Smooth Sailing So Far: Were We Wrong About Tron?
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Earlier this year, an article appeared in Crypto Briefing which described the Tron project as a catastrophe in the making.The author of that article repeated the many, many accusations that have been made against Tron and its founder, before predicting that it would likely end in a fizzle of unworkable code and investor lawsuits.
I happen to remember that column particularly well, because it was mine. Tron is one of those projects that’s fun to hate—it had already been caught plagiarizing both its white paper and its code; and a report by Digital Asset Research predicted disasters in Tron’s main net launch.
In fairness to its critics, Tron was a very overhyped project. Back in January, a headline in Trustnodes described it as a “$14 billion dollar white paper with no product,” and at the time it was true.
But Justin Sun did not raise $14 billion dollars for the Tron company. Tron only raised $75 million in its ICO—which was then inflated to stratospheric heights by the same crazy winds that lifted all the others. Justin just brought the balloon.
Since then Tron has managed to avoid crashing into any icebergs. After the BitTorrent acquisition, that stolen white paper seems much closer to being realized by Tron than it is by Filecoin.
Tron used to be outranked by projects like Verge, BitConnect, and Bitcoin Gold, which have since been flushed down the septic-tank of cryptocurrencies. While CoinMarketCap is turning into a graveyard of poorly-planned projects, Tron is delivering some kind of product.
And it’s doing a rather better job of it than many competitors. EOS, the other much-hyped ICO of 2018, was an underperformer since the very beginning. The mainnet was plagued by bugs, both before and after launch, and its governance devolved into a crypto version of the White House.
Meanwhile, there hasn’t been much news from the Tron camp, because there’s not much to report. In comparison with EOS, Tron’s elections were mostly scandal-free, a $10M bug bounty still seems to be unclaimed, and the Tron Virtual Machine does not seem to require any last-minute sledgehammering.
There’s still no excuse for plagiarism, and the philosophical objections to Tron’s huge premine and delegated-proof-of-stake won’t go away anytime soon.
But for those who bought front-row seats expecting a shipwreck of Titanic proportions… well, it’s pretty boring so far. The popcorn’s getting stale.
Tron is staying afloat. And Kate Winslet doesn’t even have to feel guilty about Leonardo DiCaprio for the rest of her life.
The author is not invested in Tron, but does have a few TRX tokens from an airdrop.
An early version of this article pointed out Filecoin’s comparatively low low ranking by Market Capitalization, which is an artifact from CMC’s ranking algorithm.
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