Decentralized pioneer BitTorrent officially confirmed that they have been purchased by cryptocurrency phenom Justin Sun and his Tron Foundation. The combination makes Tron (TRX) one of the largest global decentralized businesses – and further puts to rest concerns about Tron’s ability to deliver on their promises. Their recent migration from the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain to their own custom platform opened a world of possibilities. However, buying BitTorrent came as a considerable surprise to the community.
While BitTorrent’s software is similar to how blockchain technology works – and almost certainly played a part in early development – there is still a large difference between the two. Both use decentralized user groups to accomplish their goal, but those goals are vastly disparate. Where BitTorrent is a file sharing service, cryptocurrency only uses their cloud of users to validate transactions and execute smart contracts.
The Players Involved
Tron is well known in the cryptocurrency market for their bombastic public relations blitz. Justin Sun is seen as a successor to Jack Ma of Alibaba fame and spends much of his time securing new partnerships. At first, this brought ire from some subsets of the cryptocurrency community. However, development continues at a rapid pace and Tron’s operational platform lives up to some of Sun’s initial promises. Ultimately, the Tron platform is envisioned as a decentralized media marketplace – music, movies, images and more – that are controlled entirely through cryptocurrency.
To this end, the BitTorrent acquisition makes more sense. After all, BitTorrent’s initial release came close on the heels of the P2P file sharing crackdown of the late 90s. Today, BitTorrent handles an incredible amount of traffic – at one point accounting for 21% of data sent through the Internet. While the advent of Netflix and other streaming sites caused a decline, BitTorrent’s software remains the gold standard for efficient file transfers. After the merger, BitTorrent and Tron will combine US offices in San Francisco to create a single development team.
What is the Potential Market Impact?
Tron acquiring the BitTorrent product line and development team is a long term success. In the immediate future, the cryptocurrency market itself will probably remain unaffected by this news. It has no direct impact on Tron’s use as a currency – instead, it is a clearly focused step towards their media-empire future. The BitTorrent team brings a monumental amount of experience to the project, no doubt bolstering Tron’s own in house developers.
Meanwhile, BitTorrent’s announcement carefully reassured long time users that their service would not degrade. As of now, there are no intentions to charge for torrenting services – with or without cryptocurrency. While the direct use of BitTorrent as a peer-to-peer file sharing network has decreased, the software itself is used by some major companies to quickly distribute files. Game development giant Blizzard has used BitTorrent software to distribute game patches for years now.
Article By: Adam Stone
