Tron CEO Justin Sun has announced the upcoming launch of BitTorrent’s latest testnet. Set for Monday, July 1st, Tron says the new file system protocol is a distributed web platform powered by blockchain technology. The crypto-based system rewards users with the BitTorrent (BTT) token in exchange for sharing files and enabling faster downloads.
The platform is billed as “the world’s largest blockchain application for speedy uploading and downloading of files.” BitTorrent reports an existing user base of more than 100 million and says the consumer platform currently drives 22% of upstream and 3% of downstream traffic globally as people share film, video, audio, software and digital files.
A variant of the InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS) protocol, BitTorrent Speed merges BitTorrent and blockchain. It will be available on July 8th.
Says Sun,
“With BitTorrent Speed, we aim to strengthen the BitTorrent protocol and then deliver more features that inspire innovation across industries.”
#BitTorrentSpeed will be the first major use case of #blockchain by introducing the concept of #cryptocurrency to 100 million users. It is important for us to educate our users on $BTT and how it will power faster downloads. #BTT pic.twitter.com/G5eug1Eghz
— BitTorrent Inc. (@BitTorrent) June 28, 2019
Tron bought BitTorrent last year for more than $100 million. BitTorrent’s file system is part of Tron’s vision to grow a borderless internet where privacy and ownership are controlled by users and not corporate middlemen. The platform is expected to expand the Tron ecosystem since users will be able to earn crypto for sharing their hard drive space with Tron.
As more users join the platform and share content, the goal is to scale BitTorrent Speed to become a universal platform encompassing aspects of social media, like Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat, to search engine functions like Google and a computer cloud products like Amazon Web Services. The tokenized economy operating on a decentralized internet is designed to transfer profits from ad sales and other data routinely collected by giant tech companies, and to distribute them to the users.
According to an announcement,
“[BitTorrent File System] BTFS Mainnet will be launched for public access and will power all TRON decentralized applications that require a decentralized storage network. Preliminary developer tools will be available and a few outstanding popular DApps built by the community will be running on the platform, including the upcoming TronMovie and BitTorrent Pix.”
Says Sun,
“BTFS represents the first truly viable and scalable implementation of a decentralized storage system that can be used by DApp developers.”
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