Tron CEO Justin Sun has received a ton of negative publicity after announcing a contest to win a Tesla car and then refusing to keep the promise.
Justin Sun is currently facing a great deal of criticism after mishandling a competition he started on Twitter that promised the winner a free Tesla. The winner was announced when Sun announced it would cancel the deal – many criticized Sun for it and accused it of fraud.
Just follow and retweet
The competition, which was held as part of a Global Appreciation Campaign to celebrate the success of BitTorrent, Tether and Tron, was easy enough to enter. All you had to do was follow Sun on Twitter and retweet his post announcing the sweepstakes. In the post, Sun announced that it would be dropping $ 20 million – although it wasn’t really clear what form it would be in – as well as giving away a Tesla.
However, Sun later appears to have removed the original tweet announcing the winner.
Fraud?
In the wake of this announcement, some strange details have come to light that challenge the legitimacy of this competition as a whole.
Crypto analyst John Galt posted a number of tweets explaining some suspicious features of the entire draw process. The draws were conducted live via a feed on the Tron Foundation’s official Twitter account. After looking at the IP hashes of the winners’ accounts, Galt found that the first winner drawn was actually a bot account. The following 88 other drawn winners were drawn anonymously, but Galt states that the timestamps and IP hashes show that they are actually the same person.
In addition, strangely enough, during the video of the draw, the profile of Twitter user Uziel Garcia, who uses the Twitter handle @uzgaroth, is displayed for a split second before the actual draw takes place. Sun attributes this to a problem with file compression during upload. Garcia was later announced as the winner of the Tesla in a post that later disappeared.
After announcing the win from Mexico’s Garcia, Sun contacted him and asked for his details so he could receive his award. Garcia didn’t hear anything after that, however, and the tweet announcing him as the winner was removed by Sun. Garcia was suspicious of what was going on and publicly tweeted asking his followers if they thought he was being betrayed.
“I was officially the winner because he mentioned there was no problem with the video and then they just made another drawing and forgot about me. Do you think @justinsuntron and @Tronfoundation cheated on me?”
Ben Miller, an analyst at Shark CIA, a cryptocurrency intelligence and research agency, told Bloomberg that this raises some serious questions about the legitimacy of all of the competition.
“To delete the first draw video and announcement of the winners, do not make any statement and then, under the guise of ‘transparency’, run another draw with new rules, a misrepresentation of the number of entrants Twitter allows and a new drawing page leaving no record by actual draw conditions – it’s questionable “,
Renege on the Renege
Initially, Sun ignored any negative comments Twitter cast on him from observers and deleted any tweets mentioning @uzgaroth. Presumably, however, he bowed to pressure from the Internet, but made a statement describing the situation as “unfortunate” and instead offering Garcia free tickets for the next niTRON summit in 2020.
However, I understand that this is an unfortunate situation and I would like to extend a warm welcome to you to the next #niTROn summit in 2020, including a fully paid round-trip ticket to the venue. We are very grateful for your continued support. #TRON
– Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) March 29, 2019
Needless to say, the internet wasn’t impressed. After the amount of negative publicity that this whole debacle has accumulated in the last few days, Justin Sun has now again promised, according to Bloomberg, to actually give Garcia and another winner from Vietnam Teslas. According to Sun, this is intended to ensure “transparency”.
Whatever happened here, there is clearly something fishy and Sun clearly just damaged its brand and made a fool of itself. It’s ironic in this story that the creator of the 11th largest coin by market cap should be so perfectly illustrating a use case for blockchain – if you can’t trust the people you do business with, blockchain can be an indispensable tool for transparency.
Alex has been putting words on paper since he was old enough to hold a pen; When he bought his first Bitcoin in January 2017, these words also found their place in cryptocurrency. He holds a Masters degree in International Relations from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and his particular expertise lies in European cryptocurrency regulation.
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Released March 30, 2019 March 30, 2019
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