I guess most of you heard about TRON. It is surely a project with strong fundamentals. It was founded by Justin Sun, a young chinese entrepreneur, who was featured in Forbes´ "30 under 30" several times. He is well-known in china. He is not only a successful entrepreneur, but also a bestseller author in china. The media often labels him as the "next Jack Ma" (founder of AliBaba).
According to the website, TRON is " a blockchain-based decentralized protocol that aims to construct a worldwide free content entertainment system with the blockchain and distributed storage technology. The protocol allows each user to freely publish, store and own data, and in the decentralized autonomous form, decides the distribution, subscription and push of contents and enables content creators by releasing, circulating and dealing with digital assets, thus forming a decentralized content entertainment ecosystem." Sounds disruptive right?
DYOR! I do not want to talk about fundamentals today. Let´s take a look at the TRON chart.
You see, until 14th of december, Tron´s price has been pretty low. It always stayed within the range of 20 to 50 Satoshi, with a recent low of about 18 Satoshi in early december. And then: BOOM! Within about one week, Tron price grew about 1000% from 30 sat to over 300 sat! That was a massive bull-run. But what was the reason for it? TRON around 20-50 Satoshi was really cheap, regarding the project´s fundamentals and possible future impact, a price rise was not unexpected. Of course, the market is complex, no one can really break it down to a single factor, but in the end money rules. The bigger your pockets, the higher is your influence on the price. Trading is a sentiment game. It is only about guessing what the other market participants think, what all other players think and do. Players try to exclude themselves from the rest of the market and try to act rational, but in fact every player is part of the market and in the same boat as everyone.
A good example for changing market sentiment is Verge. Verge once was DogeCoinDark, before it was rebranded. It was a well known project for a long time and I would say the average crypto investor knew about it for a long time. Price was always low, way under 1 cent. Then John McAfee did his epic "coin of the day" tweets and Verge started the biggest bullrun, I have seen this year. How can this run be explained? The fundamentals of Verge did not change, but the market sentiment did. People know about the "new people" in crypto and all the new money flowing in. People know about McAfee and the fact, that people nowaydays are easily influenced and prefer following advices, instead of doing their own research. Just take a look at all the new "crypto experts" on youtube, with clickbaiting video titles... LOL So: People know about the fact, that "normies" like to follow advices. They know about the fact, that other players know about the same thing. So people bought up Verge like crazy, not because Verge has strong fundamentals or it was unknown before, but only because McAfee tweeted about it and because of the fact, that they know, others would do the same. The market really became kind of irrational, but from the point of view of a single player in the market, wouldn´t it be rational to follow others in their irrational behavior in order to profit? Probably.
It is really an amazing time to be in this market.
Let´s get back to the TRON/Binance story.
Binance is on the way to become the biggest crypto currency exchange in the world. Binance´s ICO was in summer 2017 and since then. Binance price increased by about 100 times. Personally, I think it is the best exchange right now. In times of governmental regulation, the trend is shifting to decentralized exchanges. If exchanges are decentralized, governmental regulation (I see regulation as a form of market manipulation) does not matter. Binance plans to become decentralized in the future, which would surely give it another huge push when completed.
Binance and Tron are two awesome projects in the crypto space, no question. They cooperated and pulled a marketing move, that was just huge. Binance is doing "trading competitions" as promotions recently. People can win supercars, like Lamborghinis, Prosches or Maseratis if they win these "trading competitions". The rules for these competitions are easy: The person with the highest trading volume on a trading pair within a certain time span (like 1 week) wins.
This is really kind of funny and epic. It creates incentives for People to trade like crazy. Imagine you would be a whale with let´s say 5000BTC. You see this trading competition of TRON/Binance and you can win a maserati, if you manage to trade the highest volume. What could you loose? If price would not move, you would only loose the 0.1% trading fee on your trading volume. If you say the car is worth 200K$, you could trade 200million$, and the car´s worth covers your fees. Sounds like an awesome and fun opportunity for a whale. But reality is even more epic. When the TRON/Binance trading competition started on December 18, TRON price was around 3.5 cents (200sat). It peaked to about 7 cents (400sat) on December 21 and then settled again around 3.9 cents. So if you were a whale, you could have made a shitload of money (if sold at peak) while winning a Maserati. You could have taken the profit and trade even more. I am unsure about, how much volume this competition created, but I guess I was a significant percentage of the overall trading volume.
All in all, TRON and Binance did an awesome job in starting this promotion while the bullrun was ongoing. This is a whole new level of promotion. Incentivising huge-volume traders to trade even higher volume is an awesome idea.