Following his investments of $141 million in Puffer Finance and $253 million in EigenLayer last month, Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, has once again made a move in the “Ethereum liquidity repledge race.” This time, he has invested $480 million in ether.fi, a new coin mining project currently being conducted by Binance.
In a previous investment, Sun pledged a staggering 58,000 stETH tokens, worth approximately $141 million, to the Puffer Finance protocol and deposited 104,001 stETH tokens, valued at around $253 million, into EigenLayer. The community was astonished by the immense amount of collateralization, with some remarking, “Is this how the whales are participating in airdrops?”
However, this also demonstrates Sun’s confidence in the LRT race. Moreover, he has once again taken action recently. According to online analyst Yu Jin, Sun’s target this time is Binance’s latest coin mining project, ether.fi. Binance announced this news on March 12, and on the following day, Sun pledged 120,000 ETH tokens to the protocol, worth approximately $480 million. This amount exceeds the $141 million invested in Puffer Finance and the $253 million in EigenLayer last month.
Regarding the source of these funds, Yu Jin explained that from February 8 to February 25, Sun made a substantial purchase of 173,800 ETH tokens at an average price of $2,869 through withdrawals from centralized exchanges and on-chain purchases. At the current ETH price of around $3,900, this investment is worth $678 million, resulting in an unrealized profit of $179 million and a return rate of nearly 36%.
Ether.fi, currently the largest Ethereum liquidity repledge protocol, allows users to pledge ETH in exchange for eETH, a native liquidity collateral token. According to DeFiLlama data, the Total Value Locked (TVL) in this protocol has exceeded $3.1 billion, more than twice the TVL of Puffer Finance, which is $1.427 billion.
The reasons for attracting such a large amount of capital are twofold. Firstly, ether.fi is the only protocol in the LRT race that supports redemption with ETH. Secondly, pledgers can earn quadruple returns, making it highly favored by Ethereum users. These returns include Ethereum PoS staking rewards, EigenLayer repledge rewards (which have not yet begun), ether.fi platform points (which will be exchanged for airdrops in the future), and EigenLayer platform points (which will also be exchanged for airdrops in the future).
On February 27, ether.fi announced the completion of a $27 million financing round led by Bullish and CoinFund. Prior to this, the protocol raised $5.3 million in a seed round led by North Island Ventures, Chapter One, and Node Capital, with participation from Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMex.
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