. They expressed their confusion at 36 Krypton, why did Sun Yuchen still show his greedy side when he was already so rich. In fact, on the other hand, he is greedy enough, which may explain Sun's path to "success" - in his early years, he repeatedly told the media who came to interview him that how much money he made was the only measure of success.
"Justin Sun is like a drug addict who is highly addicted to making money because he has no way to get any pleasure from anywhere else. Ma Jiajia told us.
When his former friends were enemies of him, money could at least buy employees and a community of interests - they were the few guarantees for this "patient" in addition to wealth, but Sun Yuchen now even lost them.
A TRON employee accidentally discovered that he had millions of yuan worth of digital currency on Binance. Then everyone found out that "it was Sun Yuchen who used the identity information of several TRON employees to open an account on the Binance trading platform, and deposited the TRON coins he mastered into the account and sold them for cash". Angry, the employee eventually left.
It can be a small amount of money that can ruin the labor relationship. In October last year, after Sun Yuchen became a member of the Huobi Global Advisory Committee and gradually took over Huobi, he began "disguised layoffs". According to information in Huobi's employee rights protection group, the methods include "employees who do not reimburse travel expenses in advance, increase the number of salary deductions, and do not get compensation even if they are laid off".
In contrast, in 2019, when Huobi founder Li Lin officially gave up his business and turned Huobi overseas, he took out tens of millions in his personal name and paid each employee an extra month's salary.
In such a situation, trust is crumbling and has become an empty term that is inconvenient to delve into. Some employees are worried, "If something happens to Huobi, Li Lin will take care of it." But when Sun Yuchen was in trouble with Huobi, he would only draw his salary from the bottom of the kettle, so everyone was thinking about how to make a fortune and ran away, betraying in both directions."
Terminally ill: There is only one lonely planet left
In the end, the lover and blood ties became the last layer of safety net, maintaining the "patient's" weak relationship with free existence, and they almost pulled him back into a normal world.
Sun Yuchen's father worked on Huobi.com, specializing in corruption, and internally called his father "master" and "head of the Huobi Discipline Inspection Commission". Huobi employees once said, "Sun Yuchen doesn't believe anyone, he always feels that someone is corrupt." "For a while, all the money he made was taken care of by his father.
Ma Jiajia said that Sun's father was conservative and old-fashioned, and he seriously considered "handing over" all the money and "changing his son's free body back to China, but everyone saw the result."
She and Sun Yuchen have been in a real relationship for a while. But Sun's extremely weak spirit of contract not only led to the breakdown of his relationship with the people he worked with, but also led to the failure of intimate relationships. Ma Jiajia believes that "being with him is a stain on my life."
Coming to this point, the former lover is only left with a huge suspicion, "He stands on the top of the heads of people all over the world, I used to think that he would spend a lifetime to go to the step of anti-human and anti-society, but I didn't expect him to come in one step."
In Sun Yuchen's mansion, it is rare to welcome a real hostess. Even his close assistant, a man who had followed him for many years, thought that he had a very clear sense of inner boundaries. "I sometimes ask him, Brother Sun, how many girlfriends do you have now, do you plan to get married, and he will divert the topic."
He may have thought about having a child, but he didn't value the role of "mother". A former Huobi employee said Mr. Sun had seriously studied artificial insemination and surrogacy.
You don't need a relationship of trust, you're not good at romantic relationships, you're not obsessed with fame, and you're making enough money. When the bigwigs in the currency circle generally enjoy the top wealth in the world, he seems to be a person who is powerless to struggle and no longer cares.
In Singapore, he rarely participates in the rich people's drunken money and yacht parties. "If you look at the photos he occasionally circulates with others, they are all very business parties, and everyone is smirking and raising their glasses to pose for photos," said a blockchain practitioner.
In the game of poker and egg hunting that is often held in the circle, you can't see Sun Yuchen. Du Jun remembers that after the Hong Kong Web3 Conference in April this year, he and Sun Yuchen participated in the After Party together. At that time, many familiar people in the circle were playing cards in full swing and called them to play, but Sun Yuchen only watched from a distance for a while with a wine glass.
He doesn't seem to have any particular hobbies other than making money. According to his assistant, Sun Yuchen worked from morning to night, and his home and office were two points and one line. And he has no appetite, and only eats the food cooked by the chef at home every day. The meals were packed into lunch boxes and brought into his office, looking no different from the most ordinary lunch boxes outside. And in order to keep in shape, he spends a meal with a little vegetable salad all year round.
This is contrary to the imagination of many blockchain investors, in their opinion, Sun Yuchen should be extremely luxurious, "even if Brother Sun uses pure gold to build a toilet, I will not find it strange."
The scenes and opinions described in the documentary "Rich Life" are more in line with the public's perception of Sun Yuchen's "life as he should have" - custom yachts, luxury houses, top luxury cars studded with diamonds, these "toys" that can be easily obtained by super-rich people with a snap of their fingers, Sun Yuchen does not seem to have any. And in the existing culture, "people are more willing to talk about the new rich than the old money, so the visible wealth [of the new rich] is important".
It's only when you're out on the street with him that you can understand a little bit about the reason for the above scene - the bodyguards never leave you. There are even suspicions that he has body armor in his jacket when he goes to crowded places.
Although the rich spend huge sums of money on security every year, not everyone has the same fear as Sun Yuchen.
An entrepreneur who has close personal relations with a number of bigwigs in the currency industry said that he heard in March this year that Sun Yuchen's "reward order" in the mainland had reached 50 million yuan.
"The people around him are always coming and going, and everyone is thinking about how to get a fortune from him. Probably the only people who really cared about him were those he had "harvested", who were desperately waiting for him to return.
"To be honest, I don't want a life like Justin Sun," the entrepreneur said.
"Rich Life" argues that people with extremely high net worth have serious trust problems, which makes their lives extremely complicated. Moreover, most of the rich face one last fear, who will remember them, and how to be remembered. "When we look at them from afar, we wish we had this kind of life, but the ultimate luxury, such as security and fearlessness, cannot be bought with any amount of money."
We talked about a senior of Sun Yuchen at Peking University, who also joined the Peking Student Union. But when it comes to this junior, he thinks this is a person who is not worth discussing. "At least we don't take the initiative to talk about him at class reunions. A person who cannot bring value to the world is not a prerequisite for his success. A man is the enemy of the world, and he cannot be the boss."
We try to reach out to people who have helped and invested in Justin Sun. The reply was, "We can talk about the former post-90s entrepreneurs, but we have no position (to talk about him) for Sun Yuchen."
He seems to be alone on a lonely planet. No one wants to spend energy caring about the secrets of his heart - whether he will regret if he cannot return to Chinese mainland in his life. And where the planet he is on will eventually wander to.
So, it's easy to have a question, why is Sun Yuchen like this, and what else does he want?
Many media attributed his excessive pursuit of success to the constant quarrels of his parents when he was young, his mother's overly assertive mother, the tutor who had to compete for the first place in everything, and the insecure family of origin. But it doesn't matter if it's the right answer, and as an adult, all that will sway him is to go with the flow in Vanity Fair.
As for the latter question, we asked him on the phone. Not surprisingly, he expressed his determination to contribute to the blockchain industry in a tirade. His public relations team also tried to persuade us that instead of writing about Sun Yuchen and his person, it is better to write about TRON's business, and how Sun Yuchen uses technical means to "make the industry good": "Why should we pay attention to his personal affairs, which is an innocent person?"
In the end, the answers to all questions may only exist in his heart.
It's just a bit of a pity. When he returned to China after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and received IDG capital financing to devote himself to the blockchain, Sun Yuchen was the most dazzling representative of the post-90s entrepreneurs.
At that time, the tide of the PC era was receding from the beachhead of China's Internet. People still clearly remember that it was an era when Internet +, traditional push, 2G network, Bitcoin, and mobile Internet went hand in hand.
The post-90s generation began to bear expectations, and some of them became the light of this era ten years later. Sun Yuchen should have been one of them. But the surging opportunities allow many young people to bear the word "change", while in the hearts of others, they have to add the weight of "choice".
Fame and fortune eventually erased the edge of this young man, and bred all kinds of substances that are contrary to warmth, innovation, justice, and tolerance, which go deep into the skin and blood along the intestines, and may eventually spread throughout the body.
(Thanks to Liu Shiwu, Guo Pengchao, Mr. Wang, and Mr. Lu for their contributions to this article)