Justin Sun, founder and CEO of the contentious blockchain project Tron, has once again played a marketing hype in the flat market in the wake of the Chinese New Year holiday, bragging that he has more Twitter followers than Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.

“Today, I have 832K twitter followers, equal to that of Vitalik, surpassing litecoin founder and becoming the largest twitter account in the industry. We started twitter six years after Vitalik but we always know it is never too late.” (Posted on his Weibo).

Tron has long been a contentious blockchain project, particularly after its founder claimed it is superior to Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap. While the project is labeled by many in the Chinese crypto community as a scam, for its whitepaper copies existing whitepapers of many other blockchains and its founder is known as a hype machine, or put it politely, a marketing “guru”.

The outspoken entrepreneur, with more than 1 million followers on Weibo (Twitter-like social media in China), is one of the most contentious crypto celebrities in China. Some think he’s a talented young entrepreneur, and some curse him a scammer.

Nevertheless, the founder has been trying hard to get rid of this negative label. The recent positive developments on Tron including its price gains against the massive crypto slump, BTT airdrop and celebrity presence at its developer conference, together with his constant marketing bombast, have seemingly earned Sun a large number of followers, which could rival Ethereum founder Vitalik.

You should compare dick sizes next. 😐

— A v B ⚡ (@ArminVanBitcoin) February 11, 2019

Sun created his Twitter account in August 2017 to help promote his cryptocurrency Tron overseas, and earned himself a reputation for making announcements of announcements since then. He showed off the remarkable achievement of 832K followers on major social media platforms Twitter and Weibo, which soon amassed much sarcasm and rebuts. Comments about the topic on China’s largest crypto forum 8btc read,

“Such a jerk, people who are doing things will never use this way to attract people’s attention. Tron’s code update is far less than EOS and ETH. Too many marketing stunts.”

“No matter how capable the man is, what he says above is really offensive.”

“It is even cheaper to buy Twitter followers than Weibo followers…”

It seems a majority of people in the community do not buy his conspicuous self-marketing. The outspoken entrepreneur shall speak less and do more to quell mounting criticism.