On May 4, 2020, at 3:30 PM (UTC+8) TronLive had an exclusive AMA with the founder of TRON and CEO of BitTorrent, Justin Sun in the TRX Whale telegram private group. The private group is made up of around 300 members with large TRX holdings and the AMA session aims to answer commonly asked questions from the TRON community.
The AMA session with Justin was split into two main sections. The first half was hosted by TronLive where questions were collected from the TRON community beforehand, the second half of the session was opened for TRX Whale members to ask live questions.
[Disclaimer: Justin answered the telegram group via voice messages and we have transcribed them below with minor touch-ups. Other non-essential messages from the group were omitted out.]
Hello everyone, it’s about time now. Let us begin the AMA with Justin Sun. Justin, are you online now?
Justin Sun: Hi, I’m online.
Great. Are you ready now?
Justin Sun: Hello, hello everyone. Yes, let’s start, let’s do it. And also, thanks to everybody for coming to today’s AMA.
First of all, TronLive would like to represent the TRON community and thank Justin for joining our TRX Whale exclusive group.
Let’s give a brief overview of how this AMA will flow. We have just muted the group so the AMA flow can proceed smoothly. TronLive will begin by picking commonly asked questions collected earlier from the community in this TRX Whale group then ask the questions to Justin by text.
Justin will be answering the questions with voice messages. This way, users can easily follow through the questions and also ensure that Justin is answering the questions live on the other end.
After answering the common questions, we will open up the group so online users can ask more questions to Justin. Justin will be selecting a few more questions and answering them live here. All good, Justin?
Justin Sun: Yes, let’s do it.
Great! Let’s start with a simple introduction. TronLive is the first TRON community site that aims to unite all Tron supporters together. One of our main goals is to connect the community with bigger entities like TRON foundation, TRON SR, and TRON partners. We strived for the community voices to be heard hence we are invited to be the host for this AMA.
Most of us here already know Justin as the founder of TRON and the CEO of BitTorrent. Justin, can you give a quick introduction to our audience, perhaps a self-intro that is a bit different?
Likeβ¦What’s your personality and what are your major goals of life?
Justin Sun: Hello everyone, so basically I think my major goal of life is to increase the TRX and BTT value. We have been doing so many businesses these days but the goals are the same. We focus on increasing the value of TRX and BTT.
For myself, I think I live a very distributed life. I have been all around the globe for the last three years.
That’s great Justin, a lot of members here would like to see more value in TRX and BTT. Keep up the good work that you and the TRON team have been doing!
A really basic intro we have here, now let’s switch the focus to Justin’s AMA by selecting the first question from our list.
Justin Sun: Thank you, thank you. Ya, I think we all work really hard together to try to bring TRON to the mainstream of blockchain infrastructure.
Yes, we can see the hard work you guys are always putting in non-stop, and this relates to the first question we have from the community. With the on-going Covid-19 case and many are forced to work from home, how is TRON dealing with this?
Justin Sun: TRON team members are very distributed around the globe. We are [amongst] the first one when Covid-19 breaks out [to have] sent a lot of masks to Wuhan province and to our Chinese community. We helped them a lot.
After the Covid-19 spread around the globe, our team members and the community members in China have already [gone] back to work. I think the good news is even though the Covid-19 has lots of impact on traditional businesses, TRON team members have always worked 24/7 around the globe to push our projects and our partnerships. I think even [though] Covid-19 has an impact on other businesses, TRON is doing a great job here.
That’s great news and glad that TRON is able to function properly as before, So, how do you spend your days personally now? Is there any major impact on you?
Justin Sun: I think I’m pretty safe. I mean the place [that I live] we don’t even have [new] Covid-19 [case] increase for almost a week. So, I think right now, Covid-19 impact on TRON is very minimal.
Awesome, stay safe! Now move on to the next question from the community list.
One of the major concerns is about the 33-billion TRX. Are there any plans of what TRON will do with the 33 billion locked up TRX tokens supposedly released on 1 Jan 2020?
Justin Sun: I think TRON Foundation’s financial situation is one of the best in the industry. I don’t think lots of other foundations have lots of funding like us. I think right now we believed TRON TRX’s current value is definitely undervalued. I think we don’t have intention to sell a lot of TRX for now because I think our value is definitely undervalued. For example, right now the total USDT issued on TRON blockchain has already surpassed the valuation of TRX. So, that’s why I believed TRX is definitely undervalued.
The 33 billion TRX will all be used for daily operations of TRON Foundation, and also promote TRON to be the most successful blockchain infrastructure in the world. And right now, I think we still have plenty of resources to push TRX forward. I think in the future, we even have plans to increase our position on TRX because I still believed TRX is the most potential candidate to compete with Ethereum on future financial infrastructure. So, that’s my [opinion] on TRX.
That’s good, so no major sell-off planned, and even increased position on TRX from the foundation. This is good news.
Justin Sun: Yes.
On to the next question, which is a quite common one we got from the community so let us address that. What are the specific privileges you can offer the TRX Whales, besides the priority to TRON news that we got so far?
Justin Sun: I think, first of all, the TRON Whale group is a very important communication channel with TRON Foundation itself. We want to know major investors’ concerns and opinions. Because right now, the TRON community is a very large community, we have over 5 million addresses around the globe, right? So, there are lots of different opinions. That’s why internally we want to prioritize different opinions. So, if any whales have concerns or any advice on TRX, we will prioritize the opinions of the TRX Whale group first.
I believed, rather than [us] giving lots of news of TRX to the Whale group, we want to get more advice if you have concerns and we also want to know the opinions of TRX Whales.
I think this communication channel will be really constructive. So, we will share our future developments in the group and we are willing to hear from whales on how they think TRON is doing compared to our competitors. Because we want to know honest opinions from investors so we can allocate and put our resources into the most important things we need to do.
Of course, I think for the privileges of TRX Whales, I think we can first put the TRX Whales group questions and advice on the priority list. And at the same time, we will share first-hand news in the TRX Whale group. And also, a lot of our team members are also in the TRX Whale group too so we will see everybody’s questions and discussions in the group.
To everyone else, you heard this. Your opinion matters and your voices will be heard. TronLive will also be actively collecting opinions from the community so feel free to @TronLive when you submitted constructive feedback here.
Now let’s move on to the next question.
This is from a couple of members. What should we do to get through this bear market with a minimum loss, and when do you think the bear market will end?
Justin Sun: I always believed a motto called “Long Bitcoin Short the World”. I think right now I’m pretty pessimistic about the current financial situation. I think both the US stock market and China stock market will continue to be bearish because of the Covid-19 impact. But, I believed blockchain has lots of room to grow. That’s why we have seen a lot of resilience recently in the price of Bitcoin. So, that’s why I believed [in the year] 2020, we still can see lots of increases from blockchain aspects. I believed 2021 will be a bull year.
I have been in the blockchain industry since 2012. At that time, there’s not even a world of blockchain. I have experienced [Bitcoin] halving twice already. So, this [upcoming] halving will be my third time. I think the halving will indeed have lots of impacts on the price of Bitcoin, at least from the last two times I have seen. I think this time will be the same, let’s check it out.
[During] the last two times, the halving has a huge impact on the [Bitcoin’s] price, especially one year and a half after the halving. You will see the major increase in the Bitcoin price. I think the reason is very simple because [it] reduces lots of supply and demand is still increasing. So, in the long term, it is going to impact the bitcoin price a lot. That’s why I still believed the bull market will be coming really soon.
Great, Justin. Thanks for sharing your advice and your past experience with the group. Now, let’s move on to the next question which is a bit more personal.
There’re often bearish markets in cryptocurrency and a lot of negativity in the space during these times. How can you handle all this pressure even though you are at such a young age?
Justin Sun: I think the most important reason is because I believed in the blockchain industry. I have been in the industry since 2012. In 2013, I joined Ripple. In 2014, I went back to China and try to promote “value network”. At that time, there’s not like a word like blockchain; so, I named it “value network”. In the very early days, I have become a believer in blockchain and Bitcoin. I have seen Bitcoin increased [in] price from less than $1 to today’s price [which] is around $9000. So, I have seen all these happened in a very short period of time – in 8 years. So, that’s why I’m always bullish about our industry.
I have made so many friends since these 8 years and [from] all their stories [that they] told me, I believed this is like the once of a lifetime chance for our generation. So, that’s why I cherish this opportunity. Even though in the bearish market, lots of projects have abandoned their projects, but the TRON team and myself always cherish this opportunity. We always want to do more, we always feel like the time is not enough, we need more time to finish our work and always based our belief in cryptocurrency.
I still believed this is just a beginning. Because right now, [even though] cryptocurrency had been developed a lot since 2012, it is just a small segment of the economy. I believed in the next 10-20 years, cryptocurrency and blockchain will become the major infrastructure for the whole financial industry. So, that’s why I’m a huge believer of blockchain and cryptocurrency and I think [for] the next 5-10 years, the change will be dramatic and everybody will see it happen.
All the pressures of the bearish market we have experienced these before right? So, 2014, 2015, 2016, and early 2017, these three and a half years, it’s definitely like a bearish market. We have experienced a lot of exchanges and projects [that] file bankruptcy and they didn’t sustain, right? And lots of people quit the industry. When the Bitcoin price declined to less than $200, a lot of people even believed Bitcoin will be dead really soon. So, since we have experienced all these, right now I have 100% confidence in our industry.
Thanks, Justin. From your responses, we can conclude that being a strong believer in blockchain and cryptocurrency helps you a lot in these situations. We hope the same goes for our TRX Whale holders here.
Now to the next question. This is related to one of the questions we had earlier. Since it is mentioned many times, let’s paste the question from the community directly here. “Will we get TRON Hoodies and caps as we are holding TRX since the beginning of the time!”
Justin Sun: Yes, definitely. I believed everybody here can get a TRON hoodie and we will have more souvenirs in the future.
Thanks. We will be collecting more info from the TRON team on how to get a hand on these after the AMA. Now, let’s do one last question then we will open up the room for more live questions.
Justin Sun: Thanks.
A couple of members mentioned the masterplan that TRON is carrying out since there were lots of acquisitions. Do you have all of the developments for TRON planned from the beginning, or are you adjusting and adding parts to your vision over time?
Justin Sun: So, basically I think we have most of our developments planned from the beginning. For example, we want to design a blockchain infrastructure to compete with Ethereum and we want to build the next-generation infrastructure for the decentralized web. But, if we go into the details, [like] which part we want to develop first, and how we develop it, this is adjusted over time. [This is] because we want to know what’s our users’ beliefs, what’s the current market, and how we can more effectively compete with our competitors. This is like two [approaches] mixed up together, it’s like a mixture of two different parts. I think this is a very good question.
Great Justin, thanks for answering this. And, we hope to see more progress in the TRON blockchain soon!
We will open up the room in about 20 seconds, so have your questions ready for Justin!
Live AMA session
p ct (hodler): Justin thanks for your presence today. Can u ranked the following projects in terms of potential: JUST, WINK, DLIVE, BTT, TRX.
Justin Sun: First of all, I think DLive and BitTorrent are kind of the same. All the tokens they served is BTT. DLive – you can see it as a decentralized live streaming platform that is very friendly for cryptocurrency. Right now, 25% of the revenue goes to BTT staking holders. We are interested in live streaming [platform] because most of the people who downloaded BitTorrent and uTorrent clients want better content. So, that’s why we believed adding DLive to our roadmap also suffice the needs for the content.
I believed, our majority of the work will be focused on TRX and BTT, and all other things like WINk and JUST, their success depends on the success of TRX and BTT. For example, JUST is a platform token. The value of the JUST network depends on how much TRX is staked in the JUST network. In terms of the valuation, JUST basically is decided by the TRX ecosystem. I think WINk is the same. These days, WINK wants to become a multiple-cryptocurrency gaming platform. So, I believed in the future, WINk will be less dependent on TRX. But still, WINk’s focus is on the blockchain gaming platform, so, the development of the blockchain still occupies a huge amount of the potential of WINK. So, WINk’s success depends on blockchain. As long as blockchain is very successful and the WINk team delivers what they promised to the community, I believed WINk has a huge potential.
@MikeNerdUK: Hi Justin. There appears to be a lack of understanding of the governance structure about TRON (the community roles, the SRs, the technology role, and the devs and Tron Foundation’s role). From experience, the best way to present this is in a diagram. Does this exist, or can one be created and then shared with all please?
Justin: I think basically the governance of the TRON structure, the majority of the decisions will be made by the TRON committee. TRON committees are members of our super representatives. TRON Foundation is one of the major developers for the TRON ecosystem. Actually, other people can develop for the TRON network too. As long as they discussed and get passed by TRON community. I can give you an example. It’s like Bitcoin, there are several core developers, they all have BIP. When you submit BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal), the miners will vote for that and the approved BIP will go in effect. TRON is the same, every developer can submit their TIP plan, as long as the TIP is approved by [majority of the] SR, it will be live on the TRON network.
So, that’s like the basic structure of the TRON governance. I think right now because of efficiency, TRON Foundation is always the leading developer in the TRON community. But definitely, we have invested a huge amount of the money and resources to try to get more community developers involved in the development of the TRON network. So, that’s why we have a weekly and bi-weekly core developer conference held by Marcus Zhao. We welcome everybody to participate. We have [also] built Discord group, WeChat group, and also Telegram group for the developers to join and give advice or participate in the development of the TRON network.
Dimi: Dear Justin, I’ve been in TRON since the first day I’ve joined crypto at the end of 2017. I liked the vision of TRON to decentralize the internet like Tim Berner Lee intended it.
2 years have passed and the Foundation is getting more control over the network, I can understand this is to safeguard our own network to start and grow. but will the TRON foundation keep that power as we progress in time as decentralization is the key? It would be sad to lose the community aspect behind the governance and how will we assure their spot? Btw I’d love a hoodie! And thank you for taking your time.
Justin Sun: I think right now we faced two unforeseen [circumstances] right? First of all, we need to compete with Ethereum, EOS, Tezos, Cardano, with other public blockchains. So, we need lots of resources on the developer side. So, TRON Foundation is still the leading developer of the TRON network. But definitely, as I have said before, we want to invest more and also have more communication channels to have more community members to participate in the development of the TRON network for sure. I believed, under the leadership of the TRON Foundation, TRON can succeed for 3, 5 years, even 10 years. But if we want to really succeed for 50 years, or even 100 years, an open-source [approach] and a good community is very important if your protocol wants to last for longer [period of time]. I think two things are not conflicting. Under the TRON Foundation’s leadership, we can guarantee in the short term of the competition, we can compete with Ethereum, EOS, and all other public chains I have mentioned before. And also at the same time, with the power of the community, as long as we do more to develop our community, our success will last for a longer time.
So, basically, as my mentor, Jack Ma, has told me – both the speed and resilience, are very important. We need to make sure in the future, we have both. I think TRON has lots of things we need to improve. But definitely, with gradual improvements, we can definitely do better, or even become the best, in terms of development efficiency and community governance. This is also our goals as well.
And also, I think our community also needs to be more inclusive. The concept of community is very wide, right? Not only the people in the TRON community is what we called the community, but also, lots of the people who helped us like wallets, exchanges, they are part of the TRON community as well. So that’s why I always welcome Binance, Bitfinix, Huobi, OKEx, KuCoin, Poloniex, and any exchange. If they want to be a part of the community, running our nodes, running as a member of Super Representative, I am more than welcome. I hope they can do a great job to align their customer’s interests with the TRON community members’ interests. And also, TRON has recently focused a lot of the energy to push our partnership with bigger companies like Samsung, and we have other big companies on the pipeline.
For some of the community members, for example in Bitcoin community or other [chains with] toxic community members, they hate big exchange, they hate big corporation, because they believed the big exchange and the corporation is against the value of decentralization, and against the concept of cryptocurrency. But on my side, I believed we should be inclusive. Because eventually, blockchain and cryptocurrency will be the next generation of financial infrastructure for everybody on this planet. It’s like 7-billion people out there, so we definitely need to be more inclusive. The exchange, wallet, big corporations, and members of the other industries are also the ones we need to collaborate with. That’s why we have focused a lot of the energy to include them in the TRON ecosystem. This year, I definitely promised we will not only see Samsung partnership, but we will also see other multi-billion dollars company join the TRON ecosystem and play an important role in the TRON ecosystem as well.
Sca2le8p: Hi Justin! Thanks for your time. I work for an investment fund management institution and I would like to know more deeply lots of things but the main one is about one of your answers. You said The foundation believed that TRX is undervalued, right? but which is the value you estimated for TRX in the near future? I think this question is quite important, obviously Tron will grow up but I would like to know your estimation of the value, please! Thanks a lot.
My understanding is TRON’s TRX valuation will eventually be equivalent to the amount of the assets running on the TRON network. For example, right now we already got USDT with 1.1 billion dollars, we got TRX, we got BTT, WINk, and lots of the [other] TRC10 and TRC20 tokens. In the future, you can see a lot of games, DApps running on the TRON platform.
For example, TRON is just like the next version of the Android + iOS + SWIFT + Stripe + Square, right? So, TRON is basically the operating system and financial infrastructure for all this kind of development. I believed TRON valuation will be equivalent to the economic activities that happened on the TRON network. So, that is my theory on the valuation of TRON. If you guys have like any other theories, I want to hear them too because I’m exploring the way to evaluate TRX as well.
And also, it is just like my mentor’s company – Alibaba. How you can evaluate Alibaba and Amazon? I believed eventually, it is decided by the economic activities that happened on Amazon and Alibaba’s platform. For example, all the revenue model and the ecosystem that is built on the platform, and eventually the Alibaba’s valuation and Amazon’s valuation will come close to the scale of the GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) on the platform. I believed TRON shared the same business model. For myself, I’m not focusing on the price of TRX a lot, I always try to focus on our ecosystem, try to increase the scale of our ecosystem, to make more valuable token, more economic activities on the TRON platform, and to get the best companies, DApps, assets on the TRON platform.
tommy: With the upcoming Chinese YUAN digital currency. How can Tron ride on this massive wave?
I definitely have lots of confidence in that because you know we have numerous Chinese community members. I think as long as the Chinese Yuan digital currency gets popular in China, more and more people will see the potential of TRON. Because right now TRON is already like one of the most famous public blockchains in China.
Me Fa: Any plan on acquisition of freelancing platform online?
I think right now we don’t have the plan for the acquisition of freelancing platforms. But definitely we are interested in doing acquisitions. Of course, our standards will be high, we will see if we have other acquisition opportunity in the future.
β ππππ πππ β¦: When will your book be translated into English? I really want to read it!
Definitely, we will work on translating my book into English and I’m thinking about maybe in the future, when I am less busy, I can write like a book about myself, originally in English for sure. So, that’s my plan.
Thanks, everyone. I think that’s all the questions we have today. Thanks to everybody who participates in today’s AMA.
TronLive: Justin, that is awesome, thanks for answering the community questions. Since it is still midnight for the westerners, a lot of users are offline. We will get them to give feedback to TRON in this telegram group so that you and the TRON team can see them.
Alright, guys, that will be the end of this AMA session. We want to thank you for joining TronLive and the TRON community today and hope to see you participate more in the TRX Whale discussion group in the near future!
