A public clash between Binance CEO Changpeng CZ Zhao and Tron founder Justin Sun aired yesterday.
The issue was the launch of the SUI token on Binance’s Launchpool.
Binance CEO vs. Tron founder over SUI token issue
On April 30, Binance announced the launch of the 33rd project on its Launchpool, namely Sui. The Sui project, with its SUI token, is a level 1 DPoS blockchain based on the Move programming language.
Staking and farming of SUI started yesterday, in BNB and TUSD.
It must be remembered that since Binance USD (BUSD) had problems, the exchange’s preferred stablecoin has become True USD (TUSD).
When SUI’s liquidity meets Binance‘s requirements, the exchange will start trading SUI/BTC, SUI/USDT, SUI/TUSD and SUI/BNB pairs.
The problem caused by Justin Sun according to CZ at Binance
Just yesterday, Whale Alert reported that over 56 million TUSD were transferred from Justin Sun to Binance.
Upon hearing the news, the CEO of Binance posted a tweet reporting that the exchange team told the Tron founder that they would take action against him if he used any of those tokens to purchase SUI.
The reason is that Binance’s LaunchPool is supposed to be a tool for small retail investors, not whales.
Tron founder’s response
Justin Sun also later publicly responded to CZ’s tweet.
He first stated that TRON DAO Venture is a market maker partnering with TUSD, and that the main objective of this multi-million dollar deposit was to facilitate market making of TUSD among major exchanges to improve liquidity and trading volume.
In fact, he denied, albeit indirectly, that he wanted to participate in SUI’s LaunchPool.
However, he also admitted that some members of his team were not fully aware of the intended use of these funds and thus “inadvertently” used some of them to participate in the very purchase of SUI.
Sun admits that this was a mistake and reveals that he immediately contacted the Binance team and arranged for a full refund of the funds.
Finally, he apologizes to CZ.
Problem solved?
The specific issue regarding the possible purchase of SUI on Binance’s LaunchPool with funds from the TRON DAO venture seems to have been resolved.
But one question remains: how was this possible?
Note that CZ himself had stated in his initial tweet that blockchains are transparent, which means that such actions cannot go unnoticed.
And for this very reason, it seems really strange that Justin Sun was aware of such an initiative, since he would have immediately realized that it would certainly not go unnoticed.
While it is by no means possible to say that similar things will not happen again in the future, it does show how much easier it is in the crypto world to not let such initiatives go unnoticed.
On the other hand, this issue is emblematic because it shows once again how active the whales are in this market. The fact is that the actions of the whales, who can easily deploy huge amounts of capital, have little impact on the markets.
In fact, in many cases, when a market is tight or very young, the whales can do as they please.
All of this is practically inevitable, however, because incentivized blockchains cannot prevent large capital transfers by the whales in any way, so they are actually free to manipulate markets in some cases.
SUI is not yet listed, so there may not have been any market manipulation yet, but watch out when it is listed, because at that point it is fair to wonder if the whales will be able to manipulate its price, for example by letting it rise in order to sell what they bought cheaply before.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2023/05/02/binance-ceo-versus-tron-founder/