Tron founder Justin Sun with Pablo Picasso’s Femme nue couchée au collier (Marie-Thérèse), 1932, which he purchased for $20 million at Christie’s in 2021. Courtesy of APENFT Foundation. Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron blockchain, is inarguably one of the most fascinating people in the NFT space right now. A self-made billionaire, the 31-year-old founder has collected more than $100 million worth of NFTs and traditional art—by artists from Picasso to Giacometti—this year alone, generating new headlines almost every month.
While Sun was already a household name in crypto circles beforehand, he grabbed the attention of the general public in 2019 when he won a $4.6 million bid in a charity auction to share a meal with Warren Buffett. According to news reports, he gave Buffett an assortment of cryptocurrencies, including one Bitcoin, in an attempt to convert the famous value investor into a crypto believer.
Unlike many collectors, Sun was not born into wealth or a privileged family. He has spoken about how, when his family moved to a small town in Guangdong in the ‘90s, he would linger in a bookstore until closing time every summer because his parents couldn’t afford air conditioning at home.
Growing up, the young Sun was a rebel. Ambitious as a writer, he refused to study for his exams, instead burning the midnight oil to pen a novel. As luck would have it, Sun got his first taste of success through his writing, winning an essay contest in his last year of high school that gained him entry into Peking University, considered among the finest in China.
Sun was also interested in the stock market, and after graduation, in 2012, he made a significant investment in Tesla shares—a bet that paid off handsomely. He went on to found TRON in 2018, creating a cryptocurrency platform that today has more than 65 million active users and more than 2.5 billion transactions logged. Sun’s profile, meanwhile, has risen along with his business successes, as reflected in his more than 3.4 million Twitter followers.
These days, Sun is undergoing a period of personal and professional evolution. Earlier this year, he created the APENFT Foundation with the veteran curator Sydney Xiong, now the foundation’s director, as a blockchain-based platform for hosting, exhibiting, and sharing the estimable art collection he has amassed. Then, just this month, Sun sent shockwaves through the crypto world by stepping down at Tron to become an ambassador of the Grenada government to the World Trade Organization—an effort to raise the profile of both cryptocurrency and the blockchain in the Caribbean, which he sees as uniquely receptive to innovation. Oh, and just last month he revealed himself as the winner of the $28 million auction to join Blue Origin’s crew—along with five handpicked fellow travelers—on a voyage to space.
Amid all of this activity, Artnet NFT’s Jiayin Chen got together with Justin Sun to discuss all things crypto, and hear Sun’s vision for NFTs. Peking University’s campus in Beijing, China. Photo by Jiangang Wang. When people tell your story, your early years pursuing a B.A. in history at Peking University always receive prominent mention. How did your experience there shape your career?
The main thing my passion for history has taught me is to always learn from past experience. Whenever I start something new, I always look back and refer to previous experience as a basis for reflection to improve the ways I think and work. My background with history and literature has also enabled me to be open-minded and build an appreciation for different cultures and art.
At 31 years old, you are a member of a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs. What are the characteristics that distinguish your generation from those that precede it?
I would summarize the main characteristics that I identify our generation with as resilience, willingness to take risks, and strong faith. Born into the generation that experienced the country’s rapid economic growth, I find that there have been many opportunities in almost all industries since the 1990s, from manufacturing to financial services. After I graduated from the university, there was a new wave of “mass entrepreneurship” in the country. For people like me, the post-‘90s, the internet, and the digital age are the keywords to the future, so it was natural for me to start something as a young entrepreneur in internet-related activities.
The tricky part is to find one industry or sector that you are passionate about and delve into it. People might not understand what you are doing at first, but […]
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