The departure of Lucien Chen, CTO and co-founder of Tron, has caused a stir among its community as the two leaders of the blockchain project are getting into a tit-for-tat dispute, with CTO Chen claiming “Tron is no longer decentralized” and CEO Justin Sun accusing him of fund embezzlement.

“Tron is no longer decentralized”

The contentious blockchain project Tron (TRX), currently 11th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has get into a mire once again upon its CTO departure. On May 10, Lucien Chen announced his departure from Tron to which he had devoted two years due to the network’s lack of decentralization. In his open letter, Chen said Tron has deviated from the original intention of “decentralize the web”, and that everything is centralized.

“In the DPOS and Super Representative node, there is a problem of centralized voting. Some nodes have more than 90% of the votes with only a few voters. Therefore, the vote of ordinary retail investors has completely fallen. The total number of TRX in TRON is 100 billion, while the total number of votes for the super representatives is just less than 8 billion.”

Chen claimed that Tron is over-centralized in token distribution, code development, application and community voices

Ousted CTO is dismissed over illicit acts

Justin Sun took to Weibo (Twitter equivalent in China) saying Chen was fired this Jan for illicit acts

While Tron founder and CEO Justin Sun refuted that Chen was not a co-founder and he had been dismissed early in this January over illicit acts which border on “suspected fund embezzlement, bribery, competitive infringement and theft of trade secrets and intellectual property”. Sun continued that necessary documents and materials regarding his misdoings had been handed over to the judiciary.

A Reddit user pointed out that “Tron is so decentralized that we don’t even know when an extremely important figure in the company gets fired”

According to public information, Lucien Chen was introduced as the CTO of Tron on many occasions. Apparently, Chen’s departure led to the breakup of the two and Sun’s denial of Chen’s former CTO identity. Regarding Sun’s accusation, Chen fought back saying he would consider either a civil or criminal lawsuit against Sun for libel and defamation if he continues to make such accusations.

Not the first time Justin Sun got lashed out at

It is actually not the first time its former coworkers accused Sun. On the eve of Tron mainnet launch in May 2018, the ex-COO of Tron Liu Ming accused Sun of plagiarizing whitepapers of many other blockchains and claimed Sun did not even understand the rule of ICO, not to mention the spirits and technologies of blockchain, Liu continued accusing him of cashing out part of the raised fund and TRX token. Regarding these accusations, Sun never make any response.

Since the project went online a year ago, the market value and influence of Tron have been on growth, but the team is in turmoil with many big names leaving, and many of them have split with their former employer. Is that because Sun was a vicious guy as they claimed, or they are making use of their departure as a marketing (considering Chen chose to leave Tron and has started a competing blockchain)?

The contentious crypto Tron has been seen as a shitcoin by some investors. Sun, known as a hype machine who makes every effort to hype up his coins Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT), has been in hot water these days as the winner of Tron’s Tesla giveaway failed to receive the Tesla Sun promised after two months.