As the cryptocurrency craze continues, with Bitcoin leading the way, a slew of smaller, cheaper projects are emerging that investors are getting excited about. One is Tron, a coin that its Chinese founder hopes will challenge the world’s major content providers, such as Facebook and YouTube.
According to its website, Tron (TRX) is a blockchain-based platform that seeks to decentralize the internet, or rather content-sharing on the internet, ensuring that artists, creatives, musicians, authoring can release their content without having to use a middle company, be it Amazon, YouTube, Apple, or Facebook.
The digital currency was created by 26-year-old Justin Sun, a self-proclaimed protegé of Alibaba chief executive and billionaire Jack Ma. He has amassed 350,000 Twitter followers, promoting the coin to both its loyal followers and investors, as well as to the wider cryptocurrency community. Forbes listed him in its 30 under 30 for Asia in 2015 and he previously worked for another fledgling cryptocurrency, Ripple (XRP).
The currency to be used on the platform is known as “Tronix.” According to Sun, the cryptocurrency is already set to have a user base of at least 10 million, with Sun announcing that the Tron network will be implemented for his own Chinese social networking app Peiwo.
The coin has so far struck partnerships with a series of major companies, including Chinese video hardware and software provider Baofeng (which Sun dubbed the “netflix of China”), oBike, the largest bike-sharing company in Singapore, which will release “oCoins” on the Tron platform, with riders accumulating coins the more they ride. It also boasts investors such as Wei Dai, the founder of bike sharing company ofo, and a team of developers from Alibaba and Microsoft.
Sun has floated that it has a partnership in the works with a space exploration company, and rumors abound online about a partnership with Alibaba, although these remain unfounded.
It is mostly bought with Bitcoin or Ethereum, the number one and two cryptocurrencies, on the Tokyo-based exchange Binance, and at the time of writing had a market cap of almost $6 billion, despite its low price. The coin began life in September, trading at just a tenth of a penny. Earlier this month, it had soared past the 30 cent mark, before dropping back to as low as 4 cents, because of a wider market crash founded on fears that South Korea would ban cryptocurrency.
That country is a major market for digital coins, and the country has signaled that it will not ban cryptocurrencies, but more stringently regulate them to stop market manipulation and fraud.
The coin’s price is rising again, now valued at 8.4 cents at the time of writing, without a single real-case user of the coin at present. Cryptocurrency critics and advocates of Tron are divided on the potential of the project. Hype, potential, fears and doubt all shape the market price of a cryptocurrency, as does the market supply, and Tron is no different.
