Crypto Tycoons Keep Dying. Justin Sun Gets Safer the Louder He Gets

Early on August 7, in Asunción, Paraguay, a body was found at the foot of a high-end apartment tower.

The dead man was Harry Chun Tak Yeh, 40, a Canadian-Chinese founder of the crypto investment firm Quantum Fintech, whose site claimed more than $2 billion under management. He fell from around the 30th floor. His body was naked, covered by a black plastic bag. The door of his apartment stood open, the rooms were ransacked, and a handwritten note and several small stones lay near the body.

Prosecutors said accident, suicide and homicide were all still open. By mid-August there was no conclusion.

The story ran for two days and vanished. What kept me on it was a different number: in the same year, 54 physical attacks on cryptocurrency holders have been logged publicly.

The “wrench attack” is not a joke, it is a category with statistics

There is a well-known cartoon in cryptography circles: you use 4096-bit encryption, so the attacker doesn’t try to break it — he spends $5 on a wrench and hits you until you say the password. The joke got a formal name: the wrench attack.

Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp maintains a public GitHub list of physical attacks on crypto holders. It has recorded at least 316 since 2014. In the first half of 2026 alone, 46 were confirmed, with over $30 million taken; by late August the year’s count stood at 54.

Not abstractions. People:

• January 2025 — David Balland, co-founder of the hardware wallet company Ledger, and his wife were kidnapped from their home in France. The kidnappers cut off one of his fingers and sent it as leverage. Police freed them.
• May 2025 — an Italian investor was held nearly three weeks in a New York townhouse, shocked and beaten to force over his bitcoin keys. He escaped on his own.
• October 2025 — Roman Novak and his wife were killed in the UAE; their bodies were dismembered and dumped in the desert.
• France charged 88 people in cases of this kind in a single year.

Why crypto specifically? Because it has a property no other form of wealth has: transfers are irreversible, no institution has to approve them, and the key lives in someone’s head or on a USB stick.

You cannot carry off a house. A bank account gets frozen and clawed back. A stolen painting has to be fenced. Only crypto works like this: if the person types twelve words, hundreds of millions move in ten minutes and nobody can pull them back.

So violence became economical again. A hacker has to break an exchange. A kidnapper only has to break one person.

The other kind of death: the ones with no conclusion

Yeh was not the first. A list has been passed around for years:

Every time the list circulates it carries a headline about a curse on crypto. To be honest about it: for most of those cases there is no evidence of foul play. Drowning, a crash, cardiac death — official causes exist. The conspiracy theories grow on social media, not in case files.

What deserves attention is the reflex itself: in this industry, when someone dies of natural causes, the default assumption is that he was silenced.

Try that in another industry. When the founder of a listed manufacturer dies of a heart attack, nobody’s first thought is that someone wanted his keys.

That reflex did not come from nowhere.

Between 73% and 81% of retail buyers lost money: whose money is this

The Bank for International Settlements studied actual behavior in crypto trading apps across 95 countries from 2015 to 2022. Two findings.

First, between 73% and 81% of retail investors lost money on their bitcoin investments.

Second, and this is the one that matters: on-chain analysis showed that while prices rose and small users were buying, the largest holders were selling. In the BIS’s own words, those large holders made their return “at the smaller users’ expense.”

That sentence settles a lot of arguments. Crypto assets generate no cash flow, pay no dividend and produce nothing. In accounting terms, a rising price has exactly one source: later buyers paying earlier holders to leave. On the way up it looks like everyone is winning, because everyone is up on paper. Only on the way down can you see whose money was taken out.

So crypto wealth carries a problem other fortunes don’t: its legitimacy is in doubt in the public mind.

That is not a legal judgment — legally most of this money is clean. It is a perception, and perception decides two things: whether a victim gets sympathy, and whether the person hurting him can grant himself permission.

A kidnapper taking a factory owner knows he is doing evil. A kidnapper taking “one of those crypto guys” can tell himself he is settling a score. The difference changes nothing legally. It changes the incidence rate enormously.

A crypto rich lister carries two risks, not one: being rich, and having money the public suspects. The first makes you a target. The second makes violence against you easier to excuse.

Every ridiculous thing Justin Sun does raises the cost of touching him

Now put Sun into that context.

Security advice for high-net-worth crypto holders comes down to one line: don’t show it. Don’t publish holdings, don’t post the wallet, don’t let anyone know how many keys you hold, don’t broadcast where you live. Most of the victims on Lopp’s list were first identified online as “someone with coins,” and only then visited.

Sun has done the exact opposite of every clause:

• 2019: paid $4.57 million for lunch with Warren Buffett
• November 2024: paid $6.2 million at Sotheby’s for Cattelan’s banana duct-taped to a wall, then ate it in front of cameras in Hong Kong a week later after a 15-minute speech, saying the banana being gone was “like decentralization”
• June 2021: won a seat on Blue Origin’s first crewed flight at auction for $28 million; on August 3, 2025 he actually flew on New Shepard
• He holds a formal diplomatic post as Grenada’s permanent representative to the WTO
• June 2025: TRON went public on Nasdaq through a reverse merger with SRM Entertainment; the ticker was changed to TRON
• August 2026: at roughly $8.5 billion he passed the Wang Jianlin family on a live rich list
• Last week (August 27) his lawyer confirmed he had filed a civil suit against the actress Jing Tian and her parents over some 30 million yuan — trending again

One thing has to be said plainly here, so the previous section is not read onto him: the SEC did sue him in March 2023, alleging unregistered offerings of TRX and BTT, roughly 600,000 wash trades, and undisclosed paid celebrity promotion. That case ended in a settlement in March 2026 — only the affiliate Rainberry paid a $10 million civil penalty and accepted a permanent anti-fraud injunction, while all claims against Sun personally and the two foundations were dismissed with prejudice, meaning they cannot be brought again. Legally, nothing sticks to him.

So what follows is not “his money is dirty.” It is something more awkward: in an industry where the public assumes this kind of wealth is suspect, being clean does not change how you are seen.

All of this looks like one man’s pathological need for attention. My read is that it is also a very cheap piece of body armor.

Kidnapping and murder have cost calculations. Kidnappers do not pick the richest person; they pick the one who is rich and whose disappearance nobody will overturn tables about. Yeh managed billions, but before he went off that balcony almost nobody outside his industry had heard the name — and three weeks later prosecutors were still choosing between accident, suicide and homicide.

Justin Sun cannot disappear quietly. Two hours after he vanished it would be a global financial headline, a material-event filing by a Nasdaq-listed company, a note through Grenada’s diplomatic system, and several million social posts. Anyone touching him faces not one local case file but a multi-country investigation.

He has made himself into a man who is expensive to touch. In an industry where attackers rank targets by how much trouble they cause, that is what safety is.

But this armor has one lethal condition

The logic holds only if he stays on stage.

Fame is not an asset, it is a consumable. It depreciates every year; last year’s banana does not work this year. Which is why the stunts keep escalating — lunch, banana, space, listing, lawsuit. He is not getting more absurd; the same amount of attention simply costs more each year.

It is a strange way to live: he cannot stop. A man whose safety rests on being a public event starts losing his protection the moment he goes six months without making news.

I don’t know whether he ever reasoned this out or whether it is pure instinct. But every time he does something ridiculous, I think about that list of 316, and about the body at the foot of the tower in Asunción that still has no answer.

Everyone written into that list was not famous enough.