Is TRON really buying BitTorrent, and why?
There’s a rumor, not yet officially confirmed, that BitTorrent is being sold for $140 million to an ambitious Chinese entrepreneur with visionary plans to build a decentralized internet.
There’s a rumor, not yet officially confirmed, that BitTorrent is being sold for $140 million to an ambitious Chinese entrepreneur with visionary plans to build a decentralized internet.
TorrentFreak was the first to report that BitTorrent was in the process of being sold to Justin Sun, a blockchain entrepreneur best known for the Tron platform and its TRX cryptocurrency. Variety then reported that the acquisition deal had been closed and staff had been notified. TechCrunch followed up confirming the rumor and reporting that BitTorrent has been indeed sold to Sun for $140 million in cash.
It’s important to emphasize that, in this era of fake news, unconfirmed rumors should be taken with many grains of salt, and this rumor hasn’t been officially conformed to date. At the same time, both Variety and TechCrunch report unofficial confirmations and interesting indicators that the rumor of the acquisition may be true indeed.
For example, Sun registered a company called Rainberry Acquisition Inc. “Coincidentally, BitTorrent had renamed its corporate entity to Rainberry Inc. at the beginning of last year,” notes Variety.
“Last week, Sun’s Rainberry Acquisition filed a change of status with the California Secretary of State due to a merger. Rainberry Inc., the company that owns BitTorrent, also filed for a merger on the very same day, strongly suggesting that the two companies had merged.”
Time will tell. Meanwhile, it’s interesting to comment on the potential importance of the deal, and speculate on its possible implications.
TechCrunch suggests that the acquisition of the legendary BitTorrent could be used to “legitimize” Tron, which has a dubious reputation, and BitTorrent technology could be integrated in cryptocurrency mining operations. But there is a more interesting possibility.
BitTorrent is often cited as a conceptual prototype of a decentralized internet. In the BitTorrent network, currently used for file sharing, files are not streamed by a central server but by the users themselves. Each user who has a copy of the file streams parts of the file to other users who want to download it. The more users have a copy on a file, the faster other users can download the files. Typically, popular movies download in minutes via a BitTorrent client.
The BitTorrent system works optimally with static files that never change, but it requires adaptations for dynamical web content. BitTorrent has been pursuing the vision of a decentralized internet built on adaptations of the BitTorrent protocol, for example with an initially hyped but then abandoned “Project Maelstrom,” but hasn’t progressed much. In the meantime, other players are trying to build a decentralized internet, and there are interesting developments in this direction.
Tron is self-described as “an ambitious project dedicated to the establishment of a truly decentralized Internet and its infrastructure,” and the Tron technical white paper repeatedly mention torrents. This seems to suggest that Tron intends to integrate BitTorrent technology in a decentralized internet platform.
I have recently argued that a decentralized internet is a key objective to achieve in our quest for a better internet and a better society. In this light, further developments of this story are certainly worth watching.
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