TRON must be known to all in the Chinese cryptocurrency industry. This project and Justin Sun, its founder, have long stayed in the spotlight, and even the slightest move could capture great public attention. Among all the public chains across the world, TRON is hailed as the top public chain in China, and is also one of the few that can rival Ethereum.
As we all know, TRON has gone through numerous ups and downs ever since its birth: It rose to fame overnight with a white paper published by its big-name founder; yet it was much criticized by Vitalik Buterin for plagiarizing the white paper of its counterparts; and soon another glory came when the TRON’s circulating market value peaked at 1.3 billion US dollars… Even to this day, reviews on TRON are mixed. In this article, we are going to talk about TRON, known as the Chinese top blockchain project with over 14 million global accounts and over 1.3 billion transactions by cumulative number.
Justin Sun , born in the 1990s, founded TRON in 2017, an open-source decentralized content protocol based on blockchain. Relying on the blockchain and distributed storage technology, TRON is committed to building a free content entertainment system across the world. In its ecosystem, all users can publish, store, and own data at will, and determine, in a decentralized form of autonomy, how contents are distributed, subscribed and pushed by issuing, circulating and trading digital assets. In this way, they empower content creators and set up a decentralized content entertainment ecosystem. Since its establishment, TRON has declared its commitment to promoting the decentralization of the Internet by building infrastructure and providing better compatibility for Ethereum smart contracts through an innovative smart contract platform.
On July 24, 2018, TRON acquired BitTorrent Inc., an Internet technology company based in San Francisco. The distributed technology designed by BitTorrent Inc. is highly scalable and intelligent, and allows creators and consumers to control their contents and data.
(PS: Products developed by BitTorrent Inc. have a monthly user base of over 170 million people. Its protocol can transmit 40% of the world’s Internet traffic every day.)
Despite TRON’s superiority over its counterparts in performance, its DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) consensus mechanism comes with evident disadvantages — low decentralization and poor security. Though designed to decentralize the Internet, TRON still has a long way to go.
With so many details about the principle of DPoS in the previous articles, there is no need to repeat here. Up to now, TRON has a total of 1,431 nodes and 287 candidates for super representatives. It is well-received both at home and abroad.
Compared with Bitcoin and the Ethereum network, TRON has a TPS at about 2000, lower transaction fees and higher speeds. Take DeFi, which is a smash hit this year, as an example. The contract interaction of the Ethereum network often charges hundreds of dollars for transactions, while TRON costs only a few dollars, without compromising trading experience at all.
More importantly, transferring USDT through TRON is completely cost-free, an advantage that makes it outshine its counterparts. When the Ethereum network is congested, a single transfer entails a transaction fee of 5 U.S. dollars or so, and the figure could be even higher when it comes to the Bitcoin network. In contrast, TRON is more suitable for small transfers, which has won itself extensive support in this field.
What are the specific characteristics of the TRON project?
1. High throughput: The high throughput is ascribed to the improved TPS in TRON, making this project more practical than Bitcoin and Ethereum.
2. Scalability: Based on good scalability and efficient smart contracts, TRON provides multiple means of deployment for DApps and can handle mass transactions from a large number of users.
3. High reliability: TRON boasts a more reliable network structure, user assets, intrinsic value, and a higher degree of decentralized consensus which has brought along an improved reward distribution mechanism.
TRON Basic Characteristics
In addition, according to the TRON white paper, TRON, as a decentralized content protocol, has the following four basic characteristics, compared with the centralized Internet structure:
1. Data freedom
Users are entitled to upload, store and disseminate contents including text, pictures, audio and video at will;
2. Content empowerment
Users who create or disseminate contents are entitled to digital assets as the due income, and such economic incentives help empower the content ecosystem;
3. Independent issuance of digital assets
Individual users can freely issue digital assets, and others can enjoy the benefits and services from the continuous development of data contributors by purchasing digital assets;
4. Infrastructure
Distributed digital assets are equipped with complete decentralized infrastructure, including distributed exchanges, autonomous games, predictions, and game systems;
The TRON ecosystem will provide its contributors with the infrastructure listed as below:
- A content platform with high-quality contents
- A social network that links everyone
- A digital currency bridge
- A payment network
- An autonomous ecosystem
That’s all for TRON.
TRON’s token TRX
Now let’s take a look at TRON’s token TRX~
TRONIX is a mainnet currency on the TRON protocol issued by the TRON Foundation. Referred to as TRX, it is also the circulating currency of the TRON system. The total amount of TRX is 100 billion, of which 55% are for public sale and private placement.
TRX is the basic unit of accounts on the TRON blockchain. The value of all other tokens is derived from the value of TRON. TRX is also a natural bridge currency based on TRC tokens. Applied across the TRON ecosystem, TRX can be used in versatile scenarios, and therefore empower transactions and DApps on the chain.
According to the official website of TRON, users can pay TRX via credit cards, use TRX through the TRON ATM, help issue TRON tokens, acquire voting rights, and so on. The current total market value of TRX is 1.826 billion U.S. dollars, ranking 16th in the world.
As you may have guessed, I’m going to talk about Justin Sun, the top Internet celebrity in the cryptocurrency circle.
Justin, a legend in the industry, has a record of cashing in on newbies’ ignorance. His talent is reflected in both knowledge and marketing. Rumor once had it: Justin was enrolled in Peking University with a low mark of 300 points in the Chinese college entrance exam; he achieved financial freedom at the age of 23, and grabbed a place in Forbes 30 Under 30; his paid audio courses soon became the best seller in less than one week after launched online, which won him a reputation of the “first intellectual internet celebrity of the post-1990s generation”; he is also the only post-90s among the first students of Jack Ma’s Hupan University; his TRON project rose to Top Ten by market value; during his postgraduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school in the United States, he joined Ripple, and used to act as the chief representative of Ripple Greater China…
Apart from all these legendary stories, Justin also stole the spotlight in various incidents:
He bid 4,568,000 U.S. dollars for Buffett’s dinner, later postponed it due to “kidney stones” as he said, and finally dined with Buffett. All these moves caused a big stir in the industry; moreover, he spread words that he would hire Luo Yonghao, a Chinese entrepreneur and internet celebrity, with an annual salary of 1 million yuan when Luo was broke and that he would financially aid the former Netease employee who got dismissed for being terminally ill; he even gave out cash on Weibo, China’s Twitter-esque microblogging site, and attempted to divert public attention to his TRON in the recently much-discussed OKEX incident… Again and again, Justin became a trending topic on Weibo, grabbing the attention of the crowd.
It is no exaggeration to say that where there is Justin, there is breaking news.
Despite the moderate performance of TRX price, the TRON ecosystem is expanding over time, and this year, in particular, has witnessed more frequent moves:
On August 11, TRON launched JUST, a decentralized stablecoin platform, which was benchmarked against Ethereum MakerDAO. Users can generate the stablecoin USDJ by staking TRX.
On September 2, TRON launched SUN (official), Pearl Farmer, Salmon, Carrot and other mining projects, benchmarking against the prevailing yield farming.
In October, TRON launched its version of Bitcoin (TRC20-BTC), which was issued by the JUST Foundation. Currently, many well-known exchanges have supported the TRC20-BTC exchange, and the TRC20-BTC contract has been audited by SlowMist, a third-party code company. As of November 1, over 9,000 Bitcoin based on TRON have been issued.
In the same month, TRON launched JustLink, a decentralized oracle machine, meeting head-on the Ethereum network oracle machine Chainlink.
On November 2, TRON issued an announcement that it was attacked by malicious nodes and the block production was suspended. After several hours, TRON announced that everything was back to normal and that user assets were not affected.
All these moves seem quite aggressive. Although TRON is merely a copycat of the Ethereum ecosystem all the way, it is undeniable that it has established itself as a pivotal project. But just as what users criticize, as a decentralized network, TRON is too vulnerable to attacks, and is much inferior to Ethereum in terms of security. Just look at the attack incident on November 2. It seems that TRON still has a long way to go to achieve its goal of decentralization.
What is your opinion on the frequent actions of TRON this year? Are you optimistic about its future? Welcome to share with me your opinion below or in CoinEx!
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