TRON (TRX)–In addition to being one of the more polarizing currencies on the market, TRON founder Justin Sun has become a focal point for advocates and detractors alike.

Sun has been accused in the past of over hyping announcements and partnerships related to his currency, creating false excitement in investors which leads to TRX being overvalued and dropping in price. Some have called for Sun to take a back-seat approach in leading the TRON project, allowing the technology to stand on its own merit.

We argue differently.

Consider what Justin Sun was able to accomplish in the span of four months. TRON, through the currency TRX, was first launched in September 2017, trading at an initial price of 0.002 USD. By the beginning of January 2018, that price had soared to 0.30 USD, giving TRX a market cap of over 16 billion USD and putting the currency in the top ten of the industry. We all know the market conditions of the past December/January were heavily overbought and overvalued, but that doesn’t take away from the significant accomplishment for Sun and the TRON team from growing their currency out of nothing to an industry leader in less than half a year.

Strong Credentials

In addition to founding the TRON project and TRX currency, Justin Sun is the former Chief Representative for Ripple (XRP) in Greater China. A handful of detractors have tried to manipulate this into Sun claiming that he was CEO of Ripple. That’s not the case at all, and can be attributed to an error in translation and misappropriation of the title. Sun has not only been a figure in the crypto-space for some time, but is recognized as an industry leader in technology and software development. He has made the list of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Asian Consumer Technology, and hails from one of China’s most selective business-focused institutions: Hupan University.

Hupan is closely tied to billionaire Alibaba founder Jack Ma, and works to recognize and accelerate the development of China’s most brilliant and distinguished up and coming entrepreneurs. The selection criteria for Hupan goes well beyond even a Harvard or Stanford, with applicants having to demonstrate founding a company with three years on the market, over 30 employees and an annual revenue of 30 million yuan (4.75 million USD). And that’s just to apply. Of the 1000+ qualified applicants each year, the University accepts only 44, which equates to an acceptance rate of 4.4% (compared to Harvard Business School’s 12% acceptance rate). From his academic background alone, Justin Sun stands in a class of his own, and has the training and mentorship through connections like Jack Ma to helm a potential hundred billion USD entity in TRON.

Ability to Scale the TRON Project

TRON went live in September of 2017, just ahead of the Chinese crackdown on cryptocurrencies. While the entire market ballooned to a capitalization of 850 billion USD in January 2018 (up from ⅓ that number in October 2017), TRON was an industry leader in terms of market gains during that span of time. TRX was trading at 0.002 USD at the beginning of December 2017, and reached an all time high of 0.30 USD per coin in the first week of January 2018. That means in barely the span of four months, Justin Sun was able to lead TRON from being worth 0 USD to a market capitalization just under 20 billion USD. Part of that meteoric rise can be attributed to good timing, as TRX was able to get hot during the month of December when crypto FOMO was at its peak. However, the majority of the marketing and interest in TRON can be drawn directly through the efforts of Sun to promote the usability and vision of his currency.

Sun has emerged as an industry leader in transparent communication between the TRON development team and investors. His primary outlet has been Twitter, although the TRON team does a substantial job with updates through Medium. Some are put off by Sun’s aggressive approach to marketing and promotion, but the majority of TRON fans and investors appreciate his frequent communication. The industry of cryptocurrency is littered with tokens that have possibly been abandoned by their development teams, despite the fact that they are regularly traded and speculated on exchanges. The open channel between TRON brass and TRON investors is a good model for other cryptocurrencies, even if it leads to situations of over hyping.

Even without his marketing, Sun has been an impressive figure in the industry in how quickly he was able to scale TRON to a top twenty cryptocurrency, while building lasting value. Empty projects have cracked the top ten before, but TRON is pushing forward with the upcoming Main Net launch and numerous partnerships. Game.com was one of the first big names to sign on with TRX, a significant union between a gaming platform committed to integrating crypto and a currency that has values well-aligned in the entertainment and gaming industry.

If nothing else, look to the people Justin Sun is working alongside and what they are saying about the young creator. We’ll leave off with a quote by Game.com’s founder Xu Le, in an interview with the TRON.Live group:

“When a person is able scale something from scratch to a global large scale, we can gauge one’s ability form this. Tron went from a market cap of $2 billion to an all time high of $16 billion market cap after partnering with us…What we should focus on is this young man’s determination, endurance, and execution of tasks under pressure…After [the China Ban], an ordinary person just won’t know the pressure that Justin has gone through. Despite this, Justin was able to revitalize Tron in a global market and in such a large scale, getting Tronix listed on so many exchanges, doing a lot of PR, and so on. So, no matter how Tron will perform in the future, what we are seeing today is how determined a person can be and how one is able to cope with such a tremendous pressure and do it well.”