Tron or TRX is a blockchain project led by Justin Sun that is working towards decentralizing the web. Tron is seen to be the next generation of Ethereum in terms of throughput, scalability and availability. It claims to have 2000 transactions per second while Ethereum is still stuck at 25 transactions in a second. With the total market cap of $1.8 billion, it is currently the 8th largest cryptocurrency in the market. While the distributed apps (DApps) market has been dominated by the Ethereum blockchain, Tron seems to be set to compete with Ethereum.
Since Bitcoin’s bull run in December 2017 and January 2018, the whole crypto market has seen a bear trend. Corrections ranging from 70% to 95% have been seen in major cryptocurrencies. In this on-going bear market that crept into 2019, we are yet to see a bottom for Bitcoin or Altcoins. With this picture in the background, Tron’s rise of 134% in a month looks massive. So why is the market buying Tron when every other crypto is biting the dust?
Tron’s Price Explosion
Tron recent price explosion can be attributed to the fact that BitTorrent, a company earlier acquired by the blockchain startup Tron, announced that it will airdrop its newly launched token BitTorrent Token or BTT to all the existing Tron holders. This means everyone who holds Tron’s TRX tokens will receive an airdrop of BitTorrent’s BTT tokens for free. Traders and investors have bought up Tron to get this airdrop. Airdrops are not new to the crypto market but this one generated much interest because it is unique.
BitTorrent is a very popular client for peer-to-peer file sharing. Tron announced that Project Atlas will be the bridge between Tron and BitTorrent in order to incentivize file-sharing. Seeders on BitTorrent’s platform will be incentivized to upload and stay online for longer periods as well as dedicate more bandwidth and storage to make the swarms faster and more efficient. What incentive do seeders get? They get BTT. On the other hand, users downloading content can use Tron tokens to pay the seeders. BTT is a TRC-10 utility token based on the Tron blockchain. It was launched directly on the Binance launchpad. The first airdrop will take place on February 11th. For every TRX that a user is holding, they will get 0.11 BTT. The airdrop has been designed to go on up to 2025. This is to encourage users to take a long term view on the project.
Cutting the Middleman
In the pursuit to decentralize the internet, Justin Sun has stated the following:
”To start, the product will feature faster downloads, more seeds, no mining, and backward compatibility. It is adapted to the world we live in today: mobile, connected, and transparent. We aim to eventually empower all content creators and their communities by eliminating the middleman and enabling content creators to distribute directly to users.
This move will allow BitTorrent’s core functionality to be free while the token rewards will be based on the resources contributed, instead of being mined on their machines. The more a person contributes to the network, the more they will get rewarded.
Game Changer in BTT
With over 100 million users in 138 countries, this would probably be one of the largest blockchain user adoption programs that a crypto project has ever launched. It could be a game changing proposition and a proof that crypto tokens will be worth some value. If this were to have happened in a bull market instead of a bear run, one could expect much better response than 134% growth. It will be interesting to see what happens if a bull market forms this year.
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