By Edward W. Mandel
At BQT, our curated list of asset pairs is and will perpetually remain a work in progress. Now that we have entered cryptocurrency’s second decade, it’s critical that we look forward to the assets with the greatest growth potential. While not counting anything out, there are an even dozen which have attracted our attention. In this new series, we examine them, listed here in no particular order: Bitcoin SV, Matic, Cardano, Monero, Iota, Dash, Tezos, Chainlink, Luna, Neo, Seele and, per this installment, TRON.
Market cap
I went back and forth about whether to concede to the TRON Foundation’s insistence of spelling the token’s name out in all caps. Most style manuals advise against it unless the name is the result of an acronym — NATO or NASA — but such is not the current case. Also, in this time when so many people communicate mainly through text messages, leaving your caps lock on is considered rude.
But what the heck? Why not? At some point, the TRON Foundation’s leaders will realize themselves that it’s an awkward, self-aggrandizing and off-putting construction, just like the National Association of REALTORS did.
To make things a little more confusing, you might assume that the all-caps name suggests a ticker symbol, but you’d be mistaken. This twelfth-largest cryptocurrency trades as TRX and its market cap, as of this writing, is $1.2 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. That also happens to be its typical daily trading volume, so no liquidity issues there.
History
TRON was founded by Chinese entrepreneur Justin Sun and onetime Ripple executive, who raised $70 million in an ICO, right before China outlawed cryptocurrency in September 2017. Sun, from Beijing originally, now runs the business out of Singapore. (The People’s Republic has since reversed course on its crypto crackdown, which led to an immediate 25% pop for TRX.)
The token is intended to build a free, global peer-to-peer entertainment system with distributed storage technology, enabling easy and cost-effective content sharing.
TRON lives on the Ethereum blockchain and subscribes to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm.
Use cases
Options trader Shobhit Seth sees TRON as essentially a blockchain-native adaptation of the Netflix value proposition.
“Tron … acts as a distributed, decentralized storage facility that makes it more efficient and cost-effective,” Seth writes for Investopedia where, apparently, all-caps doesn’t fly. “It aims to eliminate the middleman … by allowing anyone and everyone to host digital entertainment content on its blockchain-based network. The global audience can directly pay the content creators to access the content.”
Even though TRON raised funds via an ICO, it’s was a long time before it actually started using distributed ledger technology in its operations. The “Exodus” release sat atop just another web-based file system protocol. It was superseded in 2019 by the “Odyssey” release, which provides monetary incentives to promote the creation of content on TRON’s network. That’s where TRX — “Tronix,” mixed-case — comes in and serves as a utility token. Rather than pay-per-click, viewers would reward creators with TRX based on how much they enjoyed the production. Viewers then get subscribed to trailers advertising future works by their favorite creators.
If this sounds a lot like BitTorrent, it should BitTorrent, itself a non-blockchain technology which launched its own digital tokens via an initial exchange offering, was bought by TRON in July 2018 and the distinction between the two operations continues to blur.
Current state
TRON is not a unique idea — as BitTorrent’s developers could tell you — nor is it a unique technology. The Foundation has been accused of plagiarizing not only code, but also portions of its white paper.
That lack of originality, though, does not appear to be slowing TRON’s progress. Future plans are for creators on the TRON network to issue their own tokens, and for works to move beyond video and into decentralized gaming and then into prediction markets. From there, the ambition is to into prediction markets. That latter use case will probably be used for online casinos initially, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t work for financial speculators inside the crypto space or out. Imagine being able to tip a quant for coming up with a trading algorithm that actually delivers alpha.
Of course, before you get anywhere near a financial clientele — or clientele around a large but seldom discussed segment of the entertainment industry — you’d better have a pretty good privacy regimen in place. A hyperbolic blog post from January suggests that TRON’s “TRONZ” cryptography arm has considered that.
“An ongoing privacy protocol developed by the TRONZ team is now the largest [multiparty computation], which is a great accomplishment in the history of blockchain and sets the height for blockchain technology, at the forefront of the world’s most advantaged technology,” the blogger shrieks in ecstasy the way I might shriek Beyonce! “The MPC, which has gained popularity and attracted a lot of attention, is also expected to set a new Guinness World Record.”
Considering that, in May 2019, HackerOne revealed that the entire network could be DDOS’ed by a single PC, TRON absolutely had to address this issue aggressively.
Keeping perspective
TRON is taken very seriously in the crypto space. It not only finds support at the highest levels at Binance, it also has an ally in Alibaba, one of China’s top ecommerce platforms. There’s apparently a revolving door between Alibaba’s development lab and TRON’s, so we should all keep an eye on that.
It takes more than one big potential partner to grow like TRON has the potential to grow. We at BQT, though, believe that TRON has legs. It’s also partnering with game developers, payment processors and at least one hotel booking site. Sun’s project has both brains and ambition behind it and I, for one, want to see where it goes.
Edward is an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, Blockchain Enthusiast and visionary behind many successful organizations. An avid entrepreneur, Edward has a knack for designing distinctive business models complemented with superior technology to deliver unparalleled service and profitability. Edward also has been advising and consulting for various successful Blockchain technology and ICO projects and recently launched his own BQT.IO P2P exchange helping traders connect with each other to leverage their crypto assets.
BQT.IO has been in development since March 2017 and its ICO launched September 18. The information can be found online at BQT.io, on Telegram @BQTCommunity and on Twitter as @bqt_ico.
