Fake it till’ you make it. A well known proverb that has privately helped many individuals reach a point of success in their lives. However, I have never really publicly witnessed a successful execution of this strategy in realtime until the end of 2017. The person I am referring to is Justin Sun of the Tron Foundation. He literally took a project that had next to nothing when they first launched with a plagiarized white-paper from Ethereum, a facade that this project was happening under the close guidance of Alibaba founder Jack Ma, a team comprised of nondescript individuals, and turned Tron into one of the most formidable alternative to the Ethereum blockchain. Today, this same project now holds a market valuation of $1 billion, employs more than 100 engineers worldwide, and has even executed one of the most clever acquisitions in the crypto space with BitTorrent.
Basics:
- The TRON project started in September 2017 based out of Beijing, CN.
- The TRON is a blockchain-based decentralized protocol that aims to construct a worldwide free content entertainment system with the blockchain and distributed storage technology.
- Unlike many blockchain projects, TRON has already introduced a fully functioning product and has more than 100 Dapps.
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Ticker: TRONPrice: $.02Ranking by Market Cap: 9Market Capitalization: $1,418,180,991Circulating Supply: 66,648,407,557 TRXMax Supply: 99,247,619,212 TRX24hr Trading Volume: $172,618,413
Team:
- The Tron team is lead by Justin Sun who has been nothing short of a magician when it comes to creating FOMO and driving the price of the Tron Token. He was also one of the first employees of Ripple Laps in China.
- The CTO is Zhiqiang Chen. His prior experience focuses on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and advertisement systems. He also spent several years working at several major Chinese technology companies such as: Alibaba, Qihoo 360, and Tencent.
- The Tron team has an additional 100 blockchain developers and engineers, 40 of them being senior level developers.
- Rounding out the Tron team is a solid number of business developers, strategists, and marketers.
Drivers of Growth:
- Tron has recently announced a new hire of the former SEC Supervisory attorney, David Labhart. He will be acting as Tron’s first head of compliance to ensure that business goes smoothly with regulators. A great hire to further legitimize Tron.
- Tron recently acquired, BitTorrent, which pioneered peer-to-peer technology for sharing files on the internet, for $140 million. This collaboration is now referred to as Project Atlas.
- The Singapore-based BitTorrent Foundation, will be issuing a new BitTorrent Token (BTT) that will run on the Tron protocol. BitTorrent already has 100 million users, essentially jump starting Tron’s ecosystem.
- If Tron can find a way to leverage the BitTorrent acquisition and their users to create a decentralized media platform, I can see this making a big push towards a tangible everyday use case.
- Comparing the daily number of transactions between Tron and Ethereum. In November, Tron surpassed the highest single-day transaction total for Ethereum. It is reported that the daily transaction numbers for TRX has more than doubled to 3.3 million since then.
- Tron has achieved the high throughput of 2,000 TPS compared to the current 25 TPS of Ethereum.
- According to Sun, the Tron has plans to implement zk-SNARKs as early as the first quarter of 2019. Once implemented, users can transact TRX tokens with a far greater level of anonymity and privacy. As a result, TRON will join the group of other privacy-centric cryptos such as ZCash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), or Verge (XVG).
- Tron has recently announced the launch of a $100 million blockchain gaming fund, Tron Arcade.
- Tron Arcade will empower developers to create and develop blockchain-based games. The $100 million in funding will be distributed over the next 3 years.
- Sesameseed has announced the launch of TronCard Beta program; allowing card holders to spend their Tron tokens at participating retailers.
- Hate or love him. Justin Sun has mastered the art of marketing within the crypto space. What he was able to accomplish to create a billion dollar ecosystem doesn’t happen by accident or luck. At the end of the day, the blockchain space is open source so what really sets projects apart, other than their team members, is marketing and go to market strategy.
- Tron has also done a great job of securing partnerships within the gaming community like Game.com and Gifto, which is a low hanging industry to be revolutionized by crypto.
- Tron was also one of the first pioneers of successfully conducting a large permissionless airdrop on the Ethereum blockchain. In September 2017, they airdropped 500 Tron tokens ($1.50 at the time) to more than 500,000 addresses. This instantly created stakeholders in their newly created project which lead to its astronomical raise.
Headwinds:
- Unfortunately, there are still many predominate people within the crypto community that see Tron as a shitcoin. However, the best investments usually start with the least consensus.
- The success of this project will depend on the regulatory environment in China since it’s geared more towards that demographic. However, they have made some good attempts towards distributing their ecosystem globally.
- Since regulation will always trail innovation, the digital currency space can be subject to new regulations in the future.
Conclusion:
I’ll be the first to admit that I was not a supporter of Tron when the project first launched. I thought Justin Sun was a classic scam artist taking advantage of investors during the height of speculation. However, he has continuously proved me wrong and has now turned me into a believer. While hundreds of projects that raised millions in their ICO’s are going out of business because of poor treasury management, Justin is expanding his empire. He has accomplished more while being considered a shit coin than 95% of all projects in the space.
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