You could say Justin Sun likes attention. But not necessarily in the way you might think.

The founder of Tron – a low-fee network designed to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing of digital content – recognizes the value of celebrity attention in the crypto space. Sun made his comments at Consensus 2021, CoinDesk’s annual conference that assembles experts and influencers from the crypto industry, global finance and more.

“Every celebrity, when they get into crypto, will become controversial,” he told CoinDesk's Muyao Shen in an interview. “This is inevitable. The only difference I think here is how we use this kind of influence or controversy to bring crypto to mass adoption.”

“Today, I am grateful for Elon Musk bringing a lot of people into crypto, bringing all the media and the big companies attention to crypto.”

Sun's comments about Musk were in response to a question about whether Sun felt the crypto community still considered him a "bad boy." Sun appeared quite willing to have that mantle taken up by Musk, saying he was amused that a meme declaring "Elon Musk Is Going to Be the Next Justin Sun" got over 1,000 likes.

Sun is no stranger to controversy, and neither is Musk. The Tesla CEO has recently taken heat from the global crypto community for his announcement that Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin payments because of the cryptocurrency’s energy footprint, which left many blaming him for a 40% sell-off in the crypto markets.

Despite his gratitude, Sun did boast that the Tron blockchain hosts more transaction volume than PayPal, Musk’s former company.

“Our daily transaction volume is around, like, $10 billion. Even [for] PayPal, this number is around $2 billion. So we are doing five times [that].”

Although his focus remains on Tron, Sun acknowledged the value of increasing density in the crypto space. 

“I believe the competition in the industry breeds perfection. So we need different blockchains to compete with each other. We have to generate ideas... and find out basically the right path for the industry.”