---

Listen to SupChina editor-at-large and Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo read this article.

---

Tim Gionet, a prominent far-right personality who calls himself “Baked Alaska,” was nearing the steps of the U.S. Capitol early this month, during what has now become an infamous day of rioting and violence, when a woman wearing a red “Connecticut for Trump” hat pulled him over. 

“There’s Chinese writing over there,” she said, before launching into a loud cheer: “CCP Go home! CCP go home!” Gionet soon joined in with his own defiant chant: “Go back to China, CCP! Go back to China!” 

This exchange is captured on Gionet’s 27-minute livestream from that day on DLive, a streaming site that has become popular among far-right activists. Along the side of the video, viewers posted their comments — “Chinese spy,” one declared — while every so often a ‘Lemon’ appeared, signifying that a viewer had tipped Gionet with the platform’s integrated cryptocurrency.

But what Gionet and his roughly 17,800 DLive viewers may not have realized was that they were shouting anti-China slogans on a Chinese-owned platform. DLive is owned by a 30-year-old Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Justin Sun.¹In Chinese, he is 孙宇晨 or Sūn Yǔchén. Sun has quickly made a name for himself by founding and acquiring a series of blockchain-related companies around the world. (Both DLive and Sun declined to comment for this story.)

Since Sun acquired DLive²See this New York Times profile of the site. in 2019, the company has built a dedicated user base of live streamers who have been kicked off other platforms like YouTube and Twitch for using violent or racist language. PewDiePie, the most-subscribed individual on YouTube who is known for anti-semitism and inspiring white nationalists, was the first to make the migration in 2019, when he signed an exclusive streaming deal with DLive.³PewDiePie has since returned to YouTube.

“DLive lacked any reliable content moderation features, so it was something of an ‘anything goes’ environment,” says Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies online extremism. 

While Facebook, Twitter, and more fringe platforms like Parler and Gab have all been criticized for allowing content about the Capitol riot to proliferate, DLive, experts say, is another extreme example of lax moderation guidelines.

“That’s why these guys went over there,” says Tim Swanson, head of market intelligence for Clearmatics, a London-based blockchain company. “And they could be paid in these coins that reside on infrastructure that is hard to stop.”

While there is no advertising on the site, DLive, which boasts 7 million active users, takes a 25 percent cut of the creators’ streaming revenue on the platform. On the day of the Capitol riots, for example, Gionet may have collected as much as $2,175 from viewers’ tips.⁴Last week, the FBI announced that Gionet had been arrested for his involvement in the riot, citing his DLive video as evidence. DLive saw a sharp increase in usage leading up to the day of the Capitol riots, when the site reached its peak viewership of more than 156,000 people, according to livestream analysts. Every one of the top 50 DLive channels that day, analysts say, were either streaming from the riot or giving commentary on the riot. 

Everyone hates Justin Sun. But everyone wants to be Justin Sun if they get the chance.

Wayne Zhao, a cryptocurrency analyst

Anti-China sentiment aside, the fact that DLive’s growth collided with the most seminal moment of Donald Trump’s presidency is not entirely surprising. According to analysts and those who have met him, Justin Sun’s flashy personality and penchant for hyperbolic marketing are, in a way, Trumpian.

“He has a certain people skill that allows him to build really fast,” says Jack Liu, CEO of RelayX, a Bitcoin SV wallet, who has met Sun. “He has a PR touch. I thought of him as extremely commercial.” 

While Sun makes no secret of his entrepreneurial spirit, he also claims that all of his ventures are inspired by the same goal: to “decentralize” the internet. With the use of blockchain — a database distributed over individual devices in a network — some technologists say regular people can take back power from corporations like Google and Facebook, which profit off of user data, thus returning the internet to its original utopia. 

With multiple cryptocurrencies and blockchain companies, as well as over 2 million Twitter followers, Sun has positioned himself as one of the biggest personalities in the movement to decentralize the internet. He relentlessly taunts the “old” guard, promising to make the internet great again. 

But even before the Capitol riots, his brashness and quick rise have landed him at the center of controversy after controversy, everything from illegal fundraising and managing a site with pornographic content to allegations of plagiarism.⁵Sun and his companies have been accused of plagiarizing a “white paper” on cryptocurrency, according to an article about Sun in The Verge. He has tried to fashion himself as the next Jack Ma, but to some, he is the next Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. 

“Everyone hates Justin Sun,” says Wayne Zhao, a Beijing-based cryptocurrency analyst. “But everyone wants to be Justin Sun if they get the chance.” 

THE HYPE MAN

Justin Sun first made U.S. headlines in 2019 when he paid $4.6 million to win a charity lunch with Warren Buffett. While the sum itself was a record, Sun managed to keep the attention going for a solid month. First he used Twitter to invite President Trump to join — Trump didn’t respond — promising to convert both him and Buffett into blockchain enthusiasts, and then he abruptly cancelled just days before the event. 

Sun cited kidney stones as his excuse, but some people think that he touched a nerve in Beijing by trying to show off to a famous American businessman at a sensitive time in the trade war. Rumors swirled that China was not letting him leave the country. Although he ended up livestreaming from his San Francisco apartment in order to prove his whereabouts, he also issued a somewhat confounding apology on Weibo later that week for “excessive self promotion” and overhyping the event.

If Sun really did cross officials in China, it wouldn’t have been the first time.

Born in Qinghai, Sun graduated from the prestigious Peking University, where he studied history, and then earned a master’s degree in political economy from the University of Pennsylvania. Later, he became part of the inaugural class at Hupan University, the business school started by Jack Ma, where his thesis was titled The Birth of a Decentralized Internet.

In 2013, when he was 23 years old, he founded Peiwo, or ‘accompany me,’ an audio livestreaming app that matched users by analyzing voice samples.⁶The company was backed by GX Capital, IDG Capital, China Equity Group and the Fashion Group of Shenzhen, according to Pitchbook The idea was to minimize the emphasis other dating apps put on looks, and its popularity among young users soon landed Sun on Forbes magazine’s 30 under 30 for Asia’s Consumer Technology in 2017. But Peiwo was criticized by the Chinese government for a failure to moderate pornographic content, and by 2019, it was kicked out of mobile app stores.

This was only a small setback for Sun though since his sights were set on cryptocurrency. While he was running Peiwo, Sun also claimed to be working as the China lead for Ripple, an American cryptocurrency startup that was aiming to challenge the two most established cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and Ethereum.⁷Sun also started Tron in Beijing in 2014 and used a name similar to Ripple in founding the firm, according to WireScreen data.  But a person close to Ripple says, “Justin was a communications manager for Ripple in China around 2014 for a brief period,” and then adds, “He was certainly never CEO of China for Ripple, but misrepresented himself that way at times.”

Cryptocurrency at the time was “a wild, wild west ecosystem,” says RelayX’s Liu, who knew Sun then and notes that there weren’t that many opportunities in the Chinese tech world. “When he was coming up, if you built a traditional tech company, you were likely going to be gobbled up by one of the big tech companies,” says Liu. “But there was an emerging opportunity in blockchain. That was probably exciting to him.”

By 2017, he set out on his own, launching a new digital coin, called Tron.

Cryptocurrency experts agree that while there is something special about Tron, it is not the technology. Tron has been accused of copying the style of, and even plagiarizing, the technologies of other blockchain companies, especially Ethereum. But Tron has managed to stand out, observers say, because Sun is an excellent hype man — an especially valuable skill when it comes to encouraging users to adopt a new technology.

“Getting people excited about Tron, showing his face, creating an identity around being a supporter of Tron like a tribe — Justin has done that successfully, and he has monetized it successfully,” says Alexander Blum, managing director of crypto-focused asset management firm Two Prime. Blum says that while most leaders in the cryptocurrency world build great technologies and wait for users to follow, Sun has flipped the model on its head. “Justin built great marketing and is using that capital to create technology to follow after it,” Blum adds.

Sun, for instance, got Kobe Bryant to speak at a Tron conference in 2019. To promote his ventures, he also posted pictures of himself with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, published an autobiography in Chinese, “Brave New World,” and posed for stylish photos in the Chinese edition of GQ magazine. He regularly appears on cryptocurrency podcasts, like “The Wolf of All Streets” and “BitBoy Crypto,” has been interviewed on CNBC and organized his own cryptocurrency conference for what he calls his Tron fans.⁸Sun also claims that the Chinese government has appointed him as an advisor to help develop blockchain in China. Sun mentions the government post in this YouTube interview, in about minute 16 to 17.

But his marketing genius seems to boil down to the persona he’s created for himself. Sun has amassed 2.1 million followers on Twitter — an astonishing number considering Twitter is banned in his native China — by presenting himself as a loud-mouthed, up-and-comer. In his flashy Gucci sneakers (complete with golden pineapples), Sun leans into the idea of nipping at the staid heels of the old guard. On Twitter, he often teases men like Buffett, Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. “#HaveFunStayingPoor,” he tweeted at Buffett earlier this month, deriding Buffett for being behind the times and not embracing cryptocurrency. 

The efforts haven’t always been smooth — he once botched a giveaway promotion so badly, he was forced to give away two Teslas instead of one — but they have paid off. In 2018 Tron became the tenth most valuable cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, according to Coinbase. Today, it ranks 20th with $2.1 billion of the virtual coin in circulation. (Like many cryptocurrencies, Tron is highly volatile — its value ballooned 460 percent in the past year before falling to its current level.)

But as Sun barreled ahead, China pumped the brakes, starting to crack down on cryptocurrency trading in 2017. Although the People’s Bank of China is a pioneer in experimenting with a state-backed digital currency — something central banks around the world, including in the U.S., are considering — cryptocurrency not controlled by the government presents serious challenges. 

To start, China only allows citizens to take $50,000 worth of Renminbi out of the country each year without special approval. Cryptocurrency that can be bought for Renminbi easily thwarts this capital control. And, in a country where monetary transactions are increasingly digitized and surveilled, cryptocurrency offers a way for people to transact out of the state’s sight. Indeed, the whole concept of a decentralized internet — Sun’s holy grail — runs into massive challenges in China, where the internet is highly centralized and controlled. 

“A decentralized internet wouldn’t really work in China, because China controls the internet to such an extent,” says Leo Weese, the co-founder of the Hong Kong Bitcoin Association. “BitTorrent doesn’t really work in China; blockchains don’t even really work in China.”

This puts Sun in a bit of a gray area in his home country. While Tron is not illegal in China, cryptocurrency fundraising efforts — called Initial Coin Offerings — are. Sun was also banned on Weibo, China’s Twitter, in 2019, presumably for the relentless promotion of his cryptocurrencies.

“He’s quite a character,” says Weese. “That’s the thing that he is most criticized for. And that got him in trouble in China, building a personality cult in China isn’t really acceptable.”

But so far, Sun seems to be succeeding at walking this tightrope. While his companies, including the Tron Foundation, are registered in Singapore, Sun splits his time between San Francisco and Beijing, and continues to double down on expanding his cryptocurrency and blockchain empire.

Exactly how Sun made his fortune is unclear. He only raised about $10 million for Peiwo, according to Pitchbook. And corporate registration records in China show that he owns 99 percent of a Tron affiliate in Beijing and stakes in 15 other Chinese firms, one backed by the automotive billionaire Yin Mingshan, according to WireScreen.⁹WireScreen is the data division of The Wire 

Still, in 2018, Tron bought BitTorrent for $140 million. The 14-year-old company offered a powerful way to share files across a network of users’ computers. Although the technology was best known as a tool to pirate movies and software, Sun saw its value as a way to distribute a cryptocurrency infrastructure across the hardware of individual users without relying on a central server. Sun developed a new cryptocurrency to go with BitTorrent — aptly named BitTorrent Token — which users could give to the hosts of their files in exchange for a greater use of their network, allowing them to download files faster.

The move was shrewd, showing that while Sun understands the technology well enough, his real strength is “on the strategic vision side,” according to Liu. “He is one of those people who commercialize crypto.” 

That effort continued in 2019 when BitTorrent bought DLive, a streaming website that, unlike YouTube and other major sites, relied on decentralized hosting. Founded in 2017 by Charles Wayn and Cole Chen, two Chinese entrepreneurs who studied at University of California at Berkeley, DLive was originally built on blockchain from another startup called Lino. When Sun acquired the platform last year, he integrated it into the BitTorrent infrastructure, and began marketing it as a platform that is “Empowering creators, rewarding communities” — a message that resonated with America’s far right.

THE ‘PATRIOT POWER HOUR’

While Sun has been one of the loudest voices advocating to decentralize the internet, his rapid ascent and success have also exposed some of the movement’s biggest challenges, culminating earlier this month at the Capitol.

The decentralization movement has attracted a diverse mix of allies, including entrepreneurs hoping to disrupt industries such as finance and social media as well as activists who want to make it harder for authoritarian governments to monitor the communications and spending of dissidents. While their immediate goals are different, they all profess to share a vision for how the internet should be run. 

“The idea is power is dispersed rather than centralized, and you don’t have to trust or fear those at the center because they don’t have control over you,” says Angela Walch, a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law who studies blockchain technology. 

But Walch notes that, more often than not, when people take down an existing system with the promise to be more egalitarian, “power doesn’t get erased… it just gets moved.” 

Sun, for instance, has been accused of abusing his newfound power. He’s been hit with lawsuits alleging everything from securities violations to workplace harassment to assault of employees. And many experts believe Sun has used Tron to boost his own wealth. If he holds a chunk of Tron coins, his net worth would increase every time demand for the virtual currency goes up. And Sun is not shy about aggressive marketing aimed to raise the price of Tron, using practices that could be illegal in securities markets.

I kept saying, you need to think through the consequences. And now we have seen the consequences on January 6th.

Richard Hall, who is currently suing Sun for workplace hostility and wrongful termination

“We call him ‘Sun Ge’,” says Zhao of TokenInsight. “Ge means ‘brother,’ but it also means ‘to pump and dump and make yourself rich.’”

Cracks also started to emerge in Sun’s vision for a decentralized platform after the Capitol riot, when DLive banned some accounts (including Gionet’s), put temporary blocks on others, and even temporarily shut down all accounts in Washington, D.C. — playing the same kind of gatekeeper role advocates of decentralization have decried. The company has also demonetized all of the accounts in the X-tag section, which includes political content.

“We simply will not tolerate the possibility of violent extremists not only broadcasting on our platform, but potentially profiting by misusing our platform to promote violence or illegal conduct,” Wayn, the DLive co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement last week. 

Sun tweeted a DLive statement on January 8 saying the company has “zero tolerance towards any forms of violence and illegal activities,” but analysts say DLive’s clamp down on extremist content is unlikely to last. 

Richard Hall, who is currently suing Sun for workplace hostility and wrongful termination, worked at BitTorrent on a project called BT Live, a similar platform to DLive that never ended up coming to market. Hall was disturbed by the company’s lack of content moderation and repeatedly advocated for stricter controls. But he says the lax environment was directly encouraged by Sun, and Hall was ultimately fired. “I kept saying, you need to think through the consequences,” says Hall. “And now we have seen the consequences on January 6th.” 

Just this week, a DLive streamer who calls himself “Patriot Power Hour” rallied his 11,000 followers and showed no signs of missing a beat. “We’ve got to counter the narrative, grow our own platforms, build our own systems,”¹⁰The “Patriot” was simultaneously streaming on his Twitter account, @412Anon87, but had only 200 viewers there. he said. 

With a backwards hat and a trim beard, the “Patriot” sat in front of a Trump flag as he made fun of the American flags lined up on the National Mall for “China Joe’s” inauguration ceremony. 

“We bought those flags, and probably from China,” he said derisively, seemingly unaware that it was only because of a man named Justin from China that he was being allowed to livestream at all. 

---