Tron (cryptocurrency)

Last updated

TRON
TRON-logo-EN-vertical.svg
Original author(s) Justin Sun
Developer(s) TRON-Foundation Ltd.
Initial release25 July 2018;6 years ago (2018-07-25)
Development statusActive
Written in Java
Platform Tron
Available in Multilingual, but primarily English
Type Distributed computing
License Open-source licenses
Website tron.network

TRON is a decentralized, blockchain-based operating system with smart contract functionality, proof-of-stake principles as its consensus algorithm and a cryptocurrency native to the system, known as Tronix (TRX). It was established in March 2014 by Justin Sun and since 2017 has been overseen and supervised by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit organization [ citation needed ] in Singapore, established in the same year. It is open-source software.

Contents

It was originally an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token, which switched its protocol to its own blockchain in 2018. On some cryptocurrency wallets, users can't withdraw their funds until they have enough amount for the network fee.

History

TRON was founded by Justin Sun in 2017. [1] The TRON Foundation was established in July 2017 in Singapore. The TRON Foundation raised $70 million in 2017 through an initial coin offering shortly before China outlawed the digital tokens. [2] The testnet, Blockchain Explorer, and Web Wallet were all launched by March 2018. TRON Mainnet launched shortly afterward in May 2018, marking the Odyssey 2.0 release as a technical milestone for TRON.

In June 2018, TRON switched its protocol from an ERC-20 token on top of Ethereum to an independent peer-to-peer network.[ citation needed ] On 25 July 2018, the TRON Foundation announced it had finished the acquisition of BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing service. [3] Upon this acquisition, in August 2018, BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen also disclosed that he was leaving the company to found a separate cryptocurrency, Chia. [4]

By January 2019, TRON had a total market cap of about $1.6 bn. [5] Despite this market performance, some authors viewed TRON as a typical case of the complex and disordered nature of cryptocurrencies. [6] [7] In February 2019, after being acquired by TRON Foundation, BitTorrent started its own token sale based on the TRON network. [8] [9]

In late 2021, Justin Sun resigned as CEO of the TRON Foundation, which was subsequently reorganized as a DAO.[ citation needed ]

In March 2023, Sun and Tron were sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for selling unregistered securities related to the sale and promotion of Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BBT) tokens, alleging that Sun and Tron had engaged in wash trading in the secondary market for TRX in order to buoy its price. [10] [11] [12] Eight celebrities, including Akon, Ne-Yo, Austin Mahone, Soulja Boy, Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul and Lil Yachty, were charged with promoting these cryptocurrencies without disclosing that they were sponsored, with all those other than Soulja Boy, and Mahone settling with the FTC for more than $400,000, without admitting or denying the charges. [13] [14] [10]

In Febaruary 2024, Circle announced it would stop supporting USDC token on the Tron network. [15] [16]

In September 2024, TRON, Tether, and TRM Labs announced the T3 Financial Crime Unit (T3 FCU), an initiative aimed at addressing illicit activities involving the use of USDT on the TRON blockchain. [17]

Architecture

TRON adopts a 3-layer architecture divided into storage layer, core layer, and application layer. The TRON protocol adheres to Google protocol buffers, which intrinsically supports multi-language extension.[ citation needed ]

The TRON protocol, maintained primarily by the TRON Foundation, distributes computing resources equally among TRX holders with internal pricing mechanisms such as bandwidth and energy. [18] TRON provides a decentralized virtual machine, which can execute a program using an international network of public nodes. The network has zero transaction fees and conducts approximately 2,000 transactions per second. [19] [ non-primary source needed ]

The implementations of TRON require minimal transaction fees in order to prevent malicious users from performing DDoS attacks for free. In this respect, EOS.IO and TRON are quite similar, due to the negligible fees, high transactions per second, and high reliability, and as such are regarded as a new generation of blockchain systems. [20] Michael Borkowski, Marten Sigwart, Philipp Frauenthaler, Taneli Hukkinen and Stefan Schulte defined TRON as an Ethereum clone, with no fundamental differences. [21] The transactions per second rate on Tron's blockchain was questioned because it was far below its theoretical claim. [22]

Criticisms

In January 2018, via a Tweet, Juan Benet, the CEO at Protocol Labs, revealed that the white paper of TRON copied portions of the white papers from IPFSbot and MineFilecoin, without a single reference. [23] Researchers from Digital Asset Research (DAR) discovered multiple instances of code copied from other projects in the Tron code base. It is also accused of violating the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 (LGPL) because the project does not mention that its client was derived from EthereumJ, a Java implementation of Ethereum. These accusations were denied by the TRON Foundation, the organization behind the design of the system. [24]

In May 2019, the cyber-security testing service HackerOne revealed [25] that just one computer could have brought TRON's entire blockchain to a halt. [26] The revelation showed that a barrage of requests sent by a single PC could be used to squeeze the power of the blockchain's CPU, overload the memory, and perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. [27]

In November 2023, the TRON network was used by various terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. [28] The TRON DAO released a statement emphasizing their support for the UN’s stance against malicious actors in the blockchain space, but disputing the claim that TRON, Ethereum or similar decentralized protocols may exercise direct control over those who leverage this open-source technology. [29]


Related Research Articles

Rainberry, Inc., formerly known as BitTorrent, Inc., is an American company responsible for μTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline. The company was founded on September 22, 2004 by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin. It was successful during the Great Recession under the leadership of CEO Eric Klinker. In 2018, the company was acquired by cryptocurrency startup TRON, and Bram Cohen left the company. In March 2022, the SEC charged Rainberry with fraud for selling cryptocurrencies Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) as unregistered securities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptocurrency</span> Digital currency not reliant on a central authority

A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.

Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This is done to avoid the computational cost of proof-of-work (POW) schemes. The first functioning use of PoS for cryptocurrency was Peercoin in 2012, although the scheme, on the surface, still resembled a POW.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethereum</span> Open-source blockchain computing platform

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software.

Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.

A decentralised application is an application that can operate autonomously, typically through the use of smart contracts, that run on a decentralized computing, blockchain or other distributed ledger system. Like traditional applications, DApps provide some function or utility to its users. However, unlike traditional applications, DApps operate without human intervention and are not owned by any one entity, rather DApps distribute tokens that represent ownership. These tokens are distributed according to a programmed algorithm to the users of the system, diluting ownership and control of the DApp. Without any one entity controlling the system, the application is therefore decentralised.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethereum Classic</span> Blockchain computing platform

Ethereum Classic is a blockchain-based distributed computing platform that offers smart contract (scripting) functionality. It is open source and supports a modified version of Nakamoto consensus via transaction-based state transitions executed on a public Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cardano (blockchain platform)</span> Public blockchain platform

Cardano is a public blockchain platform. It is open-source and decentralized, with consensus achieved using proof of stake. It can facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its internal cryptocurrency, ADA.

<i>CryptoKitties</i> 2017 blockchain game on Ethereum

CryptoKitties is a blockchain game developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs. The game allows players to buy, sell, and create non-fungible tokens (NFTs) using Ethereum. These NFTs represent virtual cats. The game's popularity in December 2017 congested the Ethereum network, causing it to reach an all-time high in the number of transactions and slowing it down significantly.

A cryptocurrency bubble is a phenomenon where the market increasingly considers the going price of cryptocurrency assets to be inflated against their hypothetical value. The history of cryptocurrency has been marked by several speculative bubbles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Justin Sun</span> Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur

Justin Sun is a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur and business executive. He is the founder of TRON, a cryptocurrency with an associated blockchain DAO ecosystem and USDD, a stablecoin issued by TRON DAO Reserve. Sun is also the owner of Rainberry, which developed the BitTorrent protocol and under Sun's leadership developed the BTT cryptocurrency token. Sun also owns the crypto exchange Poloniex, and is affiliated with the crypto exchange HTX. Sun served as Permanent Representative of Grenada to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva from 2021 to 2023.

USD Coin (USDC) is a cryptocurrency stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar. Managed by Circle, USDC is issued by a private organization and is distinct from a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Paxos Trust Company is a New York–based financial institution and technology company specializing in blockchain. The company's product offerings include a cryptocurrency brokerage service, asset tokenization services, and settlement services. ItBit, a bitcoin exchange run by Paxos, was the first bitcoin exchange to be licensed by the New York State Department of Financial Services, granting the company the ability to be the custodian and exchange for customers in the United States.

Decentralized finance provides financial instruments and services through smart contracts on a programmable, permissionless blockchain. This approach reduces the need for intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks. DeFi platforms enable users to lend or borrow funds, speculate on asset price movements using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savings-like accounts. The DeFi ecosystem is built on a layered architecture and highly composable building blocks. While some applications offer high interest rates, they carry high risks. Coding errors and hacks are a common challenge in DeFi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uniswap</span> Decentralized cryptocurrency exchange

Uniswap is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that uses a set of smart contracts to create liquidity pools for the execution of trades. It is an open source project and falls into the category of a DeFi product because it uses smart contracts to facilitate trades instead of a centralized exchange. The protocol facilitates automated transactions between cryptocurrency tokens on the Ethereum blockchain through the use of smart contracts. As of October 2020, Uniswap was estimated to be the largest decentralized exchange and the fourth-largest cryptocurrency exchange overall by daily trading volume.

Algorand is a proof-of-stake blockchain and cryptocurrency. Algorand's native cryptocurrency is called ALGO.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Solana (blockchain platform)</span> Public blockchain platform

Solana is a blockchain platform which uses a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL.

Tokenomics is a term that refers to the study and analysis of the economic aspects of a cryptocurrency or blockchain project, with a particular focus on the design and distribution of its native digital tokens. The term is a portmanteau of words token and economics.

Chia Network Inc. is a US-based blockchain technology company. The company built the Chia blockchain that uses proof of space and proof of time consensus protocols and issues the digital currency Chia (XCH). Chia Network was founded in 2017 by Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, and Ryan Singer. Its headquarters are in South San Francisco, California.

References

  1. ↑ Mohamed, Theron. "Justin Sun postponed a $4.6 million lunch with Warren Buffett, plowed $10 million into GameStop stock, and lost out on a $69 million NFT. Here's a look at the crypto whiz kid". Business Insider. Insider. Retrieved 23 June 2021.
  2. ↑ Lee, Amanda (31 July 2018). "This coin issuer is all cashed up amid China's ban, but is it all hype?". South China Morning Post. Archived from the original on 1 August 2018. Retrieved 26 August 2019.
  3. ↑ Heater, Brian (24 July 2017). "Blockchain startup Tron closes BitTorrent acquisition". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 20 August 2019. Retrieved 20 August 2019.
  4. ↑ Beedham, Matthew (20 August 2018). "BitTorrent inventor walks away after TRON acquisition". The Next Web. Hard Fork. Archived from the original on 20 August 2018. Retrieved 20 August 2019.
  5. ↑ "The Hottest Cryptocurrency, Tron, Rekindles Memories of the Bitcoin Bubble". Bloomberg.com. 17 January 2019. Archived from the original on 8 February 2019. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  6. ↑ Stosic, Darko; Stosic, Dusan; Ludermir, Teresa B.; Stosic, Tatijana (1 July 2019). "Exploring disorder and complexity in the cryptocurrency space". Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications. 525: 548–556. Bibcode:2019PhyA..525..548S. doi: 10.1016/j.physa.2019.03.091 . ISSN   0378-4371.
  7. ↑ Poyser, Obryan (29 June 2018). "Herding behavior in cryptocurrency markets". arXiv: 1806.11348v2 [q-fin.ST].
  8. ↑ Clark, Bryan (3 January 2019). "BitTorrent just launched a TRON-based cryptocurrency token". The Next Web. Hard Fork. Archived from the original on 3 January 2019. Retrieved 26 August 2019.
  9. ↑ "BitTorrent unveils cryptocurrency so users can pay for faster download times". VentureBeat. 3 January 2019. Archived from the original on 3 January 2019. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  10. 1 2 "SEC.gov | SEC Charges Crypto Entrepreneur Justin Sun and his Companies for Fraud and Other Securities Law Violations". www.sec.gov. Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  11. ↑ Wigglesworth, Robin (22 March 2023). "SEC goes after Justin Sun, Lindsay Lohan and Soulja Boy". Financial Times.
  12. ↑ Roth, Emma (22 March 2023). "SEC sues Justin Sun for his crypto schemes, along with Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy". The Verge. Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  13. ↑ Mueller, Julia (22 March 2023). "SEC charges Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul with crypto violations". The Hill. Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  14. ↑ Hipes, Patrick (22 March 2023). "Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Lil Yachty Among Celebrities Charged In SEC Crypto Case". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  15. ↑ "Stablecoin USDC Ditches Tron Network, Cites Risk Management". Bloomberg. 21 February 2024. Retrieved 21 March 2024.
  16. ↑ Wilson, Tom (21 February 2024). "Crypto firm Circle to end support for USDC stablecoin on Tron blockchai". Reuters .
  17. ↑ Bambysheva, Nina (10 September 2024). "Tether, Tron, and TRM Labs Join Forces to Combat Crypto Crime". Forbes.
  18. ↑ Dimaz Ankaa Wijaya, Joseph Liu, Ron Steinfeld, Dongxi Liu, and Limerlina, 'Senarai: A Sustainable Public Blockchain-Based Permanent Storage Protocol', in Cryptology and Network Security 18th International Conference, CANS 2019, Fuzhou, China, 25–27 October 2019, Proceedings, ed. by Yi Mu, Robert Deng, Xinyi Huang (Springer, 2019), pp. 235-46.
  19. ↑ "Virtual Machine Introduction". TRON Developer Hub. September 2020. Archived from the original on 24 November 2020. Retrieved 11 June 2021.
  20. ↑ Valdeolmillos, Diego; Mezquita, Yeray; González-Briones, Alfonso; Prieto, Javier; Corchado, Juan Manuel (2020). "Blockchain Technology: A Review of the Current Challenges of Cryptocurrency". In Prieto, Javier; Das, Ashok Kumar; Ferretti, Stefano; Pinto, António; Corchado, Juan Manuel (eds.). Blockchain and Applications. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. Vol. 1010. Springer International Publishing. pp. 153–160. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-23813-1_19. ISBN   978-3-030-23813-1. S2CID   195656299.
  21. ↑ Borkowski, Michael; Sigwart, Marten; Frauenthaler, Philipp; Hukkinen, Taneli; Schulte, Stefan (2019). "Dextt: Deterministic Cross-Blockchain Token Transfers". IEEE Access. 7: 111030–111042. arXiv: 1905.06204 . Bibcode:2019IEEEA...7k1030B. doi: 10.1109/access.2019.2934707 . ISSN   2169-3536.
  22. ↑ Li, Huawei; Li, Zhihuai; Tian, Na (2020). "Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based on Tron's TPS". In Liu, Yong; Wang, Lipo; Zhao, Liang; Yu, Zhengtao (eds.). Advances in Natural Computation, Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. Vol. 1075. Springer International Publishing. pp. 944–950. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6_103. ISBN   978-3-030-32591-6. S2CID   209082724.
  23. ↑ Brown, Mike (9 January 2018). "Is Tron Plagiarized? White Paper Controversy Hits Cryptocurrency". Inverse. Archived from the original on 16 February 2018. Retrieved 24 August 2019.
  24. ↑ Bailey, Jonathan (1 February 2018). "The Multi-Billion Dollar Plagiarism Scandal". Plagiarism Today. Archived from the original on 1 September 2019. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  25. ↑ "Tron Foundation disclosed on HackerOne: DOS attack by consuming all..." HackerOne. Archived from the original on 6 May 2019. Retrieved 31 August 2019.
  26. ↑ Canellis, David (6 May 2019). "TRON suffered from a critical bug that could've crashed its entire blockchain". The Next Web. Hard Fork. Archived from the original on 6 May 2019. Retrieved 31 August 2019.
  27. ↑ Osborne, Charlie. "TRON critical security flaw could break the entire blockchain". ZDNet. Archived from the original on 8 May 2019. Retrieved 31 August 2019.
  28. ↑ "Focus: New crypto front emerges in Israel's militant financing fight". Reuters. Retrieved 7 December 2023.
  29. ↑ Trondao.org. "Tron's Statement Regarding the UN Report on Southeast Asia". TRON DAO. Retrieved 29 January 2024.
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