Does One Chinese Whale Dominate dYdX, TrueFi, and Ellipsis?

Tron founder Justin Sun's alleged wallet holds over 40% of dYdX's $1B TVL and the majority of TrueFi & Ellipsis' TVL

Chinese tech entrepreneur and Tron (TRON) founder Justin Sun Dominates TrueFi, dyDx and Ellipsis
Source: Unsplash

Chinese tech entrepreneur and Tron (TRON) founder Justin Sun was in the news late last year after he transferred almost $600M in Ethereum from a wallet to Binance. Sun's publicly known wallets are proven market movers. In May 2021, ETH dropped from $2,500 to below $2,000 on news that a $1B ETH position opened by Sun and Tron could be liquidated.

Sun's alleged Ethereum address is very active in decentralized finance (DeFi), with roughly 95% of its assets invested in farming, staking, or lending.

Sun holds over $2B on Ethereum, $609M on Binance Smart Chain, and $1M on Polygon. We can track Binance and Polygon transactions for this wallet because they are Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchains using the same address as the Ethereum wallet.

Many investors use a DeFi project's total value locked (TVL) as an indicator of the project's health. Sun's investment represents a high proportion of some projects' TVL:

Project Sun's Investments Project TVL Sun Dominance
TrueFi (TRU) $824M $882M 93%
Ellipsis (EPS) $416M $536M 77%
dYdX (DYDX) $440M $1,000M 44%
Wault (WEX) $4M $9M 44%
TVL data source: DeFi Llama

These projects are heavily exposed to Sun's investments, and it's easy to see the price of each token dropping or collapsing if Sun pulled his money.