Ex-Tron CTO Denies Founder Justin Sun's Accusations of Embezzlement, Bribery

The former CTO of Tron, who left the project to launch a competing blockchain, has denied accusations of embezzlement, bribery and infringement that were levied by Tron founder Justin Sun.

Chen, who joined Tron in late 2017 as its technology chief shortly after following an initial coin offering, said he feels "Very sad" that Tron is, in his view, no longer decentralized.

"I certainly know that the real Internet applications cannot function in TRON network at all currently. The TRON ecosystem is still far from commercial applications."

According to the white paper of Chen's Volume Network, major team members of the project also come from Tron, including Xiaodong Xie, a former Tron blockchain developer, as well as Jinchao Zhu, a former dapp product manager at Tron.

At the heart of Sun's accusations is the contention that Chen and others violated the law as well as company rules, asserting that the group had been fired in January 2019 following "Verification done by TRON's discipline department."

Chen's post appears to have drawn backlash from Tron's Justin Sun, who said via his Weibo account.

"According to verification done by TRON's discipline department, Z. Chen, J. Zhu, X. Xie had seriously violated laws and company rules with alleged corporate property embezzlement, bribery, non-compete violation, infringement of corporate trade secrets and intellectual properties, and had been fired in January 2019. TRON has submitted relevant materials to the justice department. Chen joined Tron in October 2017. Before he was fired in January 2019, he was an ordinary employee on the technical side and was not a co-founder."

Sun himself did refer to Chen as the CTO of Tron in a June 2018 Twitter post.

Sun did not specify what material or evidence Tron has obtained and submitted or to which "Justice department" he was referring.

To a Tron GitHub repository from April 2018 with his name listed as the company's CTO. "To be frank, I surprised that I turned into 'the employee of the technology department' overnight," he further stated.