Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
Crypto billionaire Justin Sun’s digital asset platform Tron is set to go public in the US, four months after market regulators agreed to pause a fraud investigation into several of his companies.
Tron will go public in a reverse merger with Nasdaq-listed SRM Entertainment in a deal orchestrated by Dominari Securities, a New York-based boutique investment bank with ties to Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The new venture will buy and hold the Tron token, mimicking the tactics of Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, which founder Michael Saylor has turned into a leveraged bitcoin vehicle, one of the people said. Eric Trump is expected to take up a role at the company, which will be called Tron Inc, the person added.
The deal will involve Tron injecting up to $210mn of token assets into the new company and marks the latest in a surge of crypto tie-ups fuelled by Donald Trump’s warm embrace of the digital asset industry since he began his second term as US president.
Shares in SRM Entertainment rose 280 per cent on Monday morning.
In 2023, Sun and three of his companies, including Tron, were charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US markets regulator, over allegations that they had sold unregistered securities and manipulated the market.
After Trump signalled his desire for a lighter-touch regulatory approach to crypto, the SEC and Sun in February filed a court motion to pause the lawsuit to explore a potential resolution.
Sun has since moved to strengthen his relationship with the Trump family. In May, Sun and the other 24 top holders of the $Trump memecoin attended a banquet with the president at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.
Sun has also poured $75mn into World Liberty Financial, a Trump family crypto company from which the president has derived income of $57mn. World Liberty last week issued its first stablecoins, a type of digital dollar, on the Tron blockchain founded by Sun.
Sun has long been regarded as one of the more controversial figures in the crypto industry and has garnered a reputation for attention-grabbing stunts.
In 2019 he made a winning $4.6mn charity auction bid for lunch with Warren Buffett and last year paid $6.2mn for a banana taped to a wall, which he then ate in front of the world’s media.
Although born in China, he has taken citizenship of St Kitts and Nevis, and once served as Grenada’s representative to the World Trade Organization.
Dominari Securities, which lined up SRM Entertainment on Tron’s behalf, is headquartered in Trump Tower two floors below the Trump Organization’s offices.
The Financial Times previously reported that shares in parent company Dominari Holdings, a securities and fintech group, surged by 580 per cent in the six weeks before its February 11 filing revealing that Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump had joined its advisory board.
American Bitcoin, the US cryptocurrency miner backed by the pair, was originally a wholly owned subsidiary of Dominari Holdings. It was previously called American Data Centers but rebranded in late March in a joint venture with another miner, Hut 8, to develop bitcoin mining and a strategic reserve of the token.
Dominari Securities has also raised millions of dollars for several of Elon Musk’s private companies, including SpaceX and xAI.