What is Tron?

In the past 5 weeks, we have seen Tron’s market cap jump from US$140 million to over US$11 billion. The most recent and significant price surge happened inthe past week after Tron made their code open-source.

Now that it has broken into the Top 10 in terms of market cap, Tron is gaining even more attention from crypto investors and enthusiasts. And with a team of non-native English speakers plus a whitepaper translated from Mandarin Chinese, it can be a bit more challenging to learn about it compared to other cryptocurrency projects.

This article will attempt to explain Tron’s ambitious dream to fundamentally change the internet, as well as offer some analysis in layman’s terms of what we learned from reviewing the project’s now open-source code.

What Does Tron Do?

The Tron protocol is being designed so that users can freely publish, store, and own their own data on the blockchain. This data can be anything from simple text to pictures, audio, and video.

Tron’s Ethereum-based token, Tronix ($TRX), will be used to facilitate data sharing in the Tron ecosystem. For example, somebody might send Tronix tokens to a video publisher in order to gain access to their latest content release.

 

 

The ambitious purpose of the project is to create a healthier entertainment ecosystem online. The current system is ruled by middlemen services like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter which take a substantial cut of the profits generated by content creators. Utilizing blockchain technology, Tron hopes to facilitate all the content publishing that currently happens on these services, but in a decentralized and censorship-resistant manner.

In this way, Tron shares a lot in common with another Ethereum token, Basic Attention Token ($BAT). Even looking beyond the technology, both projects are led by highly prestigious and successful founders who have dedicated themselves to building a decentralized future.

Perhaps the most obvious and significant difference between the two projects is their respective locations of origin. While the BAT team is predominantly based in North America, the entirety of Tron’s team is Chinese.

As you likely know, the internet in China looks extremely different from that of the Western world, as is the use of cryptocurrencies. It’s certainly worth your time to try to understand those differences if you are considering investing in Tron, which leads us to…

China and Censorship Resistance

It can be hard to grasp the extent to which content is censored in China without first-hand experience. However, it’s not terribly difficult to shed some light on the issue.

Let’s take, for example, the death of Liu Xiaobo last summer. He was a Chinese dissident who advocated for human rights and political reform and ended up spending the last decade of his life in prison. Upon his death, the Chinese government censored everything from the mention of his name to “RIP” messages and even the candle emoji. Moreover, such censorship isn’t limited merely to public posts on social media, but even includes private conversations on China’s text messaging app, WeChat.

That degree of censorship is what Tron hopes to diminish or eliminate entirely. From an investor’s perspective, a cryptocurrency which would allow for censorship-resistant content publishing in China and help connect the Chinese population to the rest of the global population would obviously be world-changing. On the other hand, anybody who thinks that pulling off such a grand feat is probable can only be described as naive, at least right now.

With an 8 – 10 year roadmap in play, we’ll have to reassess Tron’s progress in the coming years to see whether their chances of success in China become any more realistic.

The Tron Team

Tron is led by CEO Justin Sun, who has been named on the 2017 list of Forbes Asia 30 under 30. He is also a protege of the founder of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma. Among Sun’s previous successes is creating Peiwo APP, a gaming app with over 10 million users. The app will be the first to implement TRX tokens to pay for content, which could give Tron a nice little head start in the long process of achieving mass adoption.

The rest of the Tron team includes over a dozen experienced web developers as well as several influential business leaders and angel investors, all of whom are Chinese.

The Tron network is currently operated by the Tron Foundation, a Singapore-based nonprofit. The foundation also supports Tron’s development team and helps to ensure the openness and transparency of the project as the blockchain technology continues to be developed.

Source Investinblockchain

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