Justin Sun Net Worth (Updated)
February 14, 2024
(Updated:
)
INTRODUCTION
Justin Sun’s current known net worth is estimated to be at least $1.4 billion. His peak known net worth was approximately $7 billion in September 2021. However, these numbers are derived from his holdings of cryptocurrency & don’t include any privately held equity in companies he founded/backed. His net worth is likely to be higher than this, but the precise number is unknown.
This article will investigate Justin Sun’s net worth, his known crypto holdings, as well as their evolution over time. Additionally, the article will examine Sun's non-crypto holdings, which include meme stocks and an art collection - to build an awareness of the different assets which comprise his fortune.
SUMMARY
- Justin Sun’s net worth is estimated to be at least $1.4 billion as of January 2024. His peak (known) net worth was around $7B in September 2021.
- WSTETH is his largest known holding and represents 30% of his portfolio. USDD is second at 21%, and TRX is third at 17%.
- Sun is the 5th largest holder of TRX at the time of writing.
- Sun’s non-crypto holdings include his equity stakes in several companies, NFTs, an art collection and meme stocks.
HOW DID JUSTIN SUN BECOME RICH?
Justin Sun generated the bulk of his wealth as a founder & investor in the cryptocurrency market. He is renowned as the Founder of TRON, and for being the CEO of BitTorrent - a company he acquired, as well as his acquisition of the exchange Poloniex & his role as an Advisor to another exchange - HTX (formerly Huobi). Sun is also associated with the TRON DeFi projects Just (JST) & Sun (SUN) & may hold large amounts of these. He generated & amplified much of his wealth through launching TRON & associated projects, & through his stakes in Bittorrent & the 2 exchanges. He was also involved in launching USDD - a stablecoin, of which he holds a significant amount.
Sun reportedly first encountered cryptocurrency during his time as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, which led to his first Bitcoin investment. In late 2013, Sun then started working in the space as the Chief Representative and Advisor for the China region at Ripple (XRP), a global payment system & one of the top 10 largest tokens by market capitalization in 2024. At 23 years old, he was their first employee in China.
In September 2017, Sun launched his first venture in the crypto space, the TRON network. The TRON network is a smart contract platform which aims to decentralize elements of finance & software across a range of different fields, from payments, to digital entertainment. Sun later established the TRON Foundation and headed it as CEO. The Foundation was focussed on developing & maintaining the TRON network, just as other foundations do for other decentralized networks e.g. The Ethereum Foundation. This later evolved into TRON DAO.
In 2017, Sun conducted an ICO of TRON’s native token, TRX, which raised $76 million. While Sun’s allocation from the ICO was not disclosed, 34% of TRX tokens were allocated to the TRON Foundation, of which he likely received a large portion.
In August 2018, Sun acquired the file sharing service BitTorrent for approximately $140 million. Sun then moved to launch a token for BitTorent, BTT, which was distributed for free to TRX holders through airdrops instead of an ICO.
In 2019, Sun acquired the Poloniex exchange for an undisclosed amount, reportedly taking a controlling stake in it. In the same year, Sun won a charity auction for the chance to have a dinner with Warren Buffet with a bid of $4.57 million, indicating substantial liquid wealth by 2019.
Sun was also said to have acquired HTX (then known as Huobi) through About Capital Management, in which Sun was one of the leading investors. Sun was then named as HTX’s Global Advisor. He later resigned as the CEO of TRON Foundation in late 2021 to assume the role of Grenada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization.
JUSTIN SUN’S EARLY LIFE
Sun was born in 1990 in Qinghai, a rural province of China. Sun showed academic prowess from a young age, studying History at Peking University and East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, two leading universities in China/the US respectively.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, he continued his studies at Hupan University in China. Founded by Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, the institution offered a non-conventional entrepreneurship program for the next wave of Chinese entrepreneurs. In Hupan, Sun completed a thesis on "The Birth of a Decentralized Internet” & then graduated as the University’s first millennial alumnus. After working at Ripple, Sun founded his first startup in 2014 - an app called Peiwo, an audio-based mashup of Tinder and a live-streaming chat room which grew to 10 million users.
HOW RICH IS JUSTIN SUN? NET WORTH SUMMARY
Justin Sun has an estimated net worth of at least $1.43 billion. As this is based on his identified on-chain crypto holdings, his actual net worth is likely higher, as it would include any unknown crypto holdings, as well as non-crypto holdings such as equity stakes in companies, art, and real estate. Let’s look into Sun’s crypto & non-crypto holdings to learn more about his net worth.
HOW MUCH CRYPTO DOES JUSTIN SUN OWN?
Justin Sun’s known crypto holdings currently amount to approximately $1.43 billion. His holdings on the TRON network, which amount to approximately $861.66 million in total, make up 60% of his known crypto holdings. Sun’s holdings can be estimated by examining his known wallet addresses. While this doesn’t rule out the existence of any undisclosed wallets, Sun’s known wallets hold a massive amount, which likely comprises a significant portion of his net worth.
We can see these holdings and how they’ve changed over time on Sun’s Arkham profile page:
HOW MUCH TRX DOES JUSTIN SUN HOLD?
At the time of writing, Justin Sun holds around $230M worth of TRX. Sun’s highest known crypto holding on the TRON network is not TRX but about $280M worth of USDD, the stablecoin he launched.
It is worth noting that though TRX’s ICO was held in 2017, Sun’s known public wallets never received any TRX tokens until November 2020. Given his public wallets typically only hold TRX for less than a day - as his portfolio archive on Arkham shows a minimal balance of TRX held at any given point before the 15th of October 2022, it is likely that Sun’s current and historical TRX holdings are in unidentified wallets.
Arkham’s AI entity prediction feature - which gives probabilistic guesses as to who the owner of a certain address might be, reports that there are a number of other addresses which may be owned & operated by Sun. At least one of these held almost $700M of TRX in 2021, which could represent an amount large enough to be a Founder allocation of TRX. This address, as well as others predicted to be Sun, have had extensive counterparty interactions with him, which don’t confirm - but might suggest that he operates those addresses. AI-identified potential Sun addresses include:
TDqMwZVTSPLTCZQC55Db3J69eXY7HLCmfs
TJkgTCg91dEfsT9to74VDXi7uUxRDqF2ft
0xc21087f0b51BB074FB7e060Cde64b125C88b0865
TMJ5heWvehQrvHqsCc53KeVhnkSpyLYwWx
TCVvHUqZC6uezrxhCgAXqC45XHt35mNJyy
TFsuFNs5vyjJ8iKUT5uvJUhjnx5VjFdWPy
TT2T17KZhoDu47i2E4FWxfG79zdkEWkU9N
These would add a potential >$800M to his on-chain net worth. If the funds sent through the deposit addresses were sold for fiat, this would add several billion to Sun’s net worth.
The following table shows Sun’s confirmed TRX holdings, as well as his net crypto holdings over the past few years.
Sun’s known TRX holdings never reach 40% of his total portfolio in his public wallets. This is in stark contrast to Vitalik Buterin, the Founder of Ethereum, whose known crypto net worth is largely made up of his ETH holdings. Sun has significantly increased the amount of TRX tokens that he holds in his public wallets from 733.06 million tokens on 15th October 2022 to 2.44 billion tokens at the end of 2022.
JUSTIN SUN’S TRX HOLDER RANKING
A ranking of entities with the most TRX tokens can be found in the top holder section for TRX on Arkham.
Justin Sun’s known holdings of 2.4% of TRX’s supply make him the largest identified individual holder of TRX, and fifth overall It should be noted that this ranking does not include Sun’s unknown or predicted TRX holdings, which may position him even higher on the list of top TRX holders.
Additionally, Sun has notable connections to the other top-ranking entities in the list. TRON DAO, the number one holder with 12.39 million TRX tokens worth around $1.34 billion, was launched by Sun. Additionally, HTX, acquired by a fund where Sun is a key investor, owns the second-largest quantity of TRX tokens at 9.9 million, valued at around $1 billion. USDD, a stablecoin backed by TRX, among other cryptocurrencies, and launched by Sun, comes in third place with 9 million tokens worth approximately $975 million, representing around 10% of TRX’s total supply.
JUSTIN SUN’S CRYPTO HOLDINGS OVER TIME
The fluctuations of Sun’s known crypto holdings over the years can be seen by examining Sun's historical crypto holdings through the Portfolio Archive of his Arkham profile. These are also graphed under the Balance History section on his Arkham profile, giving a more visually intuitive way of tracking his net worth over time.
The following table records his known crypto holdings and his highest crypto holding on 31st December each year as a benchmark for his estimated crypto holdings in the corresponding year. The table also includes his estimated crypto net worth on the 6th of September 2021, when his public wallets reached their highest total balance as identified on Arkham.
The table shows that Justin Sun’s known crypto holdings dropped from $260.83 million in 2017 to $156.44 million in 2018. Another point of interest is the 4x in Sun’s crypto net worth from $256.91 million in 2019 to $1.04 billion in 2020. Notably, Sun’s crypto holdings reached $7.11 billion on the 6th of September 2021, approximately 7x his current crypto net worth. Afterward, the wallets’ total balance dropped till they reached $1.4 billion on the 31st of December, 2023. These changes in wallet balances are due to the drawdown in the crypto market as well as outflows from Sun’s known wallets.
From 2017 to 2023, Sun's largest crypto holdings have usually been BTC and ETH rather than TRX. Between 2017 and 2019, ETH constituted most of Sun's known public crypto holdings. Even in 2023, Sun's largest holding was WSTETH. Again however, this analysis excludes large potential TRX holdings in unidentified Sun wallets, as well as the holdings of other tokens he’s reportedly been involved with like Just (JST) & Sun (SUN).
JUSTIN SUN’S TOP CRYPTO HOLDINGS
Sun’s top four crypto holdings are worth approximately $700M in total, making up half of his $1.4 billion total portfolio.
- USDD ($280M)
- TRX ($260M)
- BTT ($108M)
- USDJ ($90M)
VALKYRIE BTC INVESTMENTS
CoinDesk reported in 2022 that Sun stored $580 million of Bitcoin in US-based Valkyrie Asset Management as of August 2022. That amounted to over 90% of the money at Valkyrie’s largest division, Valkyrie Digital Assets LLC. It is not known whether Sun still has funds at Valkyrie. This Valkyrie BTC would add >$1B at current prices to Sun’s net worth, if still held. Sun is also reportedly an early investor in Valkyrie.
NFT COLLECTION
Sun’s OpenSea profile (Justinsun) shows that his NFT holdings include 1 CryptoPunk and 36 Sandbox NFTs. Using the floor price of Sun’s collections as an estimate for their value, Sun’s Opensea holdings are worth at least $175K on Ethereum.
Sun spent $15 million on the Bored Ape Yacht Club Tron NFT that he uses as his X profile picture. He also paid $10.5 million for another TRON NFT Tpunk, resembling the Joker.
JUSTIN SUN'S OTHER TOP HOLDINGS
Sun’s other holdings include equity stakes in crypto companies like BitTorrent and Poloniex. Another notable investment was in Animoca Brands’ $65 million funding round in October 2021. In 2022, Animoca was valued at $6 billion. He also backed Ardana, a stablecoin on Cardano, in 2021.
Sun has also made large purchases in the art world. His notable pieces include the sculpture "Le Nez" by Alberto Giacometti for $78.4 million. Sun has also purchased artworks by Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. He purchased Picasso’s "Femme nue couchée au collier" for $20 million and Warhol's "Three self-portraits" for $1.5 million. Sun aimed to tokenize these paintings through the JUST NFT Fund to bridge the gap between blockchains and traditional art.
During the meme-stock frenzy, Sun also invested $12 million in GameStop, AMC, and silver. His investment was split between $10 million allocated to GameStop and the remainder into AMC and Silver. Whether he still holds these stocks is unknown.
CONCLUSION
Using the total estimates of Justin Sun’s known crypto holdings, his net worth can be approximated to be at least $1.43 billion. It is likely to be higher than this, depending on the present value of his other assets, including his art & NFT collections, private investments and equity holdings.
Using Arkham, you can track the crypto portfolios of prominent crypto entrepreneurs and traders, with a range of data and analytics to help you dig into their holdings and activity. Track Justin Sun on Arkham here.
