Justin Sun is the founder of TRON and a member of the currency circle A famous maverick. The cryptocurrency media CoinDesk published a report at the end of November this year, describing in detail how Sun Yuchen ate the stick that he bought from Sotheby’s for $6.2 million and was created by the modern artist Maurizio Cattelan. Banana's. Unexpectedly, after the article went online, it caused quite a stir.

Tron founder Justin Sun. FAN KAR-LONG—GETTY IMAGES

This article is titled "I watched Justin Sun eat the world's most expensive banana, but I really couldn't understand it" 》. The article introduces the whole story of the "Banana Incident", including the background information of Sun Yuchen and the dispute between him and the SEC - the SEC accused Sun Yuchen of fraud, but Sun Yuchen and the Tron currency platform have applied to dismiss the case. litigation. The report also pointed out that Justin Sun’s lawyers threatened multiple media outlets that they would take legal action against them if they dared to report on TRON’s alleged illegal financial activities.

But soon, CoinDesk was on fire because of this report. According to people familiar with the matter, after Justin Sun’s team expressed dissatisfaction with the article, CoinDesk’s owner, the virtual currency exchange Bullish, immediately asked the editor to remove the article from the website. After all, TRON is also the main sponsor of CoinDesk’s flagship “Consensus” conference series. (However, a version of the article is still available online through CoinDesk’s joint contribution agreement with Yahoo News.)

Sources familiar with CoinDesk said, After the article was taken down, CoinDesk reporters expressed concerns about the independence of news gathering. Last week, in a meeting with Bullish CEO Tom Farley and CoinDesk CEO Sara Stratobedhar, CoinDesk’s news staff requested that the article be reinstated with an editor’s note.

The incident also highlights the growing tensions between CoinDesk’s new owner BullishZhang's relationship. CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet, particularly acclaimed for its exposure of FTX’s massive fraud. CoinDesk was acquired by Bullish late last year. This also reflects Sun's growing influence. Justin Sun purchased $30 million in tokens through U.S. President-elect Trump’s “World Free Finance” project in November this year and joined the project as an advisor.

We asked Farley to comment on this matter through different channels, but had not received a response as of press time. CoinDesk editor-in-chief Kevin Reynolds and a spokesman for Justin Sun also did not respond to our requests for comment.

CoinDesk was founded in 2013 and was put up for sale by its original owner, Digital Currency Group, last year. The digital currency group spent a long time looking for a buyer, eventually selling CoinDesk to Bullish late last year for about $75 million. The Wall Street Journal reported in early 2023 that there were "multiple buyers" willing to take over CoinDesk for a price well over $200 million, but the final transaction price was obviously still far from $200 million.

Bullish is a cryptocurrency exchange, similar in nature to Coinbase and Binance, but it lags far behind the first two in terms of market share. Its CEO Farley was the former president of the New York Stock Exchange. Bullish is a company spun out from blockchain company Block.one. Block.one raised more than $4 billion for its blockchain EOS in 2018, but it has never built any lasting products.

When Bullish acquired CoinDesk, it promised to operate CoinDesk as an independent subsidiary and appointed Matt Murray, the former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, as editor. Chairman of the Prosecution Committee. Murray also joined the Washington Post as executive editor in June this year, but he still retained his position at CoinDesk, and he has always been the only one on the editorial board. According to people familiar with the matter, Murray resigned from CoinDesk on Monday. Murray also declined to comment for this story.

Bullish seems confident about profitability in 2025, but we don’t yet know what role CoinDesk will play in it. Last week, Bullish sent an email informing employees that the company was preparing for an IPO andEmployees were asked to keep the plans strictly confidential (although Fortune saw the email). CoinDesk’s editorial staff was also among the recipients of the email.