Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun’s legal troubles seem to be fading away. In March 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged him with manipulating the market. After Trump was elected, he dumped $30 million into the President’s World Liberty Financial crypto scheme. Now a federal judge has granted him a stay in the SEC’s investigation.
Sun is a Chinese crypto mogul who is most famous for being the guy who paid $6.2 million for a banana duct-taped to a wall. He ate the banana in front of cameras in Hong Kong after the check cleared. That was in November, when the specter of an SEC-led fraud investigation was still hanging over his head.
Sun owns several companies, including Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc. (formerly BitTorrent). According to an SEC press release from 2023, Sun was allegedly using his companies to wash trade securities, buying them with one company and immediately buying them with another. He also allegedly paid for celebrity endorsements without disclosing the agreement.
When it charged Sun, the SEC also charged eight celebrities they said were involved in the scheme, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soula Boy, and Lil Yachty. Several of the celebrities, including Lohan, agreed to pay $400,000 to settle the SEC investigation.
Sun’s SEC legal troubles also seem to be over.
Trump’s family has been cooking the WLF crypto scheme for a long time, but it finally bore fruit after his election and thanks, in no small part, to a big push from Sun. The way WLF worked, its founders would retain 70 percent of the project’s “governance” tokens and would only get a big payout if the token hit a certain threshold of investment.
Around the same time he bought the banana for $6.2 million, Sun “invested” $30 million into WLF. It pushed the coin into the threshold it needed to release cash into Trump’s pocket and netted the President around $18 million. Sun came on to WLF as an advisor. Then he dumped another $45 million into the company. According to Bloomberg, that means Trump has received around $56 million in total “fees” from Sun related to WLF.
Days after the inauguration, Sun praised President Trump in a post on X. “In my view, if I have made any money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump,” he said. “Both Trump Coin and World Liberty Financial are bound to perform exceptionally well.”
On February 26, the SEC and Sun’s lawyers sent a letter to the Judge for the case. “In this case, the Parties submit that it is in each of their interests to stay this matter while they consider a potential resolution and agree that no party or non-party would be prejudiced by a stay,” the letter said. The Judge signed it and granted the stay a day later.
