This is all entirely correct. The only thing I’d add is really the utility of the Trump coin in particular is to create an avenue to bribe Trump. Under normal circumstances, you can’t hand the president cash to push your preferred policy agenda. We call that “bribery.” Here, you can hand the president cash via “buying” a meme coin from him.
Voila! Now they can declare, “I wasn’t bribing Trump, I was investing in Trumpcoins.” Trump wins, I suppose the briber wins, what’s left of civilization loses.
i think i made that pretty clear with the **cough** TikTok **cough** comment but hey it never hurts to just be really explicit for any future readers: the TRUMP memecoin is a vector for bribes, a lot of them from China.
**UPDATE** I added a post script about at least one person that i think paid a bribe here and for what.
As always Great work wading throught that treacle thick bullshit to pull out the important points
I am enjoying the bitcoin maxis try argue how this is clearly a scam but BTC is not because... reasons...white paper...it does have utility even if no one is using it.
there's actually an uneasy truce between the bitcoin maxis and the sceptics in The Coinerian Jihad... some of the most effective sceptics at calling out cryptoo bullshit are actually bitcoin maxis (e.g. @pledditor on twitter)
It's not the first time I have found myself in the same side as Maxis. Obviously they detest Tether too, so I have made “friends” with some on that front.
like i said, it's an uneasy truce, likely to fracture at some point in the future. but when it comes to the TrumpCoin battle i have complete faith in my bitcoin maxi comrades.
Thanks very much for this post. I think I grokked less than half of it, sorry, totally my fault. The parts I did grok are scary as all H-E-double-hockey-sticks.
Thanks for doing the research and presenting it with such snark. The snark kept me going when I felt a little lost. I don't know anything about this whole ecosystem.
I mean, 45-2.0 is a known quantity now. The man is a crook, in the Nixonian sense, a crook.
I think the word that I would use for this is evil.
also i'm curious what you find hard to follow... my goal here is to try to explain this nonsense to average people so it's helpful to me to understand what kind of assumptions i might be making about background knowledge or whatever that i could do a better job elucidating.
I have, except from 2 articles, authored by you, that I read yesterday, exactly zero knowledge of crypto currency, or bitcoin, or the so-called "exchange that is not a stock market because it doesn't have contracts." Like, zip-zilch-nada!
So, I wanted to make that clear, that any errors of understanding were my responsibility.
At the same time, I was trying to praise your writing for: 1-explaining in plain language these very complex concepts, 2-making it super clear that the system is rigged, 3-praising "the snark to point out evil" linguistic vibe that you have, including new words! 4-giving a whole explanation, like: "hold on a minute - I have a lot of dots to connect, but if you stick with it, you'll see the picture at the end pretty clearly."
i'm glad you enjoyed reading it. my goal is to try to explain this stuff even to people who have almost no understanding of finance or economics, let alone crypto,. it's hard sometimes though, because you end up kind of having to repeat yourself a lot, so i think i do tend to make some assumptions about basic finance/economics knowledge that people don't have - in which case i'm always curious to know where exactly the explanation tripped them up / where i might have made some assumptions.
Michel - your research and insights are superb and a generous gift to the public. Thank you!
I, for one, have had minimal understanding of this game, yet I’ve known from the jump that it is a game. Your thorough explanation has deepened my disgust for this game and for the people who play it. I’m forwarding your great article to many others so we wake up to the intricate criminality at root. Thank you.
All this great detail, yet not a peep about Steven Witkoff, the principal backer of World Liberty Financial. He was announced as the next "Middle East Envoy" during the inauguration dinner while the scam was chugging along. He and the two pickup artist retards (yes, seriously) directly benefitted from this deliberate scam of Trump's most loyal yet unsophisticated supporters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Witkoff
Wildly entertaining. Note 5 however (footnote) I think the word 'write was used whereas 'right' was meant or implied by the context. Can check this. I get the anti-crypto angles and the whole writing but crypto-tech generally might prove important - eventually. Isn't this part of how the economy is working right now? Isn't this part of how the world is now, rather than how we want it to be? I can get the sarcasm but aren't the true believers on to something here? Bad usages (memes with ponzinomics) don't crowd out good usages (aspirational future use cases - e.g tokenisation) ... etc etc. It can't be all bad. Truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe ... 😎😑
Thanks for the engagement with my comment. I'll follow and learn from your wisdom(s). Programmable trust was meant to be the mantra so requiring simple trust nowadays is setting a high bar. ...
Thanks also for the facts cover and the research that went into writing that piece on Trump's meme-shit-ponzi-coin (depending). Charles Hoskinson (founder of Cardano, sorry) had an angle on Trump's coin which you can catch here: https://youtu.be/4SzcEguTbX8 (ending minutes) if you want to scrub along on the vid (19/20 minutes long).
>maybe for interbank transfers between offshore banks... but not, importantly for anything consumer facing.
... But wasn't that one of the most compelling reasons for existence/use of the tech? Money which people can custody and own directly plus send between each other directly without double-spending or suffering the banks & financial institutions acting as middlemen?
Anyway wanted to be some levels deep here a bit. Finally (thanks for reading I realise it's a long comment).
> ... But wasn't that one of the most compelling reasons for existence/use of the tech? Money which people can custody and own directly plus send between each other directly without double-spending or suffering the banks & financial institutions acting as middlemen?
that was the theory (it's literally the title of the bitcoin whitepaper) but that's not the reality. no one actually wants an irreversible money system where someone who hacks your phone can steal your life's savings. and literally no one uses bitcoin to buy stuff in 2024. it's polled at something like 0.1% of all bitcoin txns.
the use cases that have emerged have pretty much been limited to
1. speculation, which only ever ends one way ("staircase up, elevator down")
2. people who live in high inflation countries buying dollars (e.g. Tether) and, to a lesser extent, bitcoin to protect themselves from the depreciation of their local currency or to get around capital controls (especially rampant in China, see recent WSJ story in my Notes)
3. crime
in the vast majority of cases #2 is also a crime, because countries with high inflation also usually have currency controls, but i would say it's a defensible/moral crime.
Well written sir. Packaging all of this into etf’s is deeply concerning to me. Its like putting lipstick on a pig for retail investors who may not know the garbage that sits underneathq.
from above: "that changed when Justin Sun, a man who has been indicted by multiple federal agencies for insider trading and market manipulation and is so crooked even the rest of the crypto industry is like “yeah that guy’s a crook”18, listed TRUMP for trading on his crypto exchange named HTX (FKA “Huobi” but the first and most important rule of running a money laundry is that you must rename your company for apparently no reason19 every 2-3 years). HTX, for the record, is a company that has been banned from operating within the United States and is widely believed to have deep ties to the Chinese organized crime groups that dominate the global money laundering industry. Justin Sun is also the largest investor in Trump’s other crypto venture World Liberty Financial (put a pin in that information, we’ll need it later)..."
Of all the Trump Cryptocurrency Bros, Justin Sun is definitely the person who most interests me most. Justin Sun*, age 34, now of the sunny Caribbean isle of St. Kitts & St. Nevis**, current representative to the World Trade Organization for the nation of Grenada, is somehow doing business with US President Donald Trump, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick of Dean Cantor Fitzgerald, and Peter Thiel of Palantir. Justin Sun seems to me to be the person who has the best grasp of the way cryptocurrency works. As a practical matter.
"[Justin Sun] spent 19 million US dollars and held 1.43 million "Trump coins", firmly sitting at the top of the "Trump coin" ranking list, just to exchange for a ticket to have dinner with former US President Trump..." article is an AI text summary https://inf.news/en/economy/6e4d33064996303b1e11d59dd06215fd.html#google_vignette The writeup claims that Justin was the son of "ordinary office workers", a generalization that requires more specificity.
What little I've found about Justin Sun's family background:
"Sun Yuchen, also known as Justin Sun, is a prominent Chinese entrepreneur. His parents come from educated backgrounds:
1. **Father**: Sun Yuchen's father worked at the **Huizhou Planning Bureau** in Guangdong province. He was involved in urban planning, contributing to the development of the city (1).
2. **Mother**: His mother worked as a journalist at **Huizhou Daily** (3).
Sun's parents were both intellectuals, and their work environments likely shaped his early interests in writing and business (5)..."
That is an AI summary. Its references are Chinese language. I'm unable to evaluate provenance, or the accuracy of that very brief data snippet. Justin Sun's family connections deserve more importance. Family background is important because the mercantile elites of Chinese practically always have clan structures to extraordinarily powerful interests. Political regimes are of relatively minor importance to these clans. Their business networks may have a branch in Taiwan and branches in the PRC (Guangdong province, where Huizou is located, is a PRC mainland coastal province; Hong Kong has recently shifted to the PRC.) And branches elsewhere, of course. Some families in the overseas Chinese mercantile clan networks are long-standing players in the business of illicit drugs, endangered species trade, sex trafficking, counterfeiting, and money laundering.*** And some are honest and legitimate business people.
June 20, 2025--just last month:
"ChainCatcher news, according to a report by Coindesk, disclosed by SEC filings, Sun Yuchen's father, Sun Weike, gained control of the publicly listed company SRM Entertainment through a PIPE transaction valued at $100 million in TRX tokens, which will be renamed Tron Inc. The transaction was arranged by Dominari Securities, associated with the Trump family.
After the transaction is completed, Sun Weike will serve as the chairman of the board, and Tron executives will join the audit, compensation, and nomination committees. Although the transaction did not directly involve Tron DAO, it is seen as an arrangement led by its core management team. The new company plans to emulate MicroStrategy, intending to hold up to $210 million in TRX as a strategic asset in the future..." https://www.chaincatcher.com/en/article/2186696
"SRM Entertainment, a barely-noticed Nevada company, is rebranding as Tron Inc. following a $100 million private equity injection, and the TRX price might get affected.
The reason is that the money came with a twist that Weike Sun, the father of Tron founder Justin Sun, is now the CEO calling the shots.
The filing didn’t make waves—yet—but it cements a deeper overlap between the Sun dynasty and the Tron DAO universe, raising eyebrows about how far this familial consolidation will stretch.
The transaction, paid entirely in TRX tokens, involves Weike Sun’s investment vehicle acquiring 100,000 Series B preferred shares convertible into 200 million common shares, along with 220 million warrants at a $0.50 strike price.
This deal cements his control over SRM’s governance structure, with Weike Sun appointed board chairman.
Joining him are two Tron-aligned figures: Zhihong “Steve” Liu, strategic adviser to Tron DAO and CEO of Techteryx, a stablecoin issuer.
Both were placed on key committees, including audit, compensation, and nominating. Despite these appointments, Tron DAO itself has no official role in the deal, as clarified by Liu.
SRM’s Strategic Shift and Plans for TRX Reserves
Tron Inc., in its post-rebrand form, is borrowing a page from the MicroStrategy gospel by trying to accumulate TRX like digital gold. The target: $210 million.
"...Sun’s Tron Network? The blockchain platform is meant to allow entertainment content creators to share their work directly with users. A Coindesk report says that more than 64% of the decentralized apps (dapps) on the Tron network involve gambling, according to analytics firm Dapp Review. Users can bet with the Tron token—Tronix, or TRX—and also receive tokens as winnings. In an interview (link in Chinese) earlier this year, Sun said the prevalence of gaming dapps “is in line with our expectations, because the dapps focus on entertaining people.”
From The Verge, March 9 2022: "In some ways, Sun’s Maltese citizenship isn’t exceptional because he has other destinations he could escape to. He claimed in a court declaration that he is also a citizen of the Caribbean islands, Saint Kitts and Nevis. Another former employee told me Sun bragged offhand about intending to buy a passport from the small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. But there was another more important secret about Sun’s relationship with Malta. According to multiple Tron employees, Sun made two additional €50,000 “investments” in Malta. He had applied for citizenship for his father and mother.
Sun’s desire to bring his parents along suggests Malta could be his final destination if he gets caught in the crosshairs of regulators in the US or China. The other nations he claims paper allegiance to seem to serve more fleeting interests. After all, if you don’t live in a place, you don’t owe it anything.
Sun is something of a connoisseur of bank accounts. When Sun said he would chase citizenship for Guinea-Bissau, he urged a worker to start opening bank accounts there if it worked out. In the United States alone, he controls at least 13. When he opened a checking account at First Republic Bank, he was vague about his occupation, saying he was a technology services provider, and told a former employee to never disclose his cryptocurrency work to bankers. He also told them that banks froze his money so frequently he needed to spread his fortune across numerous accounts. The employee believed Sun’s bank account strategy was designed to avoid becoming ensnared in anti-money-laundering laws. For cryptocurrency moguls like Sun, cashing out vast sums of crypto can be an intractable problem. The traditional financial system has historically steered clear of cryptocurrency.
Many of Sun’s bank accounts could just be waypoints for moving money. As a former employee who knew about Sun’s banking speculated, “If he has to cash out all his cryptocurrencies, he has to do it outside both the US and China,” where they’re closely scrutinized or banned outright..."
https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2015/supplemental/239308.htm These clans can also call in markers from other families who are usually uninvolved in sketchy dealings, based on long-standing networks of obligation known as guanxi. That should give some idea of how much mutual interconnectedness is present; when it comes to social capital, wealthy Chinese elites are REAL elites.
***Michele Sindona, a pioneer in innovating the "financial instruments" that allowed money laundering to expand into a business of gigantic proportions in the 1970s and 1980s, referred to Chinese traders he knew of obliquely, as "the men without names". Because the name of Chinese individual is only rendered accurately in Chinese script and pronunciation, a glitch which has incidentally always given international police investigations, archived records, and databases serious trouble.
This article is a treasure. Absolutely superb writing. Facts, humor, sarcasm...just beautiful.
For the record, however, my money is with the 'Butthole' coin.
This is all entirely correct. The only thing I’d add is really the utility of the Trump coin in particular is to create an avenue to bribe Trump. Under normal circumstances, you can’t hand the president cash to push your preferred policy agenda. We call that “bribery.” Here, you can hand the president cash via “buying” a meme coin from him.
Voila! Now they can declare, “I wasn’t bribing Trump, I was investing in Trumpcoins.” Trump wins, I suppose the briber wins, what’s left of civilization loses.
i think i made that pretty clear with the **cough** TikTok **cough** comment but hey it never hurts to just be really explicit for any future readers: the TRUMP memecoin is a vector for bribes, a lot of them from China.
**UPDATE** I added a post script about at least one person that i think paid a bribe here and for what.
Brilliant writing. Clear, funny, horrified and despairing. I'm keeping this to refer to.
As always Great work wading throught that treacle thick bullshit to pull out the important points
I am enjoying the bitcoin maxis try argue how this is clearly a scam but BTC is not because... reasons...white paper...it does have utility even if no one is using it.
there's actually an uneasy truce between the bitcoin maxis and the sceptics in The Coinerian Jihad... some of the most effective sceptics at calling out cryptoo bullshit are actually bitcoin maxis (e.g. @pledditor on twitter)
I don't know if we can fully trusy them…joking.
It's not the first time I have found myself in the same side as Maxis. Obviously they detest Tether too, so I have made “friends” with some on that front.
like i said, it's an uneasy truce, likely to fracture at some point in the future. but when it comes to the TrumpCoin battle i have complete faith in my bitcoin maxi comrades.
Thanks very much for this post. I think I grokked less than half of it, sorry, totally my fault. The parts I did grok are scary as all H-E-double-hockey-sticks.
Thanks for doing the research and presenting it with such snark. The snark kept me going when I felt a little lost. I don't know anything about this whole ecosystem.
I mean, 45-2.0 is a known quantity now. The man is a crook, in the Nixonian sense, a crook.
I think the word that I would use for this is evil.
i usually go with "a hideous monstrosity made out of computers and greed" or (when brevity is required) "demonic" but "evil" also works.
https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/cryptocurrency-is-a-hideous-monstrosity
Hideous Monstrosity is a fine turn of phrase, very true.
I also love the way you normalize "dudebros," "broligarchy," and "degens." I love a creative turn of phrase! (English majors never die lol)
i actually think one thing we should all have learned from trump by now is the power of name calling...
also i'm curious what you find hard to follow... my goal here is to try to explain this nonsense to average people so it's helpful to me to understand what kind of assumptions i might be making about background knowledge or whatever that i could do a better job elucidating.
I have, except from 2 articles, authored by you, that I read yesterday, exactly zero knowledge of crypto currency, or bitcoin, or the so-called "exchange that is not a stock market because it doesn't have contracts." Like, zip-zilch-nada!
So, I wanted to make that clear, that any errors of understanding were my responsibility.
At the same time, I was trying to praise your writing for: 1-explaining in plain language these very complex concepts, 2-making it super clear that the system is rigged, 3-praising "the snark to point out evil" linguistic vibe that you have, including new words! 4-giving a whole explanation, like: "hold on a minute - I have a lot of dots to connect, but if you stick with it, you'll see the picture at the end pretty clearly."
Does that help?
i'm glad you enjoyed reading it. my goal is to try to explain this stuff even to people who have almost no understanding of finance or economics, let alone crypto,. it's hard sometimes though, because you end up kind of having to repeat yourself a lot, so i think i do tend to make some assumptions about basic finance/economics knowledge that people don't have - in which case i'm always curious to know where exactly the explanation tripped them up / where i might have made some assumptions.
Michel - your research and insights are superb and a generous gift to the public. Thank you!
I, for one, have had minimal understanding of this game, yet I’ve known from the jump that it is a game. Your thorough explanation has deepened my disgust for this game and for the people who play it. I’m forwarding your great article to many others so we wake up to the intricate criminality at root. Thank you.
𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘩
Thanks for this explainer. Next thing will be an index fund for meme coins. A fool and their money are soon parted, indeed. God help us.
there's already a memecoin index fund
https://www.marketvector.com/indexes/digital-assets/marketvector-meme-coin
Of course there is. Yikes.
the 3rd law of cryptodynamics has a lot of predictive power when approaching questions like this
https://substack.com/@cryptadamus/note/c-89033630
I remember the good old days when all we had to worry about were mortgage based securities and derivatives.
i would furthermore bet a lot of money there's a perpetual futures market for MEMECOIN where you can already trade with 25x or 100x leverage.
Incredible post. great work.
All this great detail, yet not a peep about Steven Witkoff, the principal backer of World Liberty Financial. He was announced as the next "Middle East Envoy" during the inauguration dinner while the scam was chugging along. He and the two pickup artist retards (yes, seriously) directly benefitted from this deliberate scam of Trump's most loyal yet unsophisticated supporters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Witkoff
this post isn't about World Liberty Financial but a future post may be. but yeah witkoff is involved.
Wildly entertaining. Note 5 however (footnote) I think the word 'write was used whereas 'right' was meant or implied by the context. Can check this. I get the anti-crypto angles and the whole writing but crypto-tech generally might prove important - eventually. Isn't this part of how the economy is working right now? Isn't this part of how the world is now, rather than how we want it to be? I can get the sarcasm but aren't the true believers on to something here? Bad usages (memes with ponzinomics) don't crowd out good usages (aspirational future use cases - e.g tokenisation) ... etc etc. It can't be all bad. Truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe ... 😎😑
thank you for the typo assist.
> but crypto-tech generally might prove important - eventually
maybe for interbank transfers between offshore banks... but not, importantly, for anything consumer facing.
> It can't be all bad.
it's all bad. trust me on this.
Thanks for the engagement with my comment. I'll follow and learn from your wisdom(s). Programmable trust was meant to be the mantra so requiring simple trust nowadays is setting a high bar. ...
Thanks also for the facts cover and the research that went into writing that piece on Trump's meme-shit-ponzi-coin (depending). Charles Hoskinson (founder of Cardano, sorry) had an angle on Trump's coin which you can catch here: https://youtu.be/4SzcEguTbX8 (ending minutes) if you want to scrub along on the vid (19/20 minutes long).
>maybe for interbank transfers between offshore banks... but not, importantly for anything consumer facing.
... But wasn't that one of the most compelling reasons for existence/use of the tech? Money which people can custody and own directly plus send between each other directly without double-spending or suffering the banks & financial institutions acting as middlemen?
Anyway wanted to be some levels deep here a bit. Finally (thanks for reading I realise it's a long comment).
> ... But wasn't that one of the most compelling reasons for existence/use of the tech? Money which people can custody and own directly plus send between each other directly without double-spending or suffering the banks & financial institutions acting as middlemen?
that was the theory (it's literally the title of the bitcoin whitepaper) but that's not the reality. no one actually wants an irreversible money system where someone who hacks your phone can steal your life's savings. and literally no one uses bitcoin to buy stuff in 2024. it's polled at something like 0.1% of all bitcoin txns.
the use cases that have emerged have pretty much been limited to
1. speculation, which only ever ends one way ("staircase up, elevator down")
2. people who live in high inflation countries buying dollars (e.g. Tether) and, to a lesser extent, bitcoin to protect themselves from the depreciation of their local currency or to get around capital controls (especially rampant in China, see recent WSJ story in my Notes)
3. crime
in the vast majority of cases #2 is also a crime, because countries with high inflation also usually have currency controls, but i would say it's a defensible/moral crime.
but so much of what comes under the #3 bucket is sheer horror. things like the reemergence of a bustling slave trade in SE Asia: https://substack.com/@cryptadamus/note/c-88635637
or rampant market manipulation, rugpulls, memecoin scams, wrench attacks, and on and on and on.
This is priceless...
https://x.com/WiseMintApp/status/1883941120037773825
Just a perfect analysis. KABOOM!
Spectacular, & well done as always..
👏👏👏 Teach! Thank you M for deciphering all this.
Well written sir. Packaging all of this into etf’s is deeply concerning to me. Its like putting lipstick on a pig for retail investors who may not know the garbage that sits underneathq.
from above: "that changed when Justin Sun, a man who has been indicted by multiple federal agencies for insider trading and market manipulation and is so crooked even the rest of the crypto industry is like “yeah that guy’s a crook”18, listed TRUMP for trading on his crypto exchange named HTX (FKA “Huobi” but the first and most important rule of running a money laundry is that you must rename your company for apparently no reason19 every 2-3 years). HTX, for the record, is a company that has been banned from operating within the United States and is widely believed to have deep ties to the Chinese organized crime groups that dominate the global money laundering industry. Justin Sun is also the largest investor in Trump’s other crypto venture World Liberty Financial (put a pin in that information, we’ll need it later)..."
Of all the Trump Cryptocurrency Bros, Justin Sun is definitely the person who most interests me most. Justin Sun*, age 34, now of the sunny Caribbean isle of St. Kitts & St. Nevis**, current representative to the World Trade Organization for the nation of Grenada, is somehow doing business with US President Donald Trump, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick of Dean Cantor Fitzgerald, and Peter Thiel of Palantir. Justin Sun seems to me to be the person who has the best grasp of the way cryptocurrency works. As a practical matter.
"[Justin Sun] spent 19 million US dollars and held 1.43 million "Trump coins", firmly sitting at the top of the "Trump coin" ranking list, just to exchange for a ticket to have dinner with former US President Trump..." article is an AI text summary https://inf.news/en/economy/6e4d33064996303b1e11d59dd06215fd.html#google_vignette The writeup claims that Justin was the son of "ordinary office workers", a generalization that requires more specificity.
What little I've found about Justin Sun's family background:
"Sun Yuchen, also known as Justin Sun, is a prominent Chinese entrepreneur. His parents come from educated backgrounds:
1. **Father**: Sun Yuchen's father worked at the **Huizhou Planning Bureau** in Guangdong province. He was involved in urban planning, contributing to the development of the city (1).
2. **Mother**: His mother worked as a journalist at **Huizhou Daily** (3).
Sun's parents were both intellectuals, and their work environments likely shaped his early interests in writing and business (5)..."
That is an AI summary. Its references are Chinese language. I'm unable to evaluate provenance, or the accuracy of that very brief data snippet. Justin Sun's family connections deserve more importance. Family background is important because the mercantile elites of Chinese practically always have clan structures to extraordinarily powerful interests. Political regimes are of relatively minor importance to these clans. Their business networks may have a branch in Taiwan and branches in the PRC (Guangdong province, where Huizou is located, is a PRC mainland coastal province; Hong Kong has recently shifted to the PRC.) And branches elsewhere, of course. Some families in the overseas Chinese mercantile clan networks are long-standing players in the business of illicit drugs, endangered species trade, sex trafficking, counterfeiting, and money laundering.*** And some are honest and legitimate business people.
June 20, 2025--just last month:
"ChainCatcher news, according to a report by Coindesk, disclosed by SEC filings, Sun Yuchen's father, Sun Weike, gained control of the publicly listed company SRM Entertainment through a PIPE transaction valued at $100 million in TRX tokens, which will be renamed Tron Inc. The transaction was arranged by Dominari Securities, associated with the Trump family.
After the transaction is completed, Sun Weike will serve as the chairman of the board, and Tron executives will join the audit, compensation, and nomination committees. Although the transaction did not directly involve Tron DAO, it is seen as an arrangement led by its core management team. The new company plans to emulate MicroStrategy, intending to hold up to $210 million in TRX as a strategic asset in the future..." https://www.chaincatcher.com/en/article/2186696
"SRM Entertainment, a barely-noticed Nevada company, is rebranding as Tron Inc. following a $100 million private equity injection, and the TRX price might get affected.
The reason is that the money came with a twist that Weike Sun, the father of Tron founder Justin Sun, is now the CEO calling the shots.
The filing didn’t make waves—yet—but it cements a deeper overlap between the Sun dynasty and the Tron DAO universe, raising eyebrows about how far this familial consolidation will stretch.
The transaction, paid entirely in TRX tokens, involves Weike Sun’s investment vehicle acquiring 100,000 Series B preferred shares convertible into 200 million common shares, along with 220 million warrants at a $0.50 strike price.
This deal cements his control over SRM’s governance structure, with Weike Sun appointed board chairman.
Joining him are two Tron-aligned figures: Zhihong “Steve” Liu, strategic adviser to Tron DAO and CEO of Techteryx, a stablecoin issuer.
Both were placed on key committees, including audit, compensation, and nominating. Despite these appointments, Tron DAO itself has no official role in the deal, as clarified by Liu.
SRM’s Strategic Shift and Plans for TRX Reserves
Tron Inc., in its post-rebrand form, is borrowing a page from the MicroStrategy gospel by trying to accumulate TRX like digital gold. The target: $210 million.
It’s a power move aimed at institutional legitimacy and self-reinforcing ecosystem control."**** https://99bitcoins.com/news/presales/did-justin-suns-dad-just-coup-tron-trx-price-analysis-for-june-2025
Justin Sun's business product:
"...Sun’s Tron Network? The blockchain platform is meant to allow entertainment content creators to share their work directly with users. A Coindesk report says that more than 64% of the decentralized apps (dapps) on the Tron network involve gambling, according to analytics firm Dapp Review. Users can bet with the Tron token—Tronix, or TRX—and also receive tokens as winnings. In an interview (link in Chinese) earlier this year, Sun said the prevalence of gaming dapps “is in line with our expectations, because the dapps focus on entertaining people.”
lots more in the Quartz link https://qz.com/1649872/who-is-warren-buffetts-lunch-date-tron-ceo-justin-sun
From The Verge, March 9 2022: "In some ways, Sun’s Maltese citizenship isn’t exceptional because he has other destinations he could escape to. He claimed in a court declaration that he is also a citizen of the Caribbean islands, Saint Kitts and Nevis. Another former employee told me Sun bragged offhand about intending to buy a passport from the small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. But there was another more important secret about Sun’s relationship with Malta. According to multiple Tron employees, Sun made two additional €50,000 “investments” in Malta. He had applied for citizenship for his father and mother.
Sun’s desire to bring his parents along suggests Malta could be his final destination if he gets caught in the crosshairs of regulators in the US or China. The other nations he claims paper allegiance to seem to serve more fleeting interests. After all, if you don’t live in a place, you don’t owe it anything.
Sun is something of a connoisseur of bank accounts. When Sun said he would chase citizenship for Guinea-Bissau, he urged a worker to start opening bank accounts there if it worked out. In the United States alone, he controls at least 13. When he opened a checking account at First Republic Bank, he was vague about his occupation, saying he was a technology services provider, and told a former employee to never disclose his cryptocurrency work to bankers. He also told them that banks froze his money so frequently he needed to spread his fortune across numerous accounts. The employee believed Sun’s bank account strategy was designed to avoid becoming ensnared in anti-money-laundering laws. For cryptocurrency moguls like Sun, cashing out vast sums of crypto can be an intractable problem. The traditional financial system has historically steered clear of cryptocurrency.
Many of Sun’s bank accounts could just be waypoints for moving money. As a former employee who knew about Sun’s banking speculated, “If he has to cash out all his cryptocurrencies, he has to do it outside both the US and China,” where they’re closely scrutinized or banned outright..."
Lots more here https://www.theverge.com/c/22947663/justin-sun-tron-cryptocurrency-poloniex
And lots more here https://cannabiccino.substack.com/p/charting-the-shadow-usd-network-in
* aka Sun Yuchen (aka whatever his name is in Chinese script)
**St. Kitts & St. Nevis is a renowned "banking haven" nation https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/advisory/advis26.pdf
https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2015/supplemental/239308.htm These clans can also call in markers from other families who are usually uninvolved in sketchy dealings, based on long-standing networks of obligation known as guanxi. That should give some idea of how much mutual interconnectedness is present; when it comes to social capital, wealthy Chinese elites are REAL elites.
***Michele Sindona, a pioneer in innovating the "financial instruments" that allowed money laundering to expand into a business of gigantic proportions in the 1970s and 1980s, referred to Chinese traders he knew of obliquely, as "the men without names". Because the name of Chinese individual is only rendered accurately in Chinese script and pronunciation, a glitch which has incidentally always given international police investigations, archived records, and databases serious trouble.
****whatever that means.