CRYPTO'S BILLIONAIRE BARKER

JUSTIN SUN loves a publicity stunt. But in bailing out Donald Trump's crypto venture-netting the president and his family $400 million-Sun has boosted his efforts to create a global payment system using his Tron platform, with 300 million users and counting.

- BY STEVEN EHRLICH AND NINA BAMBYSHEVA

Chinese blockchain entrepreneur Justin Sun's admiration of Donald Trump began in middle school, while he was living in Huizhou, a city of 6 million in China's Guangdong province just north of Hong Kong. Sun's teacher encouraged his class to watch American television to learn vernacular English, so Sun tapped peer-to-peer file sharer BitTorrent, a service that years later he would own, and began downloading reruns of The Apprentice.

The reality show did a lot more than teach him how to pronounce Trump's "You're fired!" catchphrase. The precocious Sun says he was captivated by the American tycoon's lessons in cutthroat competition, showmanship and, of course, ego-anathema in a society steeped in the principles of Confucianism and Chinese socialism. But it was the early 2000s, and the reforms set in place by Deng Xiaoping had opened China to capitalism-especially in booming Shenzhen, which borders Huizhou. "It was natural for The Apprentice to become popular in China," Sun says.

So it felt like fate-perhaps now a fourletter word for opportunism-that Sun heard late last year that the Trump family's crypto venture, World Liberty Financial (WLF), was faltering despite the fact that the patriarch, listed as the company's "chief crypto advocate," had just been elected president of the United States.