Justin Sun: We should have fired Lucien Chen earlier

Tron’s former-CTO Lucien Chen has been causing grief for Tron founder Justin Sun. Chen published a Medium post May 10 (which has since been removed) alleging that Tron is—apostasy!—centralized, and that it is failing to “decentralized the web.”

Chen was hired in October 2017 to oversee technical development of the Tron project. He said he left the project in May, to build a new blockchain platform, the Volume Network. According to its whitepaper, it is applying the new consensus model called “proof of time and space” which is designed to be resistant to large crypto mining machines.

But Sun alleged the former CTO was fired in January for engaging in “bribery and corruption.” Chen denied all accusations and said he is considering taking legal action against the claims.

Sun has even cast shade that Chen was indeed the CTO, despite a tweet from his own Twitter account stating that he was. Earlier this week, Sun told Decrypt that Chen was, essentially, the CTO, but claimed that nobody referred to him as that. He said that Tron doesn’t typically use such titles and even claimed that Chen himself wrote the tweet on his official account.

Chen didn’t comment, telling Decrypt he didn’t want to have a dispute with Sun.

Sun told Decrypt, “The only mistake we have here is that we should have fired him earlier when we found out he was doing all this. This has a huge damage on Tron’s reputation.”

An ex-Tron employee—who wishes to remain anonymous—claims that Chen was essential to the Tron network and that it will struggle to fill the void. Sun denied this, stating that there are several competent technical engineers at Tron, such as Marcus Zhao. Zhao is the technical director of the Tron public chain and is working on the upcoming Sun Network—which is Tron’s alternative to the Lightning Network.

“In the beginning he was [essential] but by January, he didn’t even spend lots of time at the company anyway,” he said, adding, “Considering the environment of the industry, it’s not a surprise. Most people have conflicts of interest.”