In every industry, there is a so-called scapegoat that is subject to vast discussions about whether it is legit or not. Well, I believe TRON (TRX) is that in the crypto industry. Crypto enthusiasts are always, you could even say - fighting, about whether the project is worth an investment or not. Tron has done some questionable decisions in the past, but is that a measure of the whole project? Nevertheless, Justin Sun along with his team is constantly pushing forward and developing this project which, from the first look, at least, has a very bright future ahead, in my opinion.
So What Exactly Is Tron?
Tron's main aim is to construct a worldwide free content entertainment system that uses blockchain technology. The main idea is to make the user the sole owner of his data whether it is private or public. They describe the main problem of today – big corporations are in control of users' data and more importantly creative content.
Well, Tron wants to eliminate that by offering a decentralized platform or protocol that would enable users to freely publish, store, and own the data they create. Above all that, decide at what price, how and when would they want to sell this information about themselves.
Also, Tron initially was an ERC-20 token, but last year June it successfully moved to Tron's Mainnet.
ERC-20 tokens are a technical protocol standard that defines certain rules for issuing tokens and are used on the Ethereum blockchain for smart contracts. ERC-20 stands for Ethereum Request for Comments and 20. At the time of writing (as of September 27, 2019) there are approximately a total of 215,725 ERC-20 tokens issued on the Ethereum blockchain.
“TRX is the basic unit of accounts on the TRON blockchain. The value of all other tokens derives from that of TRON. TRX is also a natural medium currency for all TRC-based tokens. TRX connects the entire TRON ecosystem, with abundant application scenarios that power transactions and applications on the chain,” says on their website.
The Statistics Of Tron Blockchain
Maybe some of you remember when Tron celebrated one of the biggest milestones in its existence – 1 million active user accounts. Well, now it is a long-forgotten past because the number of active user accounts has more than tripled since then. Currently, Tron has a total of 3,706,127 accounts that constantly increase.
(https://tronscan.org/#/blockchain/stats/addressesStats)
Moving forward, in the past 24 hours (as of September 27), there have been 2,380,965 transactions recorded on the Tron blockchain. That is an astonishing amount if compared to 330,977 transactions per day on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Another major factor of which Tron is very proud of is that they can hold a capacity of 2,000 transactions per second (TPS) 24/7. The company compares this to Ethereum's 25 TPS and Bitcoin's 3-6 TPS. However, it is a well-known fact that Bitcoin Lightning Network can hold an almost infinite amount of transactions per second, but it has yet to be developed to be fully usable.
Moreover, at the moment, the current circulating supply is 66,682,072,191 TRX and the total supply is 99,281,283,754 TRX with the price of $0,013.
Often Accused Of Copying Ethereum
Since Tron openly admits that they are going after Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, many Tron opponents and Ethereum proponents have long speculated on the legitimacy of Tron as a cryptocurrency or as a company in general. First, it is being called as one of the most centralized projects, but which altcoin is not. In my humble opinion, the only decentralized protocol is Bitcoin. But then Tron has also been accused of white-paper plagiarism.
The founder of Protocol Labs, Juan Benet, tweeted that at least 9 pages of Tron white-paper were copied from the IPFS or Filecoin papers. Juan Benet co-wrote these papers with the help of other Protocol Labs members. He tweeted:
However, Justin Sun replied to these claims rather quickly explaining:
“Our original version of the white-paper is in Chinese and we have a very detailed reference to the latest Chinese version. The English, Korea, Japanese and Spanish versions are translated by the volunteers. The translation missed numerous important details not just reference.”
But for me, the best quote was when Justin Sun compared the two projects, during the time when Tron had reached the 1 million user milestone and said that Tron has achieved this in just 6 months while Ethereum struggled to achieve this in 1,5 years.
Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts believe this narrative cannot be compared as Ethereum developers wrote the code from scratch, while Tron could’ve just copied and improved it. However, Justin Sun insists that the Tron blockchain code was written from scratch, originally in Chinese.
Tron vs EOS vs Ethereum dApps
Ever since Tron came into the market with their dApps, they have steadily climbed their way to being one of the top dApp platforms. Currently, Tron has around 424 dApps, while Ethereum has 1598, and EOS has 477, as shown on dappradar.com. However, it is worth to mention that not all dApps have a healthy user base, so let’s concentrate on the top 10 best performing dApps in the cryptocurrency space.
Since Tron has the lowest number of dApps, let’s look at the top Tron dApps that have made it to the top 10.
For example, Wink, which is an e-gaming platform that offers mostly gambling games such as Poker, live casino, and other betting games, is the third biggest dApp judging by their daily user base. Wink is used daily by approximately 2,300 users and sits behind two EOS dApps – EOS Dynasty and PROSPECTORS, as shown on dappradar.com.
A similar dApp is RocketGame which is the fourth most used dApp in crypto. It also offers various betting games and claims to be the first PVP (Player Versus Player) platforms on the Tron network. It has a daily user base of 2,200 users. Another game that sits in the top 10 most used dApps is BeeHive. It holds the eighth spot and has a daily user base of around 1,500 users. The game is a simulator of the economic model of a beehive, where users can earn TRX tokens by maintaining and managing their beehive.
When looking at the raw statistics, the Ethereum network has the most dApps, however, only three made it to the top 10.
My Crypto Heroes sits in the number one spot and is a multiplayer RPG game with a native ERC-721 token which users can hold throughout the game. Currently, it has a daily user base of around 3,200 people. Next, unfortunately behind all Tron dApps in the top 10, sits HyperFair, which is a simple gambling dApp with around 1,600 daily users.
EOS is the absolute leader holding four positions when looking at the top 10 crypto dApps. EOS Dynasty is the second most popular dApp in the cryptocurrency space as of September 27, 2019. The owners claim that it’s the first PVP and RPG game in the blockchain. The game has a native token called Three Kingdoms Token (TKT) which users can use to participate in multiple dividends or for trading in the marketplace.
PROSPECTORS is another top EOS blockchain dApp which is considered to be the first MMOG (Multiplayer Online Game) on EOS. It is a real-time economic strategy game with a fully user-generated economy. Much like in the Gold Rush days.
So as you can see, most of Tron dApps are meant for gambling. Maybe it is because these dApps are relatively new when compared to Ethereum and EOS. By being new, they want to gain traction in the number of transactions being made. And by offering gambling dApps that take a lot of network traction they break into the top 10. Is that a good or a bad thing? Not really sure, but by looking at the number of people using these gambling dApps, it’s safe to say that they’re happy with their life choices.
Ethereum and EOS dApps, on the other hand, have become more meaningful and the top ones are actually totally legit dApps, which many people would want to play. These dApps have features like “login with Facebook or Google” and that makes it much easier for people who just want to try a game out.
Tron's Amazing Marketing Skills And Dinner With Warren Buffet
Ever since Tron came out, it came out with a very clear marketing plan. I remember when I was playing around with altcoins in 2017, Tron just mysteriously appeared in many of my exchange portfolios with 500 coins on each exchange. At that time, the crypto ecosystem was full of airdrops where you had to do multiple steps and register on various websites, and stuff like that. But Tron just generally sent Tron to everyone. In the rival days, Tron was famous for doing multiple giveaways with various exchanges, mostly Binance.
The CEO, Justin Sun, is an amazing marketer who has a bachelor's degree from Peking University and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Also, Forbes China listed him in the 2017 Forbes Asia 30 under 30 entrepreneurs. Justin also founded Peiwo, an aspiring app that aims to become the Snapchat of China. In other words, we can expect much from this young rival as he is only 29 years old.
Just recently, he stunned the crypto-space with his participation in an official charity bid. He paid around $4,567,888 for a dinner date with Warren Buffet. The terms of the dinner were that he was able to bring along his own choice of guests and some of the officially approved ones were Charlie Lee from Litecoin and Jeremy Allaire from Circle. However, due to medical reasons, Justin was forced to postpone the meeting just a few days before it took place.
Tron Blockchain Characteristics
- Scalability: TRON blockchain can be extended through the side chain, which means that not only currency transactions, legally binding contracts, and certificates, audio and video files can be stored in the blockchain database;
- Decentralization: Without an agency, all nodes have the same rights and obligations, any node stopped working will not affect the overall operation of the system.
- Trustless environment: All nodes in the system can be traded without trust. Because the operation of the database and the entire system is open and transparent, the nodes can not deceive each other;
- Consistency: The data information between nodes is consistent;
- Fault-tolerant: The system can accommodate 1/3 node Byzantine failure;
- Scalability Account Model: UTXO Model + Account Abstraction. TRON has also made targeted improvements on the premise of UTXO's easy-to-parallel computing model. To make data easy to manage and easy to program, TRON introduces the world state-lightweight state tree concept, each of which maintains a global world state, the global state has the features of quickly find, cannot be changed, easy to provide proof.
(Information is taken from the Tron whitepaper)
The Price Of TRX
Till now, the golden days of TRON happened to be in 2017-2018 just like for the majority of other cryptocurrencies out there. During that time, Tron price went as high as $0,25, but it didn't hold long as the bear market stepped in the game and the price pretty quickly dropped to earlier levels of $0,05. During mid-2018 the price rose to $0,09, but ever since then, it has slowly decreased until today. At the time of writing the price of Tron (TRX) is $0,013.
Conclusion
Tron has a very detailed road map ahead. The estimated time, put by developers and founders when the project could be fully developed is set by the year 2037. I mean it is a shy 17 years ahead, which, looking at the digital revolution, which started in the past 10 years, seems like a very far way down the road. However, I feel very optimistic about Tron in the long run. As mentioned before, Justin Sun is relatively young and has achieved remarkable goals in his life and the man has a very bright future ahead.
When talking about future price movements, we need to distinguish what time period of investment are we talking about. If you want to earn a quick buck in the next few weeks, I’d say Tron is not the crypto for you. But if, for example, you want to invest in the next 5 year Tron, I’d say that now we’re talking! Tron is very popular in its native grounds - China and similar countries. If the cryptocurrency succeeds in to fulfill its aim of a global gaming and entertainment platform, then, of course, the price has a significant room to grow. Just imagine the numbers that the gaming and entertainment industry nets each year.
I’d say that it is very unlikely that Tron will reach or surpass its ATH (All-Time High) in the short run. In the long run, however, it is a completely different story.
Also, you have to remember, that not all altcoins have survived in the past. Even Tron has a small percentage of possibility to die, although I reckon it won’t. However, it is very dependant on Justin Sun. What would happen if Justin Sun leaves Tron?
To answer the question - “Is Tron a good investment?” - I'm in no position to suggest anything, but by looking at the facts and statistics, we see that Tron has proved to be a top player in the cryptocurrency space. Tron still has to complete substantial road-map points to become what it pronounced in the white-paper and for that to happen a lot needs to be done.
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