Tron (TRX) CEO Justin Sun has announced the launch of a new U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin project called “Djed” which some pundits say bears a lot of similarities with the MakerDAO decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

Tron DeFi System Launches Amid Plagiarism Claims

Sun teased the news of the launch via a tweet published on Saturday (March 28, 2020). The development comes as a follow-up to Sun’s earlier announcement in January of a decentralized stablecoin backed by the Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens.

Something new. #DJED #TRON #TRX $TRX pic.twitter.com/k0rbDtjT0Y

— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) March 28, 2020

While Sun’s Saturday announcement offered no new details about the project, an excerpt from the previously issued Djed white paper reads:

“USDJ is a new currency generated through decentralized smart contracts on the TRON network. Anyone can pledge TRX as collateral to generate USDJ. USDJ enters into free circulation as any other cryptocurrency does once generated. It is pegged to the US dollar through Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs), and also has autonomous feedback mechanisms.”

According to the white paper, Djed and its stablecoin token are designed to function as a central cog in Tron’s DeFi ecosystem. Despite Sun’s initial January announcement mentioning BTT, the project’s white paper does not contain any reference to the native token of the Torrent platform acquired by the Tron CEO back in 2018.

Sun’s announcement of the Djed project has been met with plagiarism claims from many crypto pundits on social media. Critics highlight the allegedly obvious similarities between Djed and MakerDAO, declaring that the former is nothing other than a complete rip-off of the popular DeFi platform.

MakerDAO the Next Target for Sun?

With Djed’s community being similar to that of MakerDAO, it appears the controversial Tron CEO may be setting his sights on upstaging the DeFi giant especially at a time when the latter is still in recovery mode.

As previously reported by BTCManager, the massive crypto price crash of mid-March saw MakerDAO scrambling to sell MKR tokens to service bad debts totaling more than $4 million as Ether (ETH) price tanked.

Following the upheaval of “black Thursday,” the DeFi also moved to add USD Coin (USDC) as collateral on the platform. At the time, MakerDAO revealed that the decision to include USDC in its collateral catalog was to improve the stability and liquidity of Dai and prevent future systemic failures brought on by flash crashes in the crypto market.