Another day, another flopped stunt from Tron CEO Justin Sun, sending the BitTorrent cryptocurrency price on another wild ride. | Source: Twitter (i), Shutterstock (ii). Image Edited by CCN.com.
By CCN.com: The BitTorrent cryptocurrency price tanked over 6% in Monday trading after Tron CEO Justin Sun’s latest announcement stunt flopped in hilarious fashion.
Tron Founder Will Pitch Crypto to Bitcoin Hater Warren Buffett
It turns out Sun was the mystery bidder who won a charity lunch auction to dine with investing oracle Warren Buffett. This year is the 20th anniversary of Buffett’s annual charity “power lunch” auction, and a record-setting bid of $4.5 million for the lunch date made headlines Friday. The previous record was $3.45 million in 2016.
Shortly after the news broke, Justin Sun took to Twitter for one of his infamous Tron and BitTorrent price-pumping “pre-announcements.” The crypto tycoon breathlessly told Tronsters to “stay tuned” for a “Big reveal.”
‘Please Tell Me This Isn’t the News’
But cryptocurrency traders are feeling bearish about BitTorrent (BTT) and Tron (TRX) Monday. CoinMarketCap showed Tron’s price had dropped 3% after the big reveal, outpacing Bitcoin’s minor pullback. The BitTorrent cryptocurrency suffered an even larger downturn.
The announcement was more than disappointing for cryptocurrency investors and traders, who apparently expected something more substantive. News of the lavish expense for a lunch with an investor who hates crypto unleashed a savage barrage of blowback:
https://twitter.com/LukeDRoberts/status/1135577417211420674
BitTorrent Price and Crypto Credibility Take Another Hit
Though BitTorrent’s price had been cooling, it heated up after Sun’s announcement tease Friday. He didn’t say anything substantive in the tweet, so speculators deserved to lose their money.
But crypto markets apparently anticipated something substantive. Maybe something more like $4.5 million invested in project development.
A former BitTorrent executive said in January that there’s “no way” Tron’s blockchain can handle the high rate of BitTorrent transactions. Instead of investing that much disposable cash in Tron scalability, Sun blew it on a self-aggrandizing vanity lunch with a man who’s made a fortune on Wall Street and doesn’t conceal his hatred for crypto.
Many crypto enthusiasts dream of mass adoption. But the industry’s leaders should be careful not to leave the “adoption” part out in pursuit of the mass part.
What is it that they want the masses to adopt? Watered down, centralized, corporatized altcoins, or the Internet of Money?
