Ever since Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, had announced his much-talked-about Tesla giveaway earlier in the current month, the crypto community and his Twitter followers couldn’t be more excited. But the recent reports released on Friday has turned it even more fascinating. Where earlier the Tron founder was giving away the car to only one Twitter follower, now there would be two lucky winners.
The first lucky winner had already been selected randomly and declared as well, revealed a video. The account of the winner, based in Washington D.C., was identified as @uzgaroth. But soon after the news started doing the rounds, Justin posted a series of tweets that claimed they were experiencing some glitches with their random selection process.
Justin even said that he would be selecting a fresh winner through a live video, similar to a tested process that had taken place in China for a giveaway on Weibo, the popular Chinese social network. With that he announced, he would be offering the previously declared winner a complimentary ticket to Tron’s upcoming conference to be held in 2020 and not the Tesla car.
As soon as this was posted, the Tron founder was subjected to a backlash on the social media platform, following which he issued another statement saying,
“I’ve happily decided to give away two Teslas to further my mission of creating transparency, reliability and openness about blockchain.”
According to the reports, the 2nd winner has also been selected and announced. The user is identified as @LeoHuynhPro who is based in Vietnam.
Following the controversy around the giveaway, the spokesperson from Tron, Cliff Edwards, stated that this initiative is by Justin, not BitTorrent or Tron. It is him who has chosen to give away the money to his fans purely to increase their interest in crypto. He is personally offering all his Twitter followers an opportunity that lets them win a Tesla car.
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It must be noted here that back in January while speaking about a job requirement of Justin’s personal assistant, Edwards had said that Tron is a self-financed endeavour by Justin and hence the two entities are identical with each other; this completely contradicts his recent statement.
Edwards went on to disclose another fact that the prize amount of this giveaway would be coming from the founder’s personal estate and not from the previous token sales of Tron and BitTorrent organized in 2017 and 2019 respectively. While the token sale of Tron had managed to raise 70 million dollars, BitTorrent’s had raised 7.2 million dollars.
Leaving the question of the fund’s source aside, it should be considered that such a thing has happened in the past too where Tron Foundation or Justin Sun have allegedly fallen short of keeping their word with the competition winners.
Glitches in The Hackathon Prize
Last year in the month of December, Tron had sponsored a hackathon called Tron Accelerator which had promised total cash rewards amounting to one million dollars to the topmost 56 teams. However, going by the words of Edwards, there were too many great submissions which eventually led Justin to offer less money so that it could be received by an increased number of winners. He further stated that Tron’s founder had even clearly explained to people the reason behind his changed decision and how it actually escalated the jackpot.
Amongst all this, there was also buzz in the social media communities about other disappointments experienced in the hackathon in addition to the reduced prize money. The hackathon saw a few developers claiming that their submissions were not even taken into account.
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Later, an official blog post from Tron was published in January this year which announced the winners without mentioning either the increased jackpot or Justin. The blog revealed that a total of 113 projects had been selected among which the originally declared prize money of 1 million dollars was to be distributed.
In his statement, Edwards also said that similar to the giveaway of Tesla, the prize money of hackathon too came from Justin’s personal fortune. It was his money, not BitTorrent’s or Tron’s.
