Despite all the rumors, Tron founder Justin Sun doesn’t confirm that he can be behind the acquisition of crypto exchange Poloniex.
Justin Sun who is the founder and CEO of Tron (TRX) has dismissed rumors and allegations that he is behind the investment group that acquired the premier cryptocurrency exchange group Poloniex. He indicated this in a tweet on October 19th and categorically stated that he is “not buying anything”.
I'm not buying anything. Just invest some and help out my friends. Actually I have a huge bag of $BNB, $HT, $OKB etc and bet on all exchanges that support $TRX & $BTT. 😄
— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) October 19, 2019
As indicated by sources, the US-based cryptocurrency exchange is splitting from its parent company Circle and the new company Polo Digital Assets is set to exclude the United States Citizens and residents from the list of its clientele showing a dramatic shift from the original business model of the exchange. The new arrangement is said to be backed by the yet-to-be-named Asian investment group of which it is alleged that Justin Sun has ties to.
As regards the controversial connection, it had been widely reported that Sun was involved with the new acquisition, this, of course, has now been refuted by Sun himself although a few questions linger as to why Poloniex which has been one of the upstarts in the cryptocurrency exchange industry suddenly decided to go in the opposite direction of the world’s largest economy by a wide margin.
The United States regulatory landscape has been somewhat shifty as many blockchain-related companies are facing the heat in what has been referred to by many as a highly targeted witch-hunt. Secondly, the US rate of adoption of cryptocurrencies and their underlying technologies has been slowing down in recent times.
This is mostly due to the current political climate which hasn’t been friendly to anything that has to do with technology generally. The politically motivated moves made against many technology giants are reflective of the collective mistrust that the US government has as a whole.
Thirdly, the fight from big banking especially in the US is giving the crypto space a hard time. The difficulty of working with big banking has made it quite complicated to get cryptocurrency-related projects off the ground.
All these, however, are temporary and will change over time. Poloniex in a statement on popular article website Medium indicated:
“Going forward, we have a multiyear plan to spend more than $100M to develop and expand Poloniex, and we are very excited to continue working with the amazing global community of Poloniex customers. The cryptocurrency revolution has just begun, and we’re in it for the long haul”.
This shows the cash infusion of $100 million that the unnamed Asian investment group intends to invest in Poloniex. Also, the statement reads that from the 1st of November, US customers won’t be able to execute trades on the Poloniex platform. Withdrawals through circle will still occur through Circle until 15th December of this year.
Circle, on the other hand, intends to continue working with its stable coin USDC and also to expand its services with Seedinvest which has been referred to as the largest crowdfunding platform for internet offerings. This comes after its year-long acquisition which may be a great partnership for all the parties involved. In a blog post Circle indicates:
“We have been working hard to introduce new services built on SeedInvest that allow for fundraising using tokens and digital assets, marrying traditional financial contracts and assets with crypto”.
This shows that though the environment might still be unfriendly for the crypto space miracles can still happen and change might not necessarily be a bad thing after all.
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