Justin Sun, founder of TRON (TRX), just reached a milestone with the first beta version of the Tron Main Chain. The move means that Sun is well on his way to expanding TRON, one of the largest blockchains by market cap.
With a focus on becoming a global entertainment system where users can freely publish, store and own their data, TRON aims to allow content to be decentralized in an autonomous form, creating the foundation for a decentralized web. With entertainment and media revenue expected to rise from $1.8 trillion in 2016 to $2.2 trillion by 2021, TRON’s success would disrupt a huge industry and would spell a new dawn in the Age of the Internet.
If all goes well, TRON will be a beast of a cryptocurrency – matching Bitcoin’s brand recognition, outdoing Ethereum’s usability and pushing even further for faster transaction speed.
Originally developed on the Ethereum network, TRON is waving goodbye. Sun and his team will work over the course of the next two months to migrate 100 million TRON users to TRON’s own network. Sun’s unabashed and well-touted goal is to refine the tech and make it undeniably superior to its competitors, especially Ethereum.
With 426,000 Twitter followers and counting, Sun is known for his effusive tweets and tantalizing confidence. He has inspired a crypto community that is rooting for the heyday of decentralization and the promise of life-after-corporate-control. Content creators from writers to filmmakers to musicians to mobile app creators are imagining a brand new world of unshackled digital data where they can interface with fans, readers and listeners in a peer-to-peer environment without restrictive rules and regulations. It’s a world where they control their content, reap significant benefits and generate more revenue than they can currently muster on Amazon, YouTube, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, Google Play or Spotify.
Courting Developers
TRON’s duel with Ethereum is heating up. Ethereum reigns as king of the dApps, offering the largest blockchain-as-a-service platform. Currently there are over 66,000 Ethereum-based (ERC-20) token contracts listed on Etherscan. To date, TRON ranks second on that list in market cap, behind leading competitor EOS.
With TRON’s exodus from Ethereum, TRON becomes a full-fledged platform that will allow developers to deploy decentralized applications (dApps), effectively challenging Ethereum. At roughly 1,000 transactions per second, TRON’s protocol certainly trails Ripple’s latest reports of 50,000 transactions per second, but it bests Ethereum’s 15 and Bitcoin’s 7.
And is that enough of an edge? Can TRON really build a bigger and better ecosystem? Will the developers follow?
Tron Lab cites four main reasons why the answer is yes. TRON’s network boasts:
- Ridiculously cheap transactions – practically free
- Huge transaction volumes – decoupled from Ethereum, it plans to scale massively
- Custom smart contract support – TRON’s list of dApps is slated to grow
- Integration of current partners into the TRON network
Striking Timing
Sun’s utopia of a fully decentralized web where users own their own content and connect with other users in a trusted, tamper-free, peer-to-peer environment comes at a critical time in the US. News stories have highlighted big data manipulation by Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, heavy-handed content moderators, low payouts by YouTube for its content creators, and declining artist payments by Spotify.
A world without algorithms or moderators, however, has the potential to devolve into a cesspool of fake news, trolls and haters along with content creators who can beat to the tune of their own very quirky (and perhaps exceedingly distasteful) drum. While TRON’s potential is huge, without the gatekeepers and filters, its model will need to support self-governing mechanisms that can make the network a valuable, viable and attractive global space for worldwide entertainment and media lovers.
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