TRON is arguably one of the well-known blockchain ecosystems focusing on the entertainment industry. The TRON project, founded by Justin Sun, has been making waves, especially since the $126 million acquisition of software company BitTorrent with over 100 million active users in July 2018.
Speaking at the interview, Cliff Edwards, Director of Global Communications, Tron Foundation, shared insight on Tron’s vision as well as the “strategic thinking,” that fueled the BitTorrent’s acquisition. The interview was conducted by Adi Karmon Scope, Co-founder, Innovesta and Head of Crypto Economics, Tabookey.
According to Edwards, although a lot of people say Tron is following the tracks of Ethereum and EOS, the project is more focused on how to build a “better mousetrap” than reinventing the wheel.
I will use the vision of Apple. Apple, in a lot of ways, never really innovated on creating something new but they always look at something. Steve Jobs had a great way of doing it – looking at something and say how can I do this better? He’d look at the phone and say look at this phone, how can I do this better? Let’s work on this – and they’d win. They also won not just because they build better hardware but because they had better software and they had a better ecosystem behind them. And if you think about the Tron BitTorrent vision, it’s very much the exact same thing, Edwards explained.
Tron seeks to combine the utility tokens and the blockchain technology behind a strong user base, which will automatically boost the number of people interested in cryptocurrencies.
Talking about “ICOs,” it’s no news that the term has been dragged to the mud by a lot of projects with no use case and business model, and it has led to a reduced level of trusts in ICO projects.
For that reason, Edward noted that the upcoming BitTorrent’s BTT token distribution event is not an ICO, but “crowdfunding,” powered by Binance Launchpad. The Launchpad is a new token launch platform from Binance exchange that gives “worthwhile” and promising blockchain projects the opportunity to raise funds from more than 10 million Binance users in the crypto space.
The BitTorrent token is one of the first two projects that will be featured on the Binance new platform. When asked about the kind of collaboration between Binance and Tron, Cliff Edwards shared his thoughts,
I think the deal came together very quickly. I think you know; once we sent our outlined vision to Binance, I think they probably felt like we do have a plan and they want to make sure that a Launchpad came back in a big way this year. If you read their press release, they said they’re going to be having partners every month. And that makes them look to say ‘who are the people out there that they think may have legs?’ And we also want to show those companies that we are also trying to build trust and legitimacy to the market.
Concluding the interview, Edward mentioned that Tron’s vision this year is to surpass Ethereum and EOS because those are the two closest competitors regarding what Tron is trying to accomplish. The long term vision, on the other hand, is to take on top content companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix.