In a new episode of the Crypto Chick Podcast, Justin Sun, founder of Tron and CEO of BitTorrent, provides details on the recent USDT Tron stablecoin announcement, dishes on his Twitter battle with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and hints at upcoming partnerships and collaborations.
Speaking with host Rachel Wolfson, Sun says the importance of stablecoins is that they’re tied to fiat and are not exposed to the fluctuations of the crypto markets, allowing innovators and developers in the cryptosphere to more easily penetrate the payments industry, which requires a stable medium of exchange. Stablecoins also appeal to traders who want to be able to store the value of their cryptocurrencies without constant exposure to major price fluctuations.
Last month Tron (TRX) partnered with Tether to issue a new USDT coin on Tron’s network. Sun says it’s slated to launch on April 9th. The new TRC20-based USDT will support Tron’s growing network of decentralized applications including its popular gaming and gambling DApps.
“The stablecoin is the most important thing when we come to the infrastructure and the whole industry.”
“I think this partnership means to the industry that in the future the USDT will be more reliable, faster and cheaper.”
According to Sun, when the price of Bitcoin (BTC) spiked by 20% on April 1, the network struggled to meet customer demands for USDT transactions. Whenever there are big BTC price spikes or declines, Sun says the network fails to deliver peak efficiency. So the goal is to move USDT from its Bitcoin-based protocol called Omni to a better network: Tron. Sun says the move will benefit not only Tron but its competitors, Bitcoin and Ethereum.
“It’s impossible to use the USDT on-chain, and all of these problems will be solved after we launch the USDT Tron, and we migrate the majority of the USDT-Omni to USDT-Tron.”
“I think it will benefit the whole industry. Most of the congestion and the bad experience of the stablecoin comes from the Omni blockchain because this is an obsolete solution with extremely expensive, slow and also unreliable infrastructure for the stablecoin.”
Sun makes a pitch to big investors by establishing a fully functional stablecoin that he says will make payments and trades much more seamless and stable. Based on the TRC20 protocol, the smart stablecoin will support smart contracts and will introduce a privacy option as well.
“We’re getting lots of interest from these institutional investors. I think we’ll do everything to fulfill their requests because when the institutional investor gets into this industry they have lots of requests.”
“Lots of institutions don’t want people to know they’re buying cryptocurrencies. They don’t want people to know their accounts. They don’t want people to know how much money is in their accounts.”
After addressing the needs of crypto traders, Sun’s strategy for the stablecoin involves a second phase: cross-border payments for consumers. Sun is eying use cases that will allow Tron to compete with Stripe and Square which serve mobile users and e-commerce payments for merchants and shoppers.
“We definitely already have some enterprise partners onboard right now – so everybody can stay tuned for our announcement.”
Sun also addressed the Twitter account of Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum, Tron’s primary competitor.
Sun, who has dished out his fair share of Twitter trolling, goofy jabs and snappy comebacks – largely involving avocados – seems to welcome the competition with open arms.
“We all know that Tron and Ethereum are competing in the DApp obsession, for sure, but I think that definitely produces a better product. So I think the competition between the Ethereum and the Tron benefits the whole industry, benefits all the DApp developers, benefits the DApp users as well. So definitely, I think this is a good sign. And also, in terms of the comments recently he made and the picture – first of all, I think by now I’m an advocator of the true love and the love and the brotherhood of the industry. I think in the future we will even collaborate with lots of the Ethereum developers.”
Sun highlighted a recent collaboration with Ethereum developers of the Loom Network, a second-layer Ethereum scaling solution.
“I think even within this year, we will see Tron even collaborate – officially collaborate – with Ethereum doing something good for the industry.”
Sun says Tron will launch its layer-2 scalability solution in Q2.
“This means 100x scalability. So right now Tron transactions are around 3-4 million every day, and this means that after the layer-2 solution being introduced to the Tron network, this is going to be at least a 100x-plus transactions in the future. And also the fee will be decreased dramatically. So I think this is huge news for all the Tron developers and also the users.”