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Tron CEO Sun to Give Away Two Teslas After Bungling Promotion

Cryptosphere Cries Foul as Tron Founder Redraws Tesla Lottery

(Bloomberg) -- Justin Sun, the founder of one of the largest digital tokens, is awarding two Teslas instead of one after a mishandled promotional giveaway caused an uproar in the online cryptosphere.

Sun, who built Tron into the 11th-largest cryptocurrency, announced an online Tesla giveaway earlier this month and chose a winner this week. But the offer was soon rescinded -- despite an initial congratulatory tweet by Sun -- and the crypto chief decided to pick a new winner.

The first winner, Puebla, Mexico-based Uziel Garcia, who goes by @uzgaroth on Twitter, asked if Tron was trying to “scam” him. “I was officially the winner since he had mentioned that there was no problem with the video and then they just made another draw and they forgot me,” Garcia wrote on Twitter. “Do you think @justinsuntron and @Tronfoundation scam me?,” he asked his followers.

The second winner goes by @LeoHuynhPro on Twitter and is listed as living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He has not tweeted about his new prize.

Tron CEO Sun to Give Away Two Teslas After Bungling Promotion

Sun rescinded the first prize after posting a mangled announcement video which critics said was doctored and flashed the winner’s name ahead before it was chosen. Skeptics also called attention to the 88 drawings Sun conducted before choosing a winner.

“To delete the first draw video and winner announcement, provide no explanation, then under the guise of ’transparency’ do another draw with new rules, a misrepresentation of how many entrants Twitter allows, and a new draw site that leaves no record of the actual draw conditions -- it’s questionable,” said Ben Miller, analyst at Shark CIA, a cryptocurrency intelligence and research agency. Miller was one of the first to point to problems with Sun’s video.

Sun is now giving away the Teslas to both winners in an attempt to create “transparency, reliability and openness about blockchain,” according to a statement issued by Sun to Bloomberg News.

“We will more than likely have a few setbacks along the way. The team has taken some learnings from this, and we are more than happy to collaborate with Twitter and third-party developers to have good mechanisms to select winners (maybe even powered by blockchain technology!),” Sun wrote in the statement.

Tron launched the coin, known as TRX, in 2017 and has a market value of about $1.57 billion, according to CoinMarketcap.com. It has surpassed Ethereum in popularity with many developers. When Sun tweeted out the initial Tesla winner’s name, he urged followers to swap their Tether for Tron coins to “get rewards.”

“All of this points to just how early we are in this revolution of replacing traditional trust-based tools with trust-less technologies,” Cornell University associate professor Emin Gun Sirer, said in an interview. “Here we have what could be a completely automated system that requires zero trust suddenly being subverted, suddenly being turned into a matter of speculation, marketing, and one entirely based on trust at that. As a result, we have essentially multibillion-dollar operations run by what I can only consider in very poor fashion.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Vildana Hajric in New York at vhajric1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, Dave Liedtka, Andrew Dunn

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.