SUN is the native protocol of Sun Token, the native token of a TRON-based decentralized exchange and yield farm. Its name comes from the blockchain’s creator, billionaire Justin Sun, who also founded TRON and is the CEO of BitTorrent.

Launched on September 16, 2020, SUN switched to a new smart contract (migrated the token to new code) in May 2021. In both iterations, it is a TRC-20 token, meaning it is based on the TRON blockchain.

The new SUN contract started trading in June 2021 at $0.026 but sank as low as $0.016 in July. It recovered to highs of $0.05 in October 2021 but fell shortly thereafter, landing at $0.007 by June 2022.

The old SUN tokens were launched without venture capital or private equity investments, and Sun did not pre-mine or pre-reserve any coins for himself. The protocol, however, allowed for a two-week period of public mining before it launched.

When the SUN protocol was upgraded in May 2021, old SUN tokens were redenominated at a ratio of 1:1000. Mining continues to be the method by which users earn new SUN.

The upgrade, called SUN v2, introduced a deflationary mechanism called buyback-and-burn, whereby the protocol uses 0.05% of its monthly transaction fees, employs it to buy SUN, then permanently removes this SUN by sending it to a cryptocurrency wallet that nobody controls.

Sun launched as a meme DeFi (decentralized) token – or, in the words of TRON, “a living demonstration in the coalescence of encryption with artistic expression.”

The token supports the SUN ecosystem. It includes SunSwap, a platform for TRON TRC-20 token swaps, and a host of related yield farms.

SunSwap is an automated market maker, a protocol that facilitates token swaps by drawing on vast reserves of tokens, known as liquidity pools, that other users have provided to the protocol.

Those who provide funds to liquidity pools can earn extra tokens, just like on Uniswap, the automated market maker native to Ethereum. Indeed, SunSwap uses the same bonding curve algorithm as Uniswap to price the tokens in its liquidity pools: x*y=k.

SUN can also be staked for veSUN, the staking token for SunSwap’s yield farms. Staked veSUN tokens entitle liquidity providers to extra rewards, such as transaction fees from the protocol’s stablecoin liquidity pools and increased incentives for liquidity pool mining. Plus, veSUN can be used as a governance token to vote on the weights of liquidity pools.

In October 2021, SUN completed its acquisition of JustSwap, a TRON-based decentralized lending protocol also launched by TRON founder Justin Sun.

SunSwap’s total value locked (TVL), a metric that describes the value of the crypto locked in its smart contracts, peaked at $2.2 billion on April 7, 2021. By the following June, it had fallen to $816 million. SUN-owned JustLend is the largest DeFi protocol on TRON, with a TVL of $2.42 billion as of June 2022.

Justin Sun launched an algorithmic stablecoin, USDD, three days before the collapse of Terra, a stablecoin protocol built on Cosmos. In June 2022, it slipped from its $1 peg, trading at 99 cents in June and July.