In 2016, Jiang Zhuoer wrote an article predicting that Bitcoin would not enter a bull market until it reached 4,000 RMB (yes, RMB). At that time, a newbie paid Sun Yuchen, known as "Jack Ma's disciple," to ask on Weibo: Should I buy Bitcoin? Sun Yuchen's answer was very direct: The price of 6,000 RMB is not cost-effective, and it is not recommended to buy.

As a result, in May 2017, Bitcoin soared to about 18,000, and the market was completely hot. Lao Mao’s Yunbi.com launched the first quantum chain, and the ICO price was about 2 yuan per coin. It surged to more than 50 yuan at the opening, more than 20 times. This triggered the ETH ICO craze (which is actually similar to today’s meme craze).

What did Sun Yuchen do at this time? He returned to the cryptocurrency circle, copied the Ethereum code, issued TRX, and cut the leeks of ETH and BTC. TRON’s slogan at the time was also quite close to the truth: “Big TRON, many exchanges.”

At that time, Tron had no technical accumulation at all. It was simply issuing points on ETH and copying the Ethereum code. It was even ridiculed by Vitalik Buterin, who said that Tron's consensus mechanism was a "proof of copy".

But to be honest, although he copied, Justin Sun did do two things right.

The first thing was that after the turmoil on September 4, 2017, he quickly left China with BTC and ETH (since then, he has not dared to set foot in the mainland again and was under border control), leaving the mess to his fellow senior brother, and then launched TRX spot and contracts on Binance, and accumulated the first pot of gold through Binance's control of both long and short positions.

The second thing is that through Bao Erye’s help, Justin Sun got on the bandwagon of USDT. USDT was originally issued on the BTC chain, but because the block confirmation time of BTC takes 10 minutes, which is much slower than Ethereum, USDT was moved to Ethereum. Later, because the transfer fee of Ethereum was too high, USDT was moved to TRX. TRX picked up a treasure in this way.

In my opinion, these two things have laid the foundation for 99% of TRON’s market value today. But what? Everyone forgets that Bitcoin’s original purpose was to be used as an electronic currency for transfers.

Nowadays, many transfer demands on the chain are contracted by TRX. In most scenarios, the fee is about $1 per transaction, which is acceptable to most users. The problem is that the degree of decentralization of TRX may not be as high as everyone imagines.

I often feel that Justin Sun is like the Yuan Shikai of the cryptocurrency world, stealing a low-hanging fruit from the blockchain revolution. We’ll see.