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)

1/25/19, 5:19 PMTRON Summit: How BitTorrent will drive mass adoption for the blockchain

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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)

1/25/19, 5:19 PMTRON Summit: How BitTorrent will drive mass adoption for the blockchain

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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

1/25/19, 5:19 PMTRON Summit: How BitTorrent will drive mass adoption for the blockchain

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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:

1/25/19, 5:19 PMTRON Summit: How BitTorrent will drive mass adoption for the blockchain

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