CoinDesk editor resigns after Justin Sun pressures to delete article

Justin Sun is the founder of TRON and a well-known maverick in the cryptocurrency circle. At the end of November this year, the cryptocurrency media CoinDesk published a report detailing how Justin Sun ate the banana that he bought from Sotheby's for $6.2 million and was created by modern artist Maurizio Cattelan. Unexpectedly, after the article was published, it caused quite a stir.

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

The article is titled "I watched Justin Sun eat the world's most expensive banana, but I really don't understand it." The article describes the whole story of the "banana incident", including Sun's background information and his dispute with the SEC - the SEC accused Sun of fraud, but Sun and the Tron platform have applied to dismiss the lawsuit. The report also pointed out that Sun's lawyers threatened several media outlets that if they dared to report news about Tron's suspected illegal financial activities, they would take legal action against them.

However, CoinDesk soon caught fire because of this report. According to people familiar with the matter, after 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 product "Consensus" series of conferences. (A version of the article is still available online through CoinDesk’s syndication agreement with Yahoo News.)

After the article was taken down, CoinDesk reporters expressed concerns about the independence of their newsroom, according to sources familiar with the company. In a meeting last week with Bullish CEO Tom Farley and CoinDesk CEO Sarah Stratobordha, CoinDesk newsroom staffers demanded that the article be reinstated with an editor’s note.

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The incident also highlights growing tensions between CoinDesk and its new owner, Bullish, an award-winning publication widely credited for uncovering a massive fraud at FTX.
CoinDesk was acquired by Bullish late last year. It also reflects Sun’s growing influence. Sun bought $30 million worth of tokens in November through President-elect Trump’s World Free Finance program and has joined the project as an advisor.

We reached out to Farley for comment through various channels but did not receive a response as of press time. Kevin Reynolds, editor-in-chief of CoinDesk, and a spokesperson for Sun did not respond to our requests for comment.

New Owner

Founded in 2013, CoinDesk was put up for sale last year by its original owner, Digital Currency Group. Digital Currency Group spent a long time looking for a buyer and finally sold CoinDesk to Bullish for about $75 million at the end of last year. The Wall Street Journal reported in early 2023 that "multiple buyers" were willing to take over CoinDesk for far more than $200 million, but the final transaction price was obviously far from $200 million.

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

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

Bullish seems confident about profitability in 2025, but it is not clear what role CoinDesk will play in it. Last week, Bullish sent an email informing employees that the company is preparing for an IPO and asked employees to keep the plans strictly confidential (although Fortune still saw the email). CoinDesk editors were also among the recipients of the email.