“Decentralized Entertainment Protocol”
TRON is a new crypto system designed to help users store data / content in a decentralized way.
It’s basically meant to be a system which allows the likes of a decentralized “YouTube” to create a platform through which general users are able to upload their own content & have it available anywhere in the world.
The reason why the system has caught the attention of some renowned voices in the crypto space is due to the way in which it’s able to provide the likes of a decentralized Twitter, Facebook or Google with the infrastructure it needs to run.
This is important because – if you’ve ever spent time on one of the large social platforms – one of the main gripes with the various users of these systems that the central companies end up playing a censorship role, determining which content should, and should not, remain on their platform.
Whilst this is reasonable (they allow almost everything), there have been a very few cases where users’ behaviour has been so bad that they were removed from the system (thus losing their online personal brand identity and the content their contributed to the platform).
The part where TRON comes in is to provide users with a way to store their data / content throughout a decentralized platform. So rather than having to use Twitter/Facebook/Google’s servers, the content is forever stored in the TRON blockchain.
The most important point about the system is the way in which this blockchain data is then able to be used by a number of different applications / platforms in their own right – bypassing the censorship layer the likes of the iTunes store, or Google Play Store have been putting forth.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at what TRON really does, and whether it can deliver on its ideal.
What is TRON?
One of the more pertinent points to make is that TRON has been created around an app (Peiwo APP) which has over 10 million users. Much like SEEM’s reliance on SEEMit, this does not really indicate major adoption, more a specific use-case…
What’s important here is that this app was recently given a recommendation by the Chinese government – essentially pushing Peiwo to the forefront of the national agenda. With this level of exposure, it’s no wonder that the app has become as popular as it has.
Who created it?
A product of China’s growing technology scene, TRON’s main proponent is a 27-year-old named Justin Sun:
An apparent protege of Jack Ma (founder/CEO of Alibaba), Sun studied in the US and returned to China to set up a number of companies, most well known being Peiwo.
Indicative of the industry, Sun seems to just be the team lead behind the project, with a number of other skilled developers being hired to forward the Peiwo technology (and also the underlying TRON network which powers it).
All of the team are based in China and all have social media profiles which you can check out.
Why does it exist?
As explained, the system has been designed to create a decentralized content platform on top of which social applications (such as Peiwo) can be built:
Through the use of many existing mature technologies, wave field (TRON), as a new content platform, provides security, scalability, and privacy, and simultaneously allows the participants to actively contribute to the processing capacity of their machine to build a user registration network.
It also gives positive contributors the privilege to send advertisements to the whole network to incentivize (of course this group text messaging will be limited in number).
You can view the full Whitepaper here.
Trajectory
Whilst TRON had a good run out of the gate, it dropped somewhat, predominantly due to the way in which the hype surrounding it died down.
The simple reality of this space (especially as it’s new is that it’s primarily driven by hype and speculation – with each new coin promising to change the world in ever more ambitious ways).
If you want a tip – NEVER judge a crypto token by its ICO performance. Leave it for 2 or 3 months before looking at it properly, as when it actually has to DELIVER on its promises, the market will react either negatively or positively.
A simple rule for the tech world (and indeed the business world in general) is that the ones who speak the loudest generally don’t “do” very much. They’re big on hype, rumours and speculation… but lapse on actual implementation, and RESULTS.
The ONLY thing that matters in business is RESULTS. Consequently, when looking at the types of offerings from such systems as TRON, you really have to gauge the price in regard to how much impact/adoption it’s had in the world.
To do this, we observe several data-points:
- Adoption of the system in the “wider world”
- Number of people actually using the system
- Ability to actually achieve specific functionality with it
Ultimately, we measure coins like this from the perspective of where they fit in the wider blockchain ecosystem. Whilst TRON certainly has a strong set of features, it “still” lacks the adoption and innovation required to topple the likes of Ripple or Ethereum.
