Having gained considerable attention in a short period of time, Tron has become the new digital currency on everyone’s mind. Founded by the very young Justin Sun, Tron has continued to live up to its promises and has acquired partnerships faster than any currency seen before.
The History of Tron and its Superstar Founder
In September 2017, the Singapore-based non-profit Tron Foundation, formed the TRON network and its associated coin TRONIX (TRX). Its CEO and Founder, Justin Sun, has received almost as much media attention as his company, due to his extensive list of accomplishments at just 27 years old.
The University of Pennsylvania graduate has been listed as Forbes China 30 under 30 (2015) and Forbes Asia 30 under 30 (2017). He was the founder of Peiwo APP (China’s Snapchat) and has served as the former chief representative of Ripple China—another big name in the crypto-sphere.
Assisting him is the rest of Tron’s all-star team, which is comprised of important members of the Chinese business community. Hitters Xu (founder of Nebulas), Tang Binsen (founder of mobile game Clash of Kings), Xue Manzi (famous Chinese angel investor), Chaoyong Wang (founder of China Equity Group), Dai Wei (CEO of OFO bike), and many others frame the core of the Tron Foundation.
The company held a successful initial coin offering (ICO) from August 3 to August 24, 2017. Tronix value soared from an initial .002USD to its all-time high of .045USD on December 19th, 2017. Even with current market volatility, Tron has continued to maintain its value compared with other coins such as bitcoin and ethereum. As of August 4th, 2018, a single TRX token is valued at .030USD.
Another Blockchain Project: Why Is This One Different?
Tron’s blockchain and peer-to-peer are2P) technology is designed to eliminate the middleman—offering a decentralized entertainment content sharing platform. This will allow direct exchange between consumers and producers, improving efficiency and cutting costs.
Unlike large streaming corporations such as Google Play or Netflix, which store user data in company servers, Tron’s blockchain will distribute information across the whole network—disrupting third party control and redirecting data ownership back to the creator.
Tron’s whitepaper cites world wide web inventor, Sir Tim Berners Lee, as an important figure for the Tron team,
“who are convinced that protocol, from the moment of its invention, is an asset for human beings, rather than a profit-making tool for small groups.”
Suppose you are using your Google Play or Netflix account — the purchases you make to buy music or stream media content is paid directly to Google or Netflix,. They then take a share of your payment (usually the majority) and use the rest to pay producers.
On the Tron network, similar on-demand or streaming services can run without the need of a middleman on its public blockchain network. It functions as a distributed, decentralized storage facility allowing consumers to pay producers directly for the content they want to purchase, which makes the system significantly more efficient and cost-effective.
This business model helps diminish the power of monopolies by letting a variety of companies and organizations develop streaming applications for the Tron network. This decentralized platform, with its distributed storage technology, could create significant competition for larger corporations like Google, Netflix, and Amazon.
Where is Tron Heading
With its public launch, Tron announced a road-map for the foundation, outlining the stages of development over the next several years. At present, the company is in the first stage of its outline — and seems on track for what’s to come.
The four stages:
Exodus: To develop a free P2P platform allowing distribution, storage, and content.
Odyssey: Incentivising app creation for the network
Great Voyage: Creation of individual ICO
Apollo: Allowing producers to issue their own tokens
Star Trek: Incentivising gaming app creation for the network
Eternity: Ability for the network to handle fundraising
In the long term, Tron has ambitious plans to create a network that is comprised of several blockchain technologies and digital currencies. The above stages are further explained:
Exodus
The company is currently in Exodus, nearing its completion, with a goal to “provide simple distributed file sharing built on top of something similar to IPFS.” At present, Tron is not yet adapting blockchain technologies from various producers and content creators — this will come in the 2nd phase.
Odyssey
The Odyssey stage incentivizes adoption of the Tron network, encouraging the development of a community of users — both content creators and consumers. It does so by implementing a proof-of-stake model.
For creators, reimbursement is calculated by a metric with a related tipping scheme. This ensures that bots or click farms do not skew data based on clicks and views.
Users will make payments for services utilizing the Tronix token.
Great Voyage & Apollo
Both the 3rd and 4th phase allow producers and content creators to further establish stake in the the protocol by allowing them to list their own ICOs and establish other digital currencies within the network.
In order to facilitate this stage, TRONs team will need to develop a platform that will allow smart contracts — like Ethereum which uses a Turing complete language. Ethereum has faced challenges with this and TRON acknowledges that it too, may face issues with network congestion due to ICO launches.
Network congestion could cause issues with transaction validation for individual tokens. On these and related matters, TRONs whitepaper is vague, citing the use of a decentralized exchange for these tokens to help in limiting potential hacks or other threats.
Star Trek
Like Augur, the fifth stage will produce a prediction/forecasting application on TRONs decentralized network. Like in the second stage, the foundation will incentivize game on the network — with the intent of disrupting the gaming industry.
Eternity
The final stage enables the network to fundraise to foster community growth. TRON’s technology is strongly based of the Ethereum platform and the adaptation of IPFS. Various projects and entities will further be consolidated under the Tron network.
Budding Partnerships
Despite initial skepticism from critics after the launch of Tron and TRX, the team has consistently delivered their promises leading up to the launch of its MainNet. The unexpected success has led to the receipt of unwanted stories and rumors regarding partnerships for the young foundation.
The company has been entering partnerships at a rate unseen in other blockchain projects. In early June, TRX got the green light from BitForex Exchange, meaning that users would now be able to withdraw, deposit, and trade TRX tokens on the important exchange.
Tron was listed on three other major exchanges that same week including Max exchange, Coinex, and OTCBTC. At present, a total of 53 exchanges support Tron migration.
TRON went public with its partnership with Shiftmarkets — a newish brokerage company and exchange headquartered in New York. With its official launch, the main priority for the company is to further connect the cryptocurrency market with FX. The company has plans to offer various deliverable assets as well as CFD liquidity.
The foundation has also announced its partnership with D2F. The power team of 70 individuals with ties to the entertainment and mobile device industry, is a huge asset for TRON. D2Fs work advances the development of blockchain and its implementation into smart devices and dApps.
D2F stated that it planned to run for TRONs Super Representative, an election which was held on June 26th. Currently, some of the entities serving as Super Representative’s are Lianjinshu, SkyPeople, and CryptoDiva.
Lianjinshu and CryptoDiva are both dedicated to the advancement of blockchain technology while SkyPeople, the team responsible for ‘Final Blade’, shows TRONs continued interest into breaking into the gaming market.
Conclusion
Tron has already shown real promise given the number of partnerships and exchanges it has been able to facilitate in a relatively short period of time. The total token supply is 100,000,000,000 TRX with a current circulation of 65,748,111,645 TRX.
From its initial selling value of .002USD, an individual coin is currently worth about .030USD, a 1650% price increase, which is down only 500% from its highest value in late December.
As TRON develops it will be interesting to see how this technology takes hold among various entities and producers. The project has the potential to cater to very focused-use cases within the entertainment industry — a huge win for consumers and producers alike.
There are many important members of the Chinese business community backing and comprising the TRON team — with significant power to influence future collaborations and partnerships. Likewise, TRONs strong development team has the means to facilitate and support these endeavors.
The company has a outlined a clear long-term plan with a systematic explanation of how it plans to achieve its goal. The TRX and the TRON platform, complete with a huge funding pool from investors gives many a sense of optimism for TRONs future.
For elements of TRONs plans unspecified in its whitepaper — time will tell if the company can continue to live upto the expectations it has set. Establishing a network which can handle multiple ICOs and transactions of various coins will be one of the next big steps for TRON.
