Tron Accurate Update post Testnet Launch and Live Stream! (March- April 2018)

Tron had its testnet launch 2 days ago, and it was done via lifestream with Justin Sun.

About a week ago, we did a big post explaining everything you need to know about Tron, especially going into testnet week, we wanted to help educate people about what Tron is really all about and help them to develop their own accurate and educated opinion of the project.

Originally we weren’t planning to do an update after the lifestream because we assumed there would be lots of posts on social media with information of the lifestream, and it was just an update, so information should be fairly accurate right? But, in just 2 days, there are so many different versions of the Tron update, and Tron price has dropped (probably a combination of reason) and more people have been jumping on board with more FUD and false information from the lifestream and its just becoming very confusing very quickly what was the actual update all about.

So I thought, I’m would do an update video today, to give our community an accurate summary of the lifestream and I also felt we owed it to you guys especially because we just did a Tron video last week. The other reason I thought I would do the summary is because I understand Mandarin and the lifestream was done by Justin Sun who’s mother tongue is Chinese but self- translated on air into English. There were subtle differences between the Mandarin and English interpretations that many of the post who only look at the English have failed to pick up, and I believe this has also contributed to some of the confusion out there.

For example, in their first update which was about the team, Justin said “right now, our Tron team is increased to a 100people, most of them is from Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon very prestigious company…” this gave the impression that most of the team are from these 3 giant companies only. But the actual version when he said it in Mandarin actually meant “our team has grown to a 100 people, with most of our members coming from big companies. (Full stop) e.g. Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon etc.. so these big companies were just examples of some their staff background, very different from the English impression that the majority of their staff came only from these 3 companies. Do you see the difference? It’s subtle but important.

I think the lifesteam overall was a very good lifestream by Justin with good information, because the translation wasn’t done the best at certain points. It is worth going back with the advantage of understanding both languages and getting an accurate update from that.

1. Progress introduction
   

The first part of the update was on the team as we mentioned above followed by the exchanges they are on.

So Tron is currently on 37 exchanges with 7 fiat pairings.

At this point, Justin made a couple of references to Ethereum, stating that just as Ethereum is a major fiat/ crypto, he also expects Tron to be a major fiat crypto entry point. This is huge guys, being a fiat/ crypto pairing means that particularly currency is the entry currency into the cryptomarket. At the moment, there are almost 2000 coins on the market, but you can’t change most of them directly to and from fiat. You need to swap them to a gateway currency that you can swap to fiat.

The biggest two gateway currencies at the moment are Bitcoin and Ether (but both of these two are falling out of fashion due to slow transfer times), and so rising popular alternatives are Ripple, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. That’s why a coin getting on to coinbase is so popular, because everyone who wants to buy smaller altcoins like DASH or Quantstamp or Vechain etc… has to go through their exchange to enter and exit crypto market. So their trading volume is high even though their coins may not be the end goal of the trader. If Tron can establish itself as a major fiat/ crypto pairing, this would see Tron’s price and trade volume rise significantly.

The other mention of Ethereum that Justin did here was to say that currently Tron is already one of the highest trading volumes in crypto-crypto trading and in future once Tron establishes itself as an established fiat-crypto pairing, Tron’s trade volume will exceed even that of Bitcoin or Ethereum’s. Now, he is about talking about Trade Volume here, which is the volume of the coin being traded on the market, he is NOT talking about token price or marketcap which is reflective of the coin’s worth.

Tron did not say they are going to take over Ethereum in the marketcap, just in trading volume at this point in time.

This is actually a believable goal in my opinion because in terms of Marketcap, Etheruem’s marketcap is 20x higher than Tron, and Tron won’t be able to catch up for quite a while. But in terms of trading volume, Ethereum’s trading volume is only 4x higher than Tron. Tron’s trading is higher than litecoin or bitcoin cash or ripple or another of the top ten who have bigger marketcap except Bitcoin and Ethereum. Also if you are familiar user of Binance who is the world’s busiest exchange at the moment, over the last few months, there have been many days where Tron has been sitting at the top of the Bitcoin and Ethereum trading pairs in terms of trading volume.

So I don’t think think this is an empty boast by Justin, I think it is something quite achievable when they establish more fiat/ crypto presence.

Couple of other things Justin mentioned as general progress updates include:

Mainnet date is confirmed still as May 31st

Community-- Currently Tron has about half a million token holders with millions of supporters and the Tron community is one of the biggest crypto communities in the world.

And then he moved on to the actual TESTNET introduction

Tron platform has given people the impression that it is an entertainment platform, and whilst this is true, Tron is going to be so much more than that. Entertainment Dapps will be the first use case of Tron’s platform, but ultimately, Tron’s vision is to “decentralise the web itself”.

And at this point Justin actually launches into a short explanation of what decentralised internet means and why Tron’s vision to decentralise the web makes it a bigger project in scope that other platforms e.g. Ethereum or Bitcoin. I got very excited when I heard this because this is the main point of Tron, that I think a lot of people miss out on and it was great to see the team is still very focused on achieving this picture goal. Our review video last week was spot on guys, everything Justin explained here, even down to referencing Tim Breners Lee, was captured on our video last week. So we were one week ahead of time, if you haven’t checked out our review video yet, I encourage you to do so at some point. There aren’t many posts that address this philosophical goal of Tron, but you have to understand it to understand Tron.

• The aim of their testnet is to be the world’s biggest Dapp platform, and the way he has defined what is “biggest” is based on user numbers, not application numbers. Meaning, its not about how many apps you have, but how many people who use your apps.

• To support this goal, Tron’s platform will support high scalability and high throughput support. To those who don’t understand the term “Throughput support”, think of it as transaction speeds.

• Here Justin makes a second reference stating they aim to be a bigger ecosystem than Ethereum. But here its worth pointing out he specifically uses the word ecosystem here, not platform. Let me explain this briefly, an ecosystem is where all the parts of the body interact with each other and support each other. Your body is a biological ecosystem. So if your leg is itchy, my hand can scratch it, if my eye hand wants to pick up something, my legs can walk over to the object. So there is constant interaction between my body parts to each specific part to achieve their goals.

Especially in the early phase when Tron is starting with a lot of entertainment apps, it is very believable those apps will have a lot of interactions with each other and build an entertainment platform ecosystem. However, neutral platforms like Ethereum for example, their Dapps have very little interactions with each other, it’s quite isolatory in the sense that there is no main theme for the platform, so each project can be unrelated or in a different market from other Etherum platforms, thus it is not really a robust ecoysystem. It is just a platform, so Tron certainly can be a better ecosystem than Ethereum.

• Justin also announced that the were grateful to Ethereum for all their support over the past 6 months and will be doing ETH airdops sometime in the next quarter. It is not clear in either translations whether he meant Ether airdop or other ERC-20 token airdrops. Probably ERC-20 tokens.

Slight warning here, since then, there has been a lot of comments on Tron social media pages and youtube channels, even our channel posting links to Tron airdrops. They are likely scams. Do not click on them, there has been no formal announcement of an airdrop at this point.

• The next quarter will mainly be focused on moving over to Mainnet, launching in June (last day of May). This planned moved includes talks with their 100million user base partners e.g. PEIWO, game.com, Obike, Trip.io etc.. to discuss moving with them, he can’t confirm anything of course, but he certainly sounded positive that this would happen.

Tron vs Ethereum

• Tron’s current transaction speed is 400x that of Ethereum. ? 10000trx/sec! This places Tron immediately as one of the top transaction speeds on the market. A few projects promise higher transaction speeds, but in terms of actual working product, which Tron has now, they are one of the fastest. And they can scale and become even faster in future.

• Ethereum’s current cost of transaction is $0.02. And this cost may increase over time. This price is actually potentially burdensome for developers who have large volume of transactions. In comparison, Tron announced they will now have zero transaction fees. There will be no need for users to use Tron token for platform transactions. This will make them more attractive than any other platform for potential Dapp users.

Now in our last review, you would note, we were concerned that Tron’s fees were very low, basically they were planning then to charge the equivalent of 200,000 transactions for 1cent. So it seems like the update is they decided to just make it free, which economically doesn’t make a difference, but it was so cheap it was nothing anyways, but now it sounds a whole lot better because it is officially announced as free.

But the question remains, which is, if you don’t use the tokens for platform transactions, is there still enough avenue for token use? If not the Tron platform might fall into the Ripple trap, where the company technology is used, the company makes a lot of partnerships and becomes successful but the token price stagnates because it is not needed. This is abit worrying for me to be honest.

• Tron will also have a coin burn. Now, every user meaning DAPP producer, will have the right to issue a new token according to the Tron protocol. The cost of developing that new token (crypto) will be 1024 Tron tokens burnt permanently.

Now something about the Maths here doesn’t make sense. Tron has 100billion tokens, if it only costs 1024 tokens (Basically 1000tokens) for an app to create it’s own coin. Than essentially, you need to have 100 million apps to burn 10% of the coin? WTH????

Some people are saying that its 1024 TRX to create 1 other app token. But that doesn’t make sense too, because OCN itself has a 10billion supply, so their token creation would take up all of Tron’s market.

Some are saying that it is 1 Tron token burnt for every 1024 other tokens created on its platform. That would make more sense economically, but that would mean a large variation in startup costs for all of their apps and basically every DAPP project would just go for low supply volume, high priced tokens.

Some FUD is going around that it is going to take 1000 current TRX to convert to one TRX mainnet token, and people should panic sell. That’s just rubbish, I don’t where that came from.

So its either 1000 Trx to create a currency or 1000Trx to create a token.

Given that Tron tends to try to create low costs for entry companies, it is unlikely they will demand OCN and other companies to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to start using their platform. Also you got to remember that Tron’s vision is to be a decentralised web so to host thousands of apps and a roadmap that is like 10 years long. So I am thinking He meant 1024 Trx to create a currency, which is so small it is nothing.

This is very attractive to potential Dapp users and will see a lot of Dapps users flock to use Tron protocol, but very disappointing for token holders because it means nothing to the token price.

• A good piece of news is Tron will not increase it’s supply until 2021 at least. This is great news. Tron’s currently supply is 65million, and its total supply is 100billion. So the remaining 35billion will be locked until 2021 at least. Which gives us some stability until then.

• They did announce that they would be focusing on getting mobile apps out soon. And they focused on this because they recognised most people these days use mobile apps more than they use pcs.

• They will also dedicate $1 billion to community support which is massive, because Ethereum has no community support at all, and $1 billion is almost half of their current market cap!

This $1 billion will be rewarded based on upcoming reward plans which will be given to those who help with decentralising process, wallet development, blockchain website, even making an app and creating a token! So you pay $1024 for creating a token, which is nothing for a multi-million dollar project, but you also get back a reward from the $1 billion dollar pool.

Haha, so these guys are really doing everything they can to make themselves the most attractive platform for new Dapp users.

• The last significant news was about nodes. There will be a mining process and anyone can own an node but you need to be elected by the community to be able to be rewarded. The more TRX you have the more voting/ electing influence you have. So there it’s like a hybrid model between delegated proof of stake and proof of work where you have to actually do the mining work, but the rewards are subjected to nodes being elected. For more detailed information about proof of work and delegated proof of stake, refer to our Tron review a week ago. The rewards for mining is set at $100 million/ year, so it should be very profitable. And lastly the TRX held, actually gives the holder an influence or voting weight in terms of how resources are allocated on the platform. This is huge in crypto world and let me explain why.

When you buy shares, you buy a share of the ownership of the company and you are given a right to have a say in the company—we call this an equity token.

But in Crypto, when you buy a token, you don’t actually own part of the company, but simply gain access to the utility of the project. E.g. you use it for transactions or payment on the platform etc.. we call this a utility token.

Cryptos are always utility tokens, but Tron in this entire review, seems to be describing TRX token as more like a equity token, where

i) there isn’t any utility use the token since the transaction fees are free, and
ii) token holders get a say in how major decisions are made regarding the platform. Which is unheard of in any other blockchain project.

• This for me was the important point I took home of the Tron lifestream. That maybe Tron sees TRX token adopting more of an equity token rather than utility token view.
  The lifestream ended here. There was another more technical lifestream with the tech team in Beijing, but that’s really more for developers and very technical in details. For token holders, this was the lifestream.

Tron’s price has dropped about 40% since the lifestream.

I think this is partly natural correction after a hype, there was a lot of unrealistic disappointment, because as we mentioned in our review last week, some people were spreading rumours the coin burn was going to be a once off large burn which we clarified it wasn’t, and some people are again spreading FUD that the 1000:1 ratio is about us losing our tokens when we cross to mainnet, which is absolutely not true. Also the market over the last few days has been bad, about 20-25% dips all across the board, so Tron’s current dip in price is prob cos of all the above, not because the lifestream was bad. In fact, I enjoyed the lifestream, I did Justin Sun did a great job, and the Tron team deserve a pat on the back.

In conclusion, I get the sense that Tron is setting itself up to be the cheapest, most supportive, most attractive platform for Dapps users. It will attract a lot of attention with its current pricing. The end goal of Tron is big and they want to be the biggest platform around and they will probably have a good shot at it.

I think it’s interesting that they are presenting the TRX token in an almost equity token model. BUT, until it is written in black and white, that it is an equity, I won’t buy it because there is nothing anchoring the token price to the success of the company. As a token holder, my primary concern is about the price of the token, and with the current set up, there is a real danger that Tron will take off as a company and have lots of business and be very successful, but the TRX token won’t rise in price, simply because it is not being used.

Currently TRX is not officially an equity yet, it is merely a currency. And if a currency isn’t used, the value goes down. The only way to a currency value can increase is by using it more or reducing its supply. At the expense of being attractive, the coin burn price is too small to be beneficial to token price in the short to medium term, and with the free transactions on the platform now, there doesn’t seem to be any token use whatsoever. I think this is extremely worrying.

Also I worry about scalability still. They are 400x faster then Ethereum (who is like super slow), but really only 3-4 times faster than the average platform out there. The volume of Dapps they are aiming for is ridiculous, literally thousands of times more than the average platform currently. Can they scale fast enough? They didn’t discuss any scalability solutions today, so we can only hope that they can.

Different people are going to make different decisions at this point, in terms of what they do with their bags of Tron. Im going to hold at least until Mainnet, because now is a sucky price to sell. Im not worried at the current price. It think its driven partly by market, partly by FUD which means it will self correct later on. I expect the price to rise approaching Mainnet, and many people are also hopeful the market will start picking up in April/ May. If by Mainnet, I still remain unconvinced about their token use, I will prob sell then. But if they can sort out the token use to give token holders some reassurance that their focus isn’t just on platform Dapp users but also on token price and token holders, then this is a project that I fundamentally like and would like to HODL.

So that’s it for me guys, I hope this post was helpful to you. If you liked this video, do give us a like and subscribe. Join our awesome community which is growing and I think we have one of the best communities out there, people who are friendly, respectful and genuinely keen to share good recommendations with each other.

Tomorrow we will be doing a review on Oyster Protocol which is one of our top picks for the month of April. Their airdrop is just around the corner, so we want to provide you guys with some information to help you in your decision or whether or not you think it’s a good coin to invest in. Make sure you join us for that as well as to find out if you won the giveaway!

Alright guys, thank you so much again for joining us again, I hope you’re having a great Easter Sunday! Take care and we’ll catch you guys tomorrow!