Once again we continue with the analysis of those interesting ideas in the world of cryptocurrencies that hope to attract the attention and funds of investors (and digital currencies enthusiasts), this time it's the turn of Tron (TRX), one of the most ambitious cryptocurrency projects in the crypto world, as it seeks to offer a whole economic and highly scalable platform for smart contracts, DApps and decentralized storage.
TRON emerged in 2018 with the aim of offering high scalability thanks to the fact that it uses the DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) consensus protocol and, in addition, offering advanced smart contract capabilities that are widely compatible with Ethereum (ETH) and its EVM, thanks to the fact that TRON derives such capabilities from this same technology.
Basically we are talking about a project that started practically as a technical improvement to Ethereum, but over time, has evolved to include new technologies that underpin it to be considered as one of the great blockchain projects of the community.
Undoubtedly, talking about TRON is the same as talking about Justin Sun, a young Chinese national who has become one of the most controversial and well-known figures in the crypto world worldwide. Sun has been at the forefront of TRON's development since 2017, at which time he created in Singapore the well-known TRON Foundation. This foundation would be in charge of watching over the development and ecosystem of this cryptocurrency. This is a task in which Sun has been at the forefront, as he is the CEO of said foundation since its inception.
The creation of TRON Foundation, however, was not exempt from the controversy that usually surrounds Sun. First, TRON Foundation decided to use an ICO to finance the development of the cryptocurrency. This was how on September 1, 2017, said ICO was carried out, in which it managed to raise $70 million for development. The sale meant the issuance of 100,000,000,000,000 TRX tokens, which would be delivered to their holders once the network was up and running. The controversy in all this was that Sun achieved this shortly before China put in place a blockade on ICOs in their country, something for which Sun is accused of influence peddling.
With the successful launch of their ICO, development kicked off and it would be on June 24, 2018, when the TRON mainnet would finally go live with the successful mining of its first block.
But, while the launch on the one hand was applauded by a part of the community, another actively criticized it and with compelling reasons: TRON at that time was only Ethereum with a new consensus protocol coupled with the plagiarism of many foreign ideas that were made to look like their own. In fact, Vitalik Buterin himself criticized the project by saying that the white paper was an almost exact copy of the Ethereum white paper. Other figures did the same, such as the creator of IPFS and Filecoin (FIL), Juan Benet, who also denounced on Twitter the plagiarism of TRON with the white paper of his project.
The criticism however did not matter much, as many cryptocurrency projects started exactly the same, especially copying things from Bitcoin (BTC). Moreover, the project had merit in its own right for delivering what it originally promised: a much faster and cheaper Ethereum-compatible platform, all thanks to the use of DPoS.
On July 24, TRON would create another major controversy after the acquisition of the BitTorrent company. This company handled the development of this widely known P2P protocol. Sun's idea with the acquisition was to use TRON's technology, along with its IPFS implementation, to create BTFS (BitTorrent File System), and to be able to create a distributed storage system. The idea is very similar to the Theta Network project, where a huge network of decentralized nodes linked to a blockchain platform would be created to serve content (CDN) around the world.
In this way, TRON could become a network of DApps and monetizable content distribution that will have the native TRX token as its epicenter, along with new forms of decentralized content distribution. The idea however is still under development and by its roadmap, many of its main features will be ready by the end of 2021.
Despite the huge controversies, the project has shown that it has a very active development and that many of its ideas are completely innovative. Firstly, the layered structure of its operation ensures that the development of the layers is very easy to perform, allowing TRON developers to design, test and release new functions without major complications.
Second, TRON is committed to decentralizing the execution of its execution spaces. For example, TRON seeks to use BTFS as a decentralized storage system where DApps and other network functions can keep data securely and decentralized, available to everyone at all times. At the same time, developers are looking to create an integration and development system (API and SDK) that makes it easy for third parties to take advantage of the network's full potential.
One of the keys to TRON's success is its BTFS decentralized storage system. BTFS, or BitTorrent Filesystem, is a derivative of IPFS and its function is simple: to serve as a storage network for the TRON network. Such storage can be used for everything from uploading files and data for DApps to serving personal and private files for individuals and companies.
BTFS is considered at this point to be "the key to TRON's success," a functionality so vital to the ecosystem that if it doesn't work as it should, the project may well begin to lose relevance. In fact, at present, TRON is actively developing this system and has fallen slightly behind other projects such as Sia, Filecoin and Theta Network, in this regard, as its opponents at the moment carry much more complete and functional systems.
However, this year 2021 could radically change this, as the BTFS roadmap makes it clear that the main functions of this system will be in service by the end of the year. If so, TRON would be one of the most complete decentralized storage projects available in the blockchain ecosystem.
TRON was built in order to compete directly with Ethereum, and to achieve this the first thing it did was to create a system that would allow the deployment of smart contracts in a very simple way. In that sense, TRON made a fork of the EVM and Solidity, and adapted them to the DPoS consensus protocol system of its network of nodes. The result? It is possible to bring Ethereum smart contracts to TRON with minimal changes, and at the same time, enjoy a speed of execution and transaction confirmation that Ethereum at the moment cannot achieve.
The EVM fork is known as TRON Virtual Machine (TVM) and is almost fully compatible with Ethereum's EVM. For its part, Solidity in both Ethereum and TRON are identical. This allows a developer who knows the language to program for both networks.
One of the main functionalities of TVM and Solidity in TRON, is the ability to create tokens in the same way as they can be created within Ethereum. In fact, TRON has its equivalents of Ethereum's token standards, ERC-20 and ERC-721 within its system (TRC-20, TRC-721 in TRON). This means that it is possible to create your own tokens and use them within the system, just as it happens within Ethereum.
This functionality is what has allowed TRON to currently have a large ecosystem of DApps and tokens. For example, the USDT stablecoin has a TRC-20 token on the TRON network with which you can transfer USDT using this blockchain. Although, the operation of TRC-20 is not cross-chain (compatible with other blockchain), the transfer within TRON is much cheaper than it would be on Ethereum or Bitcoin for this stablecoin.
Additionally, TRON has created the well-known Bandwidth and Energy Points, both of which are used exclusively when interacting with smart contracts. Bandwidth points are nothing more than a series of points that you can use in exchange for interacting with smart contracts (sending or receiving information from the network). Energy, on the other hand, is the points you can get for the CPU and storage resources you have available in your account.
Thus TRON creates a working structure in which CPU, Bandwidth, Storage and RAM can be used for normal transactions of a TRX token within the network. In fact, transferring TRX tokens only consumes bandwidth. Likewise, Bandwidth and Energy points are decisive when interacting with smart contracts within TRON.
TRON works thanks to the DPoS consensus protocol, a protocol designed for high speed and scalability, which works by staking and generates blocks by choosing a series of representatives that generate the blocks. In TRON, these representatives are called "Super Representatives" (SR) and there are a total of 27 of them.
These SRs have the power to produce the blocks and verify the transactions that take place within the network. SRs are elected by a vote of the network participants every 6 hours. In addition to the SRs, there are "Super Partners" (SP) whose function is to accompany the work of the SRs to verify that their work is carried out correctly. In this way, the generation of blocks in TRON is in the hands of a reduced group of nodes that is renewed every 6 hours. These nodes have a probability of being elected to occupy a position (either SR or SP) tied to the amount of TRX token staking they have in their possession.
The system bets on a small generation core that is chosen from the pool of candidate nodes for that task. This is vital because it avoids centralization of power. Since any node that meets the selection criteria can participate. And, at the same time, a generation kernel is generated that fulfills the task of establishing a new block every 3 seconds.
The rewards per block on the other hand are of the dynamic type. That is, the rewards vary according to a formulation and the amount of staking of the participating nodes.
It is important to consider that the information presented here should not be taken as a recommendation or advice to invest in this or any other project, you as an interested party should make the decision using your own processes to confirm what has been investigated here.