Justin Sun Suspected of Controlling All STUSD Staking on TRON
Date: 2023-08-04 Author: Karina Ziganova Categories: BLOCKCHAIN, BUSINESS
Journalists could not find any evidence that the DAO for the management of staked stablecoins is managed in a decentralized manner
Staking versions of the stablecoin USDT based on the TRON network (stUSDT) are almost entirely controlled by wallets and organizations associated with crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun. Journalists of Protos came to this conclusion.
As the journalists note, the stUSDT token is positioned as a stablecoin managed by the decentralized community Real World Asset Decentralized Autonomous Organization (RWA DAO). However, Protos claims that they could not find any evidence that the project is really decentralized.
Moreover, in mid-July 20203, journalists found out that about 85% of the stUSDT offer was managed by the Huobi exchange (which is de facto controlled by Justin Sun), referring to data from the Nansen service. At the time of writing, TRONSCAN data show that the TDTo...ivA4 wallet has more than $400 million in stUSDT under management. The same wallet is listed among the reserves of the exchange on the official website of Huobi.
At the time of writing, more than $500 million is placed in stUSDT staking, according to the charts on the project website.
It follows that about 79% of all stUSDT tokens are managed by a Huobi-related wallet. Journalists believe that the remaining part of stUSDT is also in a wallet, which is supposed to be controlled by Justin Sun.
On the official website of the stUSDT project, it is indicated that JustLend DAO is among its partners. However, as stated in Protos, journalists were unable to find "any proposals or discussions in JustLend related to the launch of RWA DAO".
The journalists admit that the RWA DAO is actually a centralized organization that "takes funds [...] and invests them in projects and assets in the real world." Income from such invested DAOs is returned to stUSDT holders, the journalists claim. The developers of the staked stablecoin promise a yield of slightly less than 4.3% per annum. However, Protos notes that they could not determine exactly how stUSDT's investment strategy is structured.
