Former Employees Sue Justin Sun and TRON Foundation, Alleging Workplace Hostilities

In a 70-page court document filed in October in California state, Richard Hall, 50, and Lukasz Juraszek, 28, said they put up with escalating hostilities on the job that culminated in their termination last summer from BitTorrent, a file-sharing service that combined with the TRON Foundation in a $120 million sale two years ago.

The TRON Foundation is the main sponsor of the TRON cryptocurrency.

Justin Sun, TRON Foundation's 29-year-old founder and CEO, and Cong Li, 37, the head of engineering, are named together with the companies as defendants in the lawsuit, made public last week.

In a statement from a spokesperson, Sun and Li said: "TRON is not able to speak on the details of pending litigation, but what we can tell you is that our customers, employees and the TRON community are extremely important to us."

Well in advance of the TRON cryptocurrency's circulation, traders uncovered paragraphs in the TRON whitepaper - a document laying out its blockchain model - that had been lifted verbatim from other cryptocurrency whitepapers.

Zhiqiang Chen, TRON Foundation's first CTO who left to spin up a TRON competitor, would find himself in May denying Sun's accusations that he had been fired for embezzlement, bribery, non-disclosure violations, and trade theft.

Sparking the fight was Chen's now-deleted blog post communicating worries that Sun and the TRON Foundation could override the TRON blockchain.

In the aftermath of the TRON Foundation's takeover, BitTorrent was plagued with resignations by employees who echoed that Sun exaggerated their technology's promise and accessed too many TRON nodes, points of power in the TRON blockchain that affect its cryptocurrencies' prices.

Jared Tate, creator of the Digibyte virtual currency, DGB, blamed related broadsides he personally lobbed at the TRON Foundation in December as the reason for his token's delisting on Poloniex, a cryptocurrency exchange Sun bought with a group of investors in the fall.

Staffed in Beijing and San Francisco, the TRON Foundation is a Singapore non-profit that supports the development of the TRON blockchain and its add-on features: a digital platform for mobile and web utilities such as entertainment, gambling, and gaming that are available in Samsung's blockchain store, and a network for different cryptocurrencies including bitcoin-dollar peg Tether and TRX, the TRON cryptocurrency.