The price of Tron (TRX), a smart-contract platform inspired by Ethereum, didn’t seem to be overreacting today after it was revealed founder Justin Sun is moving some of his focus to a research project with links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

While it did take a sharpish dip at one point, at the time of writing TRX was sitting at US$0.0588, down 4.05% in the past 24 hours.

According to a Coindesk report, the high-profile Tron leader revealed on his WeChat and Weibo social media accounts that he’s “transferring from business to school”.

Sun has now confirmed the collaboration with a reply from his official Twitter account, although was denying any hint of retirement rumours, which had been circulating on social media.

 

As reported by Coindesk, Sun, 30, said he hopes to be the next Liang Jianzhang – a Chinese internet entrepreneur who retired from his executive position of travel platform Trip.com in 2016 aged 47. Perhaps this is what helped fuel the “retirement” speculation.

What’s being referred to by other media outlets as a joint press release with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) suggests Sun will become a deputy leader in a research project on blockchain-based social governance.

The research project team includes members from the People’s Bank of China, Central Cyberspace Administration, as well as CAICT scholars, the China Information Association, Tsinghua University, and Peking University.

While Justin Sun’s connection to the CCP-approved project might have initially appeared like a career-direction shift, Chinese reporter Colin Wu speculated that it didn’t look like retirement to him. In fact, perhaps it’s more like a canny business play to leverage a potential government relationship.

Wu also tweeted, “This does not mean that he has any good relations with the Chinese government, because he even has no way to return to China.”