This year has been filled with exciting acquisitions, partnerships, and adoption of blockchain technology. Global brands and governments are beginning to open their arms to this nascent technology, in a bid to explore its benefits. Interestingly, I feel it’s the other way around this time. Popular cryptocurrency platform, TRON has acquired BitTorrent Inc.
If you’ve ever tried to download a movie, online course, or song, without having to pay a dime, then you’d agree that torrent files could sometimes be lifesavers. BitTorrent Inc. is the operator of the popular torrent client, uTorrent. The founder of TRON, Justin Sun, confirmed this in an official Medium post published July 24. He noted that:
“I am proud to officially announce that TRON has successfully acquired BitTorrent and all BitTorrent products. From this day on, BitTorrent, whose software has been installed on millions of user devices, will become part of the TRON ecosystem, making TRON the largest decentralized Internet ecosystem in the world.”
And we already know what happens whenever there is good news about a cryptocurrency – some price action. As at the time of writing this article, even though the crypto market is experiencing an all-green, TRON is up by almost 10%.
BitTorrent which was launched in 2001 distributed “seeding” in order to upload shareable content. Many cryptocurrencies have employed this same concept to speed up the rate of transactions, in what is known as “sharding”. So instead of having an individual node handle an entire transaction, several nodes in a network can handle bits of a transaction, and upload them simultaneously.
Sun in his post commended the step and noted that it was “the genesis of the decentralization movement”. He added that: “BitTorrent is […] the first decentralized Internet protocol with a large-scale global application, [which] even today [...] retains its status as the world’s largest decentralized protocol, once transmitting 40% of daily Internet traffic.”
Although there were rumors of the acquisition in late May, it was trailed with a lawsuit by Sun against the company for violating some terms of their supposed negotiations. However, the lawsuit was dismissed and the team of both companies is merging into one.
I am particularly interested in the concluding part of Sun’s post: “With the integration of BitTorrent, TRON aims to liberate the Internet from the stranglehold of large corporations, give data rights back to the individual, and reignite the early 21st century vision of a free, transparent, decentralized network to connect the world, because the internet belongs to the people.”
This in itself is the underlying purpose of blockchain tech.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://www.wallstreethodl.com/tron-buys-popular-torrent-platform-bittorrent/