In a matchup that promises to generate entertainment and news headlines, the founder of cryptocurrency Tron Justin Sun has won an annual charity lunch with Warren Buffett with a winning bid of $4.5 million. The lunch, which will be held in New York City, is in benefit of San Francisco-based homeless charity Glide. It promises fireworks as Buffett is famously critical of cryptocurrencies. He has referred to Bitcoin as “rat poison squared” and said that cryptocurrencies are “a delusion” that have “no unique value.”
In a Medium post, Sun pointed out that Buffett, who is widely considered one of the most successful investors of all time, missed out several profitable waves in the past. This included investment in successful technology companies, such as Amazon, Alphabet, and Google. “I believe we in the blockchain community are at the beginning of an era of immense technological and financial growth,” wrote Sun, adding that “industry leaders” from the crypto community would accompany him to the lunch.
China-based Tron has positioned itself as a competitor to Ethereum as a platform to host decentralized applications (dapps), which can be used to accomplish a variety of tasks from making money transfers to social networking to creating exchanges for trading. Interestingly, the price of Tron’s cryptocurrency surged during the crypto rally even though it had not yet launched a blockchain. Some developers also charged Tron with stealing Ethereum’s code to put out a test version of its platform.
Since then, Tron has spruced up its act and announced partnerships with other members of the crypto ecosystem. The most notable of these is with Hong Kong-based exchange Bitfinex for trading of its controversial stable USDT (Tether). The partnership enables users to “transact and exchange fiat-pegged currencies across the TRON Network.” Tron also bought BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol, and was rumored to be partnering with China’s e-commerce behemoth Alibaba. Sun is among the first graduates of Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Hupan University and is considered his protégé.