By Xinmei Shen

Copyright scmp

Tron blockchain founder Justin Sun has unveiled a new financial product linked to USDT, the world’s most popular stablecoin, as Democratic lawmakers called on the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to look into “concerning ties” between the cryptocurrency entrepreneur and US President Donald Trump’s family.
In a social media post on Friday, Sun said he launched a website dedicated to “perpetual futures”, also known as “perps” – financial instruments that allow traders to speculate on the price of an asset at an unspecified point in the future. He pointed out that “Tron is a major USDT network” and that “perps were one of USDT’s earliest use cases”.
That initiative reflects Sun’s efforts to burnish the credentials of Tron, which he founded and launched in 2018.
The new perps trading website, however, was introduced at a time when two Democratic members of the US Congress, representative Sean Casten and senator Jeff Merkley, wrote a public letter to the SEC to complain about “a litany of issues” surrounding Sun’s ties to the Trump family and Tron’s recent listing on the Nasdaq stock market via a reverse merger.
The lawmakers said Sun made “sizeable” investments in two cryptocurrency projects – the $TRUMP memecoin and the World Liberty Financial token WLFI – since Trump’s re-election in November, which “directly enriched the President and his family”.
Tron did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to Casten and Merkley’s letter, those investments in Trump crypto projects were followed by a request made by Sun and the SEC to a court to halt proceedings in a fraud lawsuit that the commission had initiated in 2023.
Other engagements between Sun and Trump’s family, including an exclusive dinner in May that Trump hosted at his golf course in Washington for top investors of his memecoin, raised “clear conflicts of interest and the potential for undue influence”, the lawmakers wrote.
They also warned that Tron’s efforts to go public in the US created risks for “foreign influence” because of Sun’s alleged ties with the Communist Party.
Casten and Merkley called on the SEC – helmed by Paul Atkins, who has a friendlier stance towards the cryptocurrency sector than his predecessor Gary Gensler – to ensure that Tron “meets the rigorous standards necessary” for listing on US stock exchanges, while examining the deals between Sun and the Trump family.
The lawmakers’ letter has cast a critical eye on the close relationship between the cryptocurrency industry and the second Trump administration, which has introduced policies that support digital assets and enabled the president’s family to do business in the field.
The Trump family first issued WLFI tokens to private investors in November, when Sun invested US$30 million in these virtual assets. Since then, Sun has steadily increased his WLFI investment, while also becoming the top holder of $TRUMP memecoins.
Recently, the relationship between Sun and the Trump family appears to have soured. In a post on social-media platform X earlier this month, Sun said his tokens on the World Liberty Financial blockchain were frozen, confirming that the Trump venture blacklisted Sun’s address with about 600 million WLFI tokens.
Sun pleaded with the World Liberty Financial team to unlock his tokens, while calling WLFI “one of the biggest and most important projects in crypto”.