Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.
SUI rises to glory as Sun sets sights on it
On April 30, cryptocurrency exchange Binance unveiled two LaunchPools for the then-up-and-coming listing of Sui tokens. As a layer-1 blockchain created by Mysten Labs, which in turn was founded by former Meta executives, the Sui project was eagerly anticipated and raised $300 million from venture capitalists such as FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, a16z and Circle Ventures. On Binance, users could either stake BNB or TrueUSD (TUSD) to farm a share of 40 million Sui tokens.
To say that the LaunchPools were oversubscribed would be an understatement. Despite just 0.4% of the 10 billion Sui being up for grabs, the retail frenzy saw the BNB-Sui farm pool surpass 8.895 million BNB staked and the TUSD-Sui farm pool top 892.6 million TUSD staked, totaling a combined $3.8 billion at the time of publication.
The arguably well-oversubscribed BNB-Sui LaunchPool (Binance)
The thirst for Sui was so great that on May 1, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), co-founder and CEO of Binance, publicly rebuked Tron founder Justin Sun for a deposit of 56.1 million TUSD on the exchange.
“Our team told Justin, if he uses any of these to grab the LaunchPool Sui token, we will ‘take action against it.’ SMH. Binance LaunchPool are meant as air drops for our retail users, not just for a few whales,” CZ wrote.
Interestingly, it appears as if the publicity raised questions over the extent of Sun’s involvement in TUSD. On May 4, TrueUSD developers stated that “TrueUSD was never owned by Justin Sun” in response to allegations.
Anyways, Sun quickly apologized with regard to the deposit, claiming that the funds were intended for “market making,” but nevertheless, “some of our team members were not fully aware of the intended purpose for these funds,” and used them to “participate in exchange campaigns.” The blockchain personality wrote that the Tron DAO…
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