Justin Sun launches TRON perps as lawmakers question Trump ties

Tron founder Justin Sun launched a website for trading perpetual futures tied to USDT, rolling out “SunPerp” in public beta on Friday, even as two Democratic lawmakers asked the SEC to examine his ties to the Trump family and TRON’s listing on Nasdaq via a reverse merger.

Perpetual futures, or “perps,” let traders speculate on prices without an expiry date. Justin Sun framed the launch around USDT’s role on Tron, saying the network is a major rail for the stablecoin and that perps were among USDT’s earliest uses. A social‑media post introduced SunPerp and said customer support would rotate, with Sun himself taking a shift during beta.

According to its documentation, SunPerp pitches an institutional‑style experience on Tron: aggregated multi‑chain liquidity for large orders, millisecond‑level matching with high‑performance APIs, and a hybrid model of off‑chain execution with on‑chain settlement aimed at zero gas fees. The venue also highlights multi‑source oracle pricing and anti‑snipe protections intended to reduce abnormal‑volatility risks.

The product debut lands alongside fresh political scrutiny. In a public letter, Representative Sean Casten and Senator Jeff Merkley urged the SEC to review what they called “concerning ties” between Sun and the Trump family, and to ensure TRON meets listing standards after its reverse‑merger path to Nasdaq. The lawmakers said Sun made sizeable investments in the $TRUMP memecoin and in World Liberty Financial’s token WLFI after the election, arguing those deals enriched the president’s family. They also pointed to a joint request by Sun and the SEC to pause proceedings in a 2023 fraud case, describing it as part of a broader pattern; the assertions are made in the letter.

The letter cited other engagements, including a May dinner hosted by the president for top memecoin investors, as potential conflicts or avenues for undue influence. It also warned that TRON’s US listing could raise “foreign influence” concerns, given allegations about Sun’s links to the Chinese Communist Party. The SEC, now chaired by Paul Atkins, was asked to scrutinize any arrangements between Sun and the Trump family and verify that listing standards are met.

Tensions between Sun and the Trump venture have also surfaced in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Sun said addresses linked to him were blacklisted on the WLFI network, freezing roughly 600 million WLFI. He urged the team to unlock the tokens and called WLFI “one of the biggest and most important projects in crypto.”

Sun has paired the launch with longer‑term ambitions for TRON’s payments role. In an interview published in August, he said TRON‑facilitated transactions could surpass SWIFT within five years and put 2025 volumes at about US$8 trillion, with the potential to scale dramatically thereafter.

I estimate that our facilitated transactions will exceed Swift’s in the next five years,

he said.

For now, SunPerp is in public beta and positioned as a decentralised derivatives venue on Tron. The lawmakers’ request asks the SEC to examine Sun’s ties and TRON’s listing route; the agency has not announced any action in response to the letter.