TRON (TRX)

TRON

Type	Content monetization & distribution
Total supply	100.000.000.000

From Messari (8-10-2020):

"TRON is a multi-purpose smart contract platform that enables the creation and deployment of decentralized applications."

Basics

• Based in: China
• Founded in: 2017
• Mainnet release: 25-6-2018

• In app purchases and smart contracts.

History

• From Messari (8-10-2020):

"Tron is a decentralized entertainment-focused blockchain and content-sharing platform. In 2018, the project purchased file sharing service BitTorrent in order to expand its product. Tron is a long-term project with a set of 6 phases.

1. Exodus: building the free platform for peer to peer distribution, storage, and content. Exodus’ goal is to provide a simple distributed file sharing built on something similar to IPFS.
2. Odyssey: introducing financial incentives to encourage content creation. Odyssey is supposed to incentivize early adopters and foster the growth of a community consisting of content creators and consumers. Reimbursement for creation will be through a tipping scheme, instead of views and clicks - as those methods can be easily exploited through bots.
3. Great Voyage: launching TRON-native ICO capability. Tron looks to allow content creators to offer a stake in a potential personal brand through individual ICOs or branded tokens.
4. Apollo: enable content producers to issue personal tokens
5. Star Trek: brings a decentralized gaming and forecasting platform.
6. Eternity: aim for further decentralization of the gaming industry. This phase aims to bring the ability to fund-raise and monetize based on community growth.

Eventually, Tron’s core technology will be based on the adaptation of IPFS and Ethereum’s platform. In short, what Tron is trying to create is a huge mixture of what is already being done by other projects. Relatedly, Tron is criticized for plagiarism regarding its white paper. Founder Justin Sun tweeted that the translation was done by volunteers and excused it as carelessness on the part of translators.

It was initially an ERC20 token. On June 24th, 2018, Tron migrated from Ethereum protocol to TRON MainNet in a one-to-one swap. "

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Bugs/Hacks

• When KuCoin got hacked (28-9-2020), some TRON tokens were frozen by 'entities'. This hints to centralized powers.
• From Crypto Briefing (2-11-2020):

"An attack on the TRON network caused the super representative responsible for block generation to cease activities. Justin Sun stated on Twitter that the attack lasted three hours and that no funds were lost."

Governance

• From Messari (8-10-2020):

"A total of 27 "super representatives" are responsible for validating blocks on the network. Super representatives are chosen through a voting system that allows users to vote based on the tokens that they hold."

Treasury

• Has no decentralized treasury (8-10-2020).
• From Messari (8-10-2020):

"The Tron Foundation initially received over 34 billion TRX, burned 1 billion in June 2018, and locked up the rest until January 2020. The treasury is located in 1000 addresses that can be monitored on TronScan."

Token

 Launch

• Tron completed a $70 million ICO in 2017, but later returned funds collected from Chinese investors after China banned the fundraising method.

Token allocation

• From Messari (8-10-2020):

"Founders & Project 44.25% Investors 55.75%

100 billion TRX were initially issued. 15.75 billion TRX were allocated to private sale investors and 40 billion TRX were allocated to ICO investors. The Tron Foundation received over 34 billion TRX and Peiwo Huanle (Beijing) Technology Co, Justin Sun's company, received 10 billion TRX.

The Tron Foundation initially did not have any lock-up restrictions but locked up its entire holdings until January 01, 2020, when the Tron Mainnet launched on June 25, 2018. It also conducted a 1 billion TRX burn in order to celebrate the launch of the Mainnet. This was advertised as "Independence Day".

Utility

• From Messari (8-10-2020):

"Tron intends to be used as market model rather than a cloud model. Tron expects TRX tokens to act as a mediator between consumers and content creators without the need for token exchanges."

Stablecoin

• From The Defiant (22-4-2022):

"On Apr. 21, Sun released a blog post stating TRON DAO will be taking out $10B in collateral to launch an algorithmic stablecoin and offer a 30% annual percentage yield to investors. Set to launch on May 5, it’s called USDD. TRON has a strong track record in the stablecoin space. Since TRONs launch in 2017, it has processed more than $4T of USDT transactions.  TRON has since become the world’s largest stablecoin network, hosting more than $55B worth of financial assets.

USDD management will be entrusted to the TRON DAO Reserve and several major blockchain institutions, which have not been disclosed. The TRON DAO Reserve will provide custody service for the $10B of pledged collateral, use it as an early-stage reserve, keep the exchange rate of USDD stable, and enforce convertibility fully."

• Has a version of Tether running on it. Plus has it's own JUST or USDJ stablecoin, which reportedly 'sold out in five minutes' (5-5-2020). This was the first token issued on Poloniex’s IEO platform LaunchBase.

 Coin Distribution

• From a twitter thread by Adam Cochran (29-4-2020): In Tron 1031 addresses hold 51.1% of TRX.

Tech

• Had loads of plagiarization in it’s whitepaper, mainly from filecoin, ifps and ethereum. The whitepaper was not online as of 8-10-2020.
• Code can be viewed here.
• Programming language used: supports smart contracts written in Java, Python, and other common programming languages.

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS): 1000
• Latency:

How it works

• From Messari (8-10-2020):

"It features a delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism, a system that offers an increase in performance while relinquishing true decentralization and censorship resistance.

Blocks are generated every 3 seconds. Block producers are rewarded 32 TRX per block and Nodes receive 16 TRX. As a result, the approximated daily inflation is 1.38 million TRX and the approximated yearly inflation is over 500 million TRX.

The Foundation initially stated that it will pay the node and block producer rewards until January 1, 2021. As such, the foundation declared that there will be no inflation on the TRON network before January 1, 2021, and the TRON Foundation will award all block rewards and candidate rewards prior to that date. Nevertheless, since the current rewards are not coming from the Foundation as of today, it is unclear if the 1 billion TRX burnt on June 25, 2018, were meant to pay for these rewards, or if the Tron Foundation will conduct other burns. Given the current rewards structure, the Foundation would need to burn an additional 250 million TRX to pay for block rewards until January 1, 2021.

Every 24 hours, the network grants every account a free pool of bandwidth that allows users to execute free transactions. In order to realize more transactions, users may freeze TRX to get additional bandwidth or decide to pay the fees in TRX. The fees paid directly in TRX are burned by the network.

Tron’s chain has a 3-tiered architecture: the storage layer, core layer, and application layer. The storage layer adopts a distributed protocol branched into block storage and state storage. Its underlying storage layer uses the graph database to manage data storage, which aims to manage data storage as Tron not only stores the node data but also inter-node connections. Its middle layer is composed of modules of smart contracts, account management, consensus and more. "

Upgrades

• Tron 4.0, a major platform upgrade, is due on July 7. It will allow for the use of an advanced privacy feature called zk-SNARKs. In fact, a January investigation by CoinTelegraph revealed that the code being used in Tron 4.0 appears to be entirely copied from ZCash. 

Mining

• From Messari (8-10-2020):

"Tronix (TRX) is the official name for the native Tron token. Miners earn TRX by providing data storage space to network users."

Staking

• From Messari (8-10-2020):

"A total of 27 "super representatives" are responsible for validating blocks on the network. Super representatives are chosen through a voting system that allows users to vote based on the tokens that they hold."

Oracle Method

• Partners with Gravity (13-8-2020)
• Integrated and partnered with Band Protocol (1-9-2020).

Privacy Method

• From Decrypt (8-6-2020):

"zk-SNARKs are the core privacy technology of the ZCash blockchain. The privacy feature ensures that a transaction can be made without revealing information such as the amount of money being sent. In fact, a January investigation by CoinTelegraph revealed that the code being used in Tron 4.0 appears to be entirely copied from ZCash. 

Unlike ZCash, Tron’s version will not make transactions using its TRX cryptocurrency anonymously. Instead, developers can adopt a shielded transaction feature by implementing the smart contract, according to the TRONZ announcement. It added that compliance with global regulations and policies are the main reasons privacy is a stand-alone feature."

Their Other Projects 

• From Decrypt (7-10-2020):

"We are creating the same kind of DeFi ecosystem as Ethereum," Sun said. "All the Ethereum network products, you can see a same version of Tron products. For example, the MakerDAO on Tron is called JustStable, created by the JUST team. And UniSwap is called JustSwap. Sun pointed to direct Tron counterparts for YFI, Aave, and Compound, three DeFi protocols that leverage the Ethereum blockchain."

JustSwap

• Decentralized Tron-based token exchange platform.
• From Crypto Briefing (11-9-2020):

"1inch.exchange, is integrating with Tron's JustSwap. The new partnership will also see 1inch.exchange’s Mooniswap merge with Tron's blockchain."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Usage

• From Decrypt (12-6-2020):

"The research sees trouble lurking from TRON, which saw active developers decline more than 50% compared to a year ago, and 96% fewer code updates."

• From Crypto Briefing (30-9-2020):

"The growth in Tron is dominated by dApps in the “high-risk” category, including gambling applications.  Nonetheless, Tron’s DeFi and DEX ecosystem grew significantly. However, data has revealed signs of wash trading on that front as well."

• From CoinDesk (23-7-2021):

"A report by blockchain data analysis site DappRadar titled “JustSwap on Tron Attracts More Users Than QuickSwap” says that in the 30-day period ended on July 19, decentralized exchange (DEX) JustSwap – Tron’s version of Uniswap on Ethereum – gained about 200,000 unique users, an increase of more than 200% compared with a 1% increase in the same time period on QuickSwap, the most popular DEX on Polygon."

Projects that use or built on it

• As of 20202 Q1, it has 727 Dapps, 342 of which are active, 66 were new and about 236.95K active users.
• Peiwo, a Snapchat-like app that allows users to send 10-second voice recordings, runs on the Tron blockchain.

• From this piece, by Bitcoin.com (9-2019):

"Tron has quietly grown into one of the most successful dApp networks to date. Admittedly, there’s a preponderance of gambling dapps, with a few exchanges thrown in for good measure..."

"Another minor success story for Tron is that its sub-tokens have gained some traction, in contrast to EOS. Most notably, the Wink token, which IEO’d on Binance last month, has done well, and cemented Tron’s reputation as the gambler’s chain of choice. Tron’s also been making progress in other areas, such as with the Sun network, a sidechain for launching dapps that provides all the functionality of the mainchain but with lower resource costs."

• From The Defiant (1-4-2020):

"Tron founder Justin Sun launched a dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by TRX tokens called Djed, in a system that closely resembles MakerDAO’s Dai. Two data dashboards for Djed looks almost exactly like MakerDAO’s portal and Mike McDonald’s mkr.tools."

• From Decrypt (11-6-2020):

"Justin Sun paid $500,000 for the developers of popular Ethereum game Fomo3D to build a new version of the game on the Tron blockchain, according to the contract seen by Decrypt. But the game never really took off, and the developers have disappeared."

• Ampleforth; "Ampleforth is set to launch on Polkadot, NEAR, and TRON within the next few months"
• JustSwap; a DEX. JustSwap now (3-9-2020) achieves close to 15% of the trading volume seen by its Ethereum-equivalent Uniswap.
• Pearl.Finance; liquidity mining platform
• tBridge Token
• SalmonSwap; a SushiSwap clone
• JUST, Zethyr Finance, Sun and SharkTron [turned out to be an exit scam] resulted in the creation of 32,000 daily active wallets in Q3. 

Migrations away from Tron

• Hive, the Steem fork away.
• IGGalaxy is migrating away from Tron and onto the Matic Network (15-9-2020). 

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Had loads of plagiarization in it’s whitepaper, mainly from filecoin, ifps and ethereum.
• Justin Sun, the founder, has repeatedly had bad press due to questionable decisions. One example was posting a 'developer guide' for Tron which was actually 'just a list of where to buy Tron'. More about it in this post. Sun deleted the 'guide' after being confronted about it.
• Might have pumped it's own token with Poloniex funds.
• When KuCoin got hacked (28-9-2020), some TRON tokens were frozen by 'entities'. This hints to centralized powers.

Competition

• Smart contract platforms like Ethereum and EOS.
• From Cointelegraph (9-9-2020):

"Tron’s scalability comes at a cost, given that the platform is based on a delegated proof-of-stake consensus. In 2019, co-founder Lucien Chen announced he was leaving the project due to the “pseudo-decentralized” nature of Tron, which he believed was counterproductive to the company’s mission to “decentralize the web.” In contrast, Ethereum 2.0 will launch with over 16,000 validators on the Beacon Chain, according to ConsenSys."

Team, Funding, Partners

• Sun, Justin; founder & ex-CEO. Became the WTO ambassador for Grenada (17-12-2021).
• Justin got into the news with fake twitter followers: "20,000 of Tron's Justin Sun's 50,000 new Twitter followers are likely fake, according to researcher Geoff Golberg; analysis reveals almost half of the new followers are extremely similar and uniform in consistency, pointing towards software creation; leading signs include all the accounts following few people, were just created, and have few tweets"
• Lucien Chen; ex-co founder who left (2019) due to the “pseudo-decentralized” nature of Tron.

Funding

• According to Messari (8-10-2020), Mutual Coin Capial and SEED Venture Capital are investors in Tron.
• The Tron Foundation is launching (10-8-2021) a $300 million fund, Tron Arcade, that will invest in play-to-earn projects over the next three years.

BitTorrent

• Bought BitTorrent in june 2018. At least 5 employees left bitTorrent soon after.:

“Among those departed were at least two individuals serving in leadership positions, the sources indicated, performing key roles such as general manager and head of marketing.

However, other senior-level employees, including the company's chief executive, chief financial officer, chief product officer and chief revenue officer, are unable to leave the company due to 18-month lock-in agreements.

The news comes just two months after Justin Sun purchased the San Francisco-based company for $120 million in cashthrough Rainberry Acquisition, Inc., a company registered to him alone according to publicly available documents. Sun, a former Ripple representative, is best known for founding the Tron project in 2017, which aims to decentralize the internet and boasts controversial miner Bitmain as a backer.”

• BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen left as well.
• After buying BitTorrent, he was sued for alleged labor violations and harassment.

Dlive

• Bought Dlive in 2019.

Steemit.Inc

• Steemit Inc. got sold to Tron on 14-2-2020:

“Steemit Inc., the largest decentralized blockchain-based social media and blogging platform, announced a strategic partnership with TRON Foundation,” the release states. “TRON and Steemit’s development teams will immediately begin working together to bring Steemit and other Steem blockchain-based DApps to TRON blockchain.

The Ask Me Anything video finds Tron founder Justin Sun in discussion with Scott, elaborating on the details and implications of the deal. In explaining why he sold the company, Scott stated he is “moving on for personal reasons” and that “there’s a couple other companies that I’m working on behind the scenes privately.” This is notable since one of the common criticisms of Steemit historically has been the project-hopping of leaders, with Bitshares creator Dan Larimer, who helped Scott create Steemit, leaving the project in 2017 to work on EOS development.

One user commented: “the community is very worried about what the next steps are and there is a lot of talk about a fork away from Tron within the Steem community as many members presently see this as a hostile take over by Tron and not a mutually beneficial partnership.”

Token Swap

• In the AMA Sun commented (16-2-2020):

"I don’t think we have a plan for immediately like token swap, so I think we will keep both steem and the tron tokens separate and run separately … there is no token swap for right now … I just want to talk with the team and found out the best solution to integrate eventually for steem, Steemit, and Tron."

However the official press release is clear: “Together, TRON Foundation and Steemit Inc. will look to create further value for their users and to augment their advancements in decentralized technologies,” it states, “including moving old STEEM token to a new TRON based STEEM token.”

Partners

• Has a partnership with Blockfolio
• Tron has confirmed it will be “collaborating” with the Japanese government to prevent gambling dapps from being accessible within the Pacific island territory. The Tron Foundation has encouraged blocking gambling dapp users with Japanese IP addresses.
• Is partners (20-4-2020) with Consensus Lab.
• Partners with Gravity (13-8-2020)
• Reef Finance partnered with Tron to "help build its DeFi ecosystem." (18-2-2021)

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