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TRON CEO Justin Sun has apologized to Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao after the latter warned followers that Sun could use Binance's Launchpool platform to farm giant amounts of a new blockchain token called Sui.
CZ took to Twitter this morning after news broke that Sun had transferred $56 million to the exchange, warning him that Binance would “take action against it” if Sun then uses the funds to acquire Sui tokens on Launchpool.
The tweet that caught CZ’s eye came from the @whale_alert bot, an account that tracks large blockchain transactions.
🚨 🚨 🚨 56,100,000 #TUSD (56,444,454 USD) transferred from Justin Sun to #Binancehttps://t.co/OWFJNQ3oXO
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) May 1, 2023
CZ went on to explain that Binance’s Launchpool platform is intended for retail users (individual investors, as opposed to institutions) and “not just for a few whales.” Launchpool lets Binance users farm new project tokens and acquire rewards by staking tokens like BNB and dollar-pegged stablecoin TrueUSD (TUSD) in staking pools on the platform.
Sun replied to CZ twenty minutes later with an apology, explaining that the transfer was due to an “oversight” stemming from TRON DAO’s market making partnership with TUSD and was emphatically not an attempt by him to hoard Sui tokens.
He also shifted the responsibility for the transfer onto “team members [that] were not fully aware of the intended purpose for these funds and inadvertently used a portion of them to participate in exchange campaigns.”
In the same tweet, Sun claims the DAO has arranged a full return of the funds with Binance.
CZ has yet to tweet an update on the situation. Decrypt reached out to all parties for comment but didn’t receive an immediate response.
Sui and Launchpool
The Sui network is a layer-1 blockchain created by Mysten Labs, a startup that was founded by former executives of Meta’s crypto division.
It’s a proof-of-stake blockchain built using the open-source Move programming language, which was originally developed for Meta’s abandoned Diem crypto project.
If this all sounds familiar then it’s because it’s pretty much the same pitch as Aptos, another recently launched newcomer Layer-1 blockchain developed by former Meta crypto experts.
Sui’s mainnet is slated to go live this Wednesday at 12pm UTC. Binance is facilitating the launch by making Sui the 33rd project to debut on its Launchpool platform.
Snapshots of both users’ and pools’ balances are taken every hour and rewards are calculated each hour too; customers can unstake their funds at any time. The total farming period will run for two days after the launch of Sui’s mainnet.
When Sui’s liquidity meets Binance’s requirements, the exchange will then list the token under the SUI/BTC, SUI/USDT, SUI/TUSD, and SUI/BNB trading pairs.
So far, users have staked nearly ten million BNB (over $3 billion) in Sui’s BNB Launchpool and half a billion over in TUSD’s pool.