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1/25/19, 5:19 PMTRON Summit: How BitTorrent will drive mass adoption for the blockchain
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TRON Summit: How the battle forBitTorrent might just lead to massadoption of blockchain$BTT ICO announced for 1/28, airdrop for 2/11
TRON was the third top mover this past Monday with its cryptocurrency
TRX jumping 5.03%, now the 9th largest cryptocurrency ranked by
market capitalization, according to ForbesCrypto Markets. This coming
oH the heels of its debut NiTROn Summit, a developer conference held in
San Francisco last week that impressed even the most skeptical in the
EOS community.
TRON’s charismatic 28 year old CEO and founder, Justin Sun, took the
stage during opening remarks proudly donning his BitTorrent hoodie
and talking about how its recent acquisition of the legendary peer-to-
Martine Paris
Jan 23 · 6 min read
TRON CEO & Founder Justin Sun onstage with NBA legend Kobe Bryant at the Nitron Summit in San
Francisco (photo credit: Martine Paris)
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peer network that pioneered distributed Sle sharing makes it the largest
decentralized ecosystem in the world. In pursuit of BitTorrent’s 100
million monthly active users, with a drama that spanned the Srst half of
last year, Sun beat out several other blockchains including Neo which,
according to Coindesk, oHered $170 million, nearly $50 million more
than the $120 million bid from TRON. Both blockchains had similar
market caps at the time (Neo at $1.5 billion, Tron at $1.6 billion) but
Sun’s commitment to speed to market helped seal the deal.
In an emotionally charged moment, Sun talked about the tough times
TRON suHered when the ICO ban came down in China on September 4,
2017 and how they were forced to move and start again in San
Francisco. Sun said, “No matter how bad, we never give up.”
Sun is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur who launched Peiwo (China’s
Snapchat), began his career at Ripple and was mentored by Alibaba
founder Jack Ma. Variety pegged his TRX holdings over the summer at
around $4.78 billion. Just watch the cinematic Tron trailer to see his
marketing prowess at work. It might just be what consumer blockchain
needs to get to mass adoption.
Focused on recruiting the next generation of blockchain developers to
grow the TRON ecosystem, Sun’s hope is that by providing funding and
TRON trailer, The Future is Now
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user acquisition support through programs like its recent $1 million
accelerator, TRON will become the platform of choice for developers.
There can only be one
Taking direct aim at EOS, Cong Li, Head of the Developer Community at
TRON, presented a slide that simply said “#3” as he showed oH data to
support the claim that TRON is now the third largest developer
community.
TRON’s style of blitz scaling, a popular business tactic in China, has been
a lightning rod for controversy among blockchain developers since it
came on the scene a year ago. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum,
accused Tron of outright plagiarizing its white paper and many in the
community continue to voice skepticism over TRON’s numbers.
Following the NiTron Summit, podcaster Dallas Rushing took a closer
look at the stats of the two platforms and in his most recent video, EOS v
TRON: The Race To Mass Adoption, he provides valuable insights into the
diHerences in wallet creation, transactions per second, and other key
metrics.
Cong Li, Head of Developer Community at TRON presenting stats at NiTron Summit in San Francisco
last week (photo credit: Martine Paris)
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All About BitTorrent
The biggest news of the show came in the form of details surrounding
the tokenization of BitTorrent.
The BitTorrent Token ($BTT) will become exclusively available on
Binance Launchpad on January 28, 2019 at 7am PST excluding U.S.,
China and other restricted jurisdictions and then airdropped to TRX
holders on February 11 with monthly airdrops continuing for the next
six years. Read more about it here and here. $BTT will allow BitTorrent
clients to bid for, and earn in exchange for, allocation of upstream
bandwidth, and then later used for purchasing content, tipping
livestreaming performers, and crowdfunding the creation of new works
once BitTorrent’s livestreaming feature launches which, according to
Sun, could be some time in 2019 if everything goes as planned with BTT.
Justin Knoll, who oversees the BitTorrent integration aka Project Atlas,
allayed concerns about those not wanting to participate in the new token
economy by saying it was an optional extension. He explains more here:
Podcaster Dallas Rushing comparing EOS to TRON
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Still some are questioning how BitTorrent will move forward in a world
of the token haves and have nots.
I asked Pavan Katepalli, Solutions Architect at Consensys, if he thought
the tokenization of BitTorrent would work.
“I don’t think so,” he said, “because the users of torrents are using them
because they don’t want to spend money, and the system has worked
without any money entering in for 15 years. People share Sles for free.
TRON should embrace the massive infrastructure that BitTorrent is and
compete with AWS.” He added, “Tokens could incentivize people to
share content that isn’t easily available, but they might as well buy it
then or stream it. When I was a kid, I used to watch anime and I
downloaded this entire series and I kept sharing it for a year because I
wanted to help others watch it. That’s the kind of community BitTorrent
has.”
Fred Krueger, an injuential voice in the EOS community and Founder of
EOS Lynx, a mobile cryptowallet, was a bit more optimistic. On his
Facebook post titled, “A Few Thoughts on Tron and TRX” he wrote, “I am
up here at the SF Tron summit … Tron has actually managed to build a
dApp platform that works. Many of the same kind of apps that work on
EOS work just Sne on Tron. The BitTorrent acquisition *may* just work.
Tron is going to give these 100MM monthly users tokens that can be
used for priority service / better downloads etc. This is absolutely a
TRON’s Justin Knoll explaining the tokenization of BitTorrent
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legitimate idea and depending on the implementation it might actually
get some uptake. Even a 1% uptake would make Tron bigger than EOS.
I’ve learned over the years not to underestimate scrappy looking
companies. Tron may very well implode, the BTT ploy may fail, etc… But
they seem to be tapping into a completely orthogonal market to EOS and
ETH and making real numbers. I would 100% keep a close eye on it.”
He added, “Funny thing at the conference, a lot of these users simply
have not heard of EOS. Parallel universe.”
Poppy Pop-Up
During the “Token Economics” presentation, Juliun Brabon, co-founder
of Sesameseed, a TRON Super Representative, announced that GRID
Justin Sun at Poppy Pop-Up Shop taking sel[es with fans and showing o\ swag available with the
GRID Troncard. (Photo credit: Martine Paris)
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Troncards with preloaded TRX were being distributed to attendees to
use at a nearby Poppy pop-up shop. I didn’t have a chance to activate my
card but I did have a chance to selSe with Justin Sun who was on hand to
meet fans and show oH how to use the card. Currently in private beta,
GRID Troncard is being promoted as a way to buy, hold and spend TRX
anonymously with interest on the balance, no fees, and a way to recover
your TRX if lost or stolen. The Poppy POS allows retailers to process TRX
payments similar to the way Bitpay enables retailers to accept Bitcoin in
the form of a prepaid VISA card. This too could be another path to mass
adoption.
Youtuber Ben Armstrong aka BitBoy shared his excitement over the
announcements with me. “BTT was a nice surprise and I’m interested to
see how they line up retailers for Poppy. Once Amazon and Walmart
start accepting crypto, that will be a game changer.”
(Preview of my article for The FinTech Times posting Saturday, January 26)
Watch Dallas Rushing, EOS v TRON: The Race To Mass Adoption:
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