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TRON, a leading blockchain platform, announced its plans to incorporate decentralized storage as another blockchain solution into the BitTorrent ecosystem. The move is another step in TRON’s mission to create a borderless internet where privacy and ownership are more user-controlled.
BitTorrent, a leader in peer-to-peer protocols and products, will incorporate BitTorrent File System (BTFS) to allow users to receive and host storage on their computers with other individuals and businesses. A variant of the open-source InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol, BTFS began testing internally in late May and is the first step in creating a distributed web platform powered by blockchain technology.
“BTFS is a continuing step in our mission to create a decentralized internet that allows everyone to share in the wealth of web commerce,” said Justin Sun, founder of TRON and CEO of BitTorrent. “We’re creating a platform with BTFS, BitTorrent Speed blockchain integration and the BTT utility token to let users quickly and privately interact with each other around the world without a middleman or government intervention.”
A 2018 study from McKinsey Global Institute that analyzed 5,750 of the world’s largest private and public companies with revenue of $1 billion or more found that the top 1 percent of those companies captured 36 percent of the economic profit. A decentralized internet would create a scenario where some of those profits, from ad sales, data collection and other means, are shared back to people who opt in to big companies’ business models.
BitTorrent plans to leverage its 100 million BitTorrent monthly active users, more than 1,000 TRON full nodes, 27 Super Representative nodes and global TronGrid nodes, to become the world’s largest distributed storage and media sharing network. Internal testing began this quarter, with full implementation expected by the end of the first quarter of 2020.
In Q3 2019, 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.