Recently, I’ve been looking into Sun Yuchen’s business empire, and the more I look, the more I realize this guy’s ambitions in the crypto world are truly extraordinary. Eight years ago, he said, “The standard for measuring a person is how much money they make,” and now it seems that’s not just talk.

First, let’s talk about Tron, which is a public blockchain project launched by Sun Yuchen in 2017. At that time, Ethereum was already gaining fame, and he set aside his previous social app project to gather a few Peking University classmates and start the journey of Tron’s entrepreneurship. They initially raised about $400 million, but soon ran into the “9.4” ICO ban, and for a time, they were in a difficult position. However, a turning point came in 2019 when Tether decided to issue a TRC-20 version of USDT on the Tron network. This move almost solidified Tron’s current market cap, which accounts for 99% of Tron’s total value today. Currently, USDT transfers on Tron’s chain account for over 98% of the total on public blockchains, with daily on-chain revenue exceeding $2.1 million and annualized revenue reaching $770 million. Tron’s total market value now exceeds $9.86M, ranking among the top mainstream public chains worldwide.

In addition to the blockchain, Sun Yuchen also spent $140 million in 2018 to acquire BitTorrent, the “outdated” download tool. Many post-80s and post-90s remember this P2P protocol, which at its peak handled about 40% of global internet traffic. Sun Yuchen’s idea was to blockchain-ize the entire BitTorrent protocol, then launched the BTT token. Users could pay with BTT to download seeds faster, while uploaders could earn rewards by seeding. Now, the total circulating supply of BTT has reached 986 trillion tokens, with a market cap of about $670 million.

On the exchange platform front, Sun Yuchen owns Poloniex and HTX. Poloniex was first acquired by Circle in 2018, and later, in June 2022, Sun Yuchen, together with several investment institutions, officially bought it back and rebranded it as “Tron Exchange.” This acquisition filled the gap in Tron’s ecosystem for a trading platform. That October, he also turned his attention to Huobi, acquiring a stake worth $1 billion through Hong Kong-based asset management firm About Capital, becoming the actual leader of the platform. Today, Huobi remains among the top 10 exchanges with a daily trading volume of $2.4 billion.

In the stablecoin sector, Sun Yuchen personally led the launch of USDD, a decentralized stablecoin issued and managed by Tron DAO Reserve. To ensure USDD remains anchored to the dollar, he directly controls the key assets in the collateral pool—TRX, USDT, Bitcoin, and others. During market fluctuations, he repeatedly injected his own funds to stabilize the system. Currently, USDD’s on-chain market cap is about $1.47 billion. There are also TUSD and WBTC—these stablecoins and wrapped Bitcoin have become important tools for Sun Yuchen to leverage liquidity on-chain.

DLive is his layout in the content platform space. It’s a decentralized live streaming platform that later migrated into the Tron ecosystem. The platform integrated BTFS for decentralized storage, with BTT tokens used for tipping streamers and content distribution incentives. It once attracted top overseas streamers like PewDiePie.

As a top art collector, Sun Yuchen also established the APENFT Foundation in 2021, aiming to connect traditional art with the NFT world through this platform. The APENFT Marketplace uses Ethereum and Tron’s dual-layer technology, integrated with BTFS for decentralized storage. Currently, the market value of platform tokens and NFTs is about $289 million.

More importantly, Sun Yuchen recently spent $100 million to acquire SRM Entertainment, a U.S.-listed company, through a reverse merger, enabling Tron to go public on NASDAQ. At 35 years old, he is now the head of a publicly listed company.

What’s even more interesting is his recent moves in the U.S. Heavily backing the cryptocurrency industry, the Trump family has made high-profile bets, and Sun Yuchen has invested a total of $75 million at the end of last year and this year into the World Liberty Financial project, becoming the “biggest supporter,” and was appointed as a core advisor by the Trump family. His HTX exchange was also the first to list the new stablecoin USD1 from WLFI. He also bought the largest Trump-themed coin ($Trump), holding 1.43 million tokens. The official Trump team invited the top 220 holders of $Trump to a dinner, and Sun Yuchen immediately tweeted that he was the biggest holder. It’s said that Trump only attended the dinner for half an hour, and the second half turned into a personal showcase for Sun Yuchen.

Sun Yuchen said himself, “I am the bridge between the crypto industry and the president; in a way, I might also be the bridge for future China-U.S. communication.” Compared to CZ, who paid a hefty price to gain entry into the U.S., Sun Yuchen’s costs are minimal. Now he’s back in the U.S., visiting multiple locations and companies, openly expressing his “affection” for Trump.

From Tron to BitTorrent, from Poloniex to HTX, to stablecoins like USDD, TUSD, WBTC—these “cash pools” that can leverage on-chain liquidity—plus the APENFT Marketplace, an “on-chain art gallery,” Sun Yuchen has spent less than ten years turning his crypto business map into a comprehensive ecosystem spanning public chains, trading platforms, stablecoins, NFTs, cross-chain, and international politics. Behind this seemingly decentralized yet tightly interconnected network, the core assets he holds are valued at over $40 billion. In a changing U.S., nothing is forever lost. For entrepreneurs like Sun Yuchen, the most important things are freedom and opportunity, and he is seizing the opportunities this era presents.