Tron is now up over 130% since December 15th, from $.0126 to $.0292, making it the 8th largest cryptocurrency by market cap ahead of Stellar, according to CoinMarketCap. The rise has followed the reveal of the new Tron-based BitTorrent token (BTT), which will be integrated with the popular file-sharing platform BitTorrent tomorrow, and will reward users who share files.
In a new interview on CNBC’s Crypto Trader, Tron founder and CEO Justin Sun confirmed he paid $140 million for the peer-to-peer file sharing platform, and talked about his future plans for BitTorrent.
“BitTorrent has been around since 2003. This is a very successful P2P network responsible for P2P file sharing. At the same time, it has more than 100 million active users around the world – basically, monthly active users.
Right now one of the biggest problems of the BitTorrent protocol is everybody’s seeding on good will. So there’s no reward for the seeding at all. So with lots of the software that uses the BitTorrent protocol, it actually helps you to disable the uploading when you’ve finished downloading. So that’s why we want to provide this new way with tokens to incentivize people who are seeding the files.”
When questioned on whether the Tron blockchain can really handle all of the transactions required to incentivize users on BitTorrent, Sun revealed Tron is creating a payment network side-chain that will process thousands of micro-transactions and later record those transactions on the Tron blockchain.
The interview also covers the debate on just how decentralized and how fast the Tron platform really is. According to Sun, Tron can currently process about 2,000 transactions per second.