Tron (cryptocurrency) explained

TRON
Author:Justin Sun
Developer:TRON-Foundation Ltd.
Frequently Updated:Yes
Status:Active
Programming Language:Java
Platform:Tron
Language:Multilingual, but primarily English
Genre:Distributed computing
License:Open-source licenses

TRON is a decentralized, blockchain-based operating system with smart contract functionality, proof-of-stake principles as its consensus algorithm and a cryptocurrency native to the system, known as Tronix (TRX). It was established in March 2014 by Justin Sun and since 2017 has been overseen and supervised by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit organization in Singapore, established in the same year. It is open-source software.

It was originally an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token, which switched its protocol to its own blockchain in 2018. TRC20 has a fee of 5 trones per 1 USD for the transfer. On some cryptocurrency wallets, users can't withdraw their funds until they have enough amount for the network fee.

History

TRON was founded by Justin Sun in 2017.[1] The TRON Foundation was established in July 2017 in Singapore. The TRON Foundation raised $70 million in 2017 through an initial coin offering shortly before China outlawed the digital tokens.[2] The testnet, Blockchain Explorer, and Web Wallet were all launched by March 2018. TRON Mainnet launched shortly afterward in May 2018, marking the Odyssey 2.0 release as a technical milestone for TRON.

In June 2018, TRON switched its protocol from an ERC-20 token on top of Ethereum to an independent peer-to-peer network. On 25 July 2018, the TRON Foundation announced it had finished the acquisition of BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing service.[3] Upon this acquisition, in August 2018, BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen also disclosed that he was leaving the company to found a separate cryptocurrency, Chia.[4]

By January 2019, TRON had a total market cap of about $1.6 bn.[5] Despite this market performance, some authors viewed TRON as a typical case of the complex and disordered nature of cryptocurrencies.[6] [7] In February 2019, after being acquired by TRON Foundation, BitTorrent started its own token sale based on the TRON network.[8] [9]

In late 2021, Justin Sun resigned as CEO of the TRON Foundation, which was subsequently reorganized as a DAO.

In March 2023, Sun and Tron were sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for selling unregistered securities related to the sale and promotion of Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BBT) tokens, alleging that Sun and Tron had engaged in wash trading in the secondary market for TRX in order to buoy its price.[10] [11] [12] Eight celebrities, including Akon, Ne-Yo, Austin Mahone, Soulja Boy, Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul and Lil Yachty, were charged with promoting these cryptocurrencies without disclosing that they were sponsored, with all those other than Soulja Boy, and Mahone settling with the FTC for more than $400,000, without admitting or denying the charges.[13] [14]

In Febaruary 2024, Circle announced it would stop supporting USDC token on the Tron network.[15] [16]

Architecture

TRON adopts a 3-layer architecture divided into storage layer, core layer, and application layer. The TRON protocol adheres to Google protocol buffers, which intrinsically supports multi-language extension.

The TRON protocol, maintained primarily by the TRON Foundation, distributes computing resources equally among TRX holders with internal pricing mechanisms such as bandwidth and energy.[17] TRON provides a decentralized virtual machine, which can execute a program using an international network of public nodes. The network has zero transaction fees and conducts approximately 2,000 transactions per second.[18]

The implementations of TRON require minimal transaction fees in order to prevent malicious users from performing DDoS attacks for free. In this respect, EOS.IO and TRON are quite similar, due to the negligible fees, high transactions per second, and high reliability, and as such are regarded as a new generation of blockchain systems.[19] Michael Borkowski, Marten Sigwart, Philipp Frauenthaler, Taneli Hukkinen and Stefan Schulte defined TRON as an Ethereum clone, with no fundamental differences.[20] The transactions per second rate on Tron's blockchain was questioned because it was far below its theoretical claim.[21]

Criticisms

In January 2018, via a Tweet, Juan Benet, the CEO at Protocol Labs, revealed that the white paper of TRON copied portions of the white papers from IPFSbot and MineFilecoin, without a single reference.[22] Researchers from Digital Asset Research (DAR) discovered multiple instances of code copied from other projects in the Tron code base. It is also accused of violating the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 (LGPL) because the project does not mention that its client was derived from EthereumJ, a Java implementation of Ethereum. These accusations were denied by the TRON Foundation, the organization behind the design of the system.[23]

In May 2019, the cyber-security testing service HackerOne revealed[24] that just one computer could have brought TRON's entire blockchain to a halt.[25] The revelation showed that a barrage of requests sent by a single PC could be used to squeeze the power of the blockchain's CPU, overload the memory, and perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.[26]

In November 2023, the TRON network was used by various terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.[27] The TRON DAO released a statement emphasizing their support for the UN’s stance against malicious actors in the blockchain space, but disputing the claim that TRON, Ethereum or similar decentralized protocols may exercise direct control over those who leverage this open-source technology.[28]

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Mohamed . Theron . Justin Sun postponed a $4.6 million lunch with Warren Buffett, plowed $10 million into GameStop stock, and lost out on a $69 million NFT. Here's a look at the crypto whiz kid. . Business Insider . Insider . 23 June 2021.
  2. Web site: Lee . Amanda . 31 July 2018 . This coin issuer is all cashed up amid China's ban, but is it all hype? . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20180801135652/https://www.scmp.com/business/money/wealth/article/2157587/tron-cashed-us70-m-coin-sale-chinas-ico-ban-where-it-going . 1 August 2018 . 26 August 2019 . South China Morning Post . en.
  3. Web site: Heater . Brian . 24 July 2017 . Blockchain startup Tron closes BitTorrent acquisition . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20190820154244/http://social.techcrunch.com/2018/07/24/blockchain-startup-tron-closes-bittorrent-acquisition/ . 20 August 2019 . 20 August 2019 . TechCrunch . en-US.
  4. Web site: Beedham . Matthew . 20 August 2018 . BitTorrent inventor walks away after TRON acquisition . 20 August 2019 . The Next Web . Hard Fork . en-US . 20 August 2018 . https://web.archive.org/web/20180820135345/https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/20/bittorrent-tron-trx-cryptocurrency/ . live.
  5. News: The Hottest Cryptocurrency, Tron, Rekindles Memories of the Bitcoin Bubble . 1 September 2019 . Bloomberg.com . 17 January 2019 . 8 February 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20190208201651/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/hottest-cryptocurrency-rekindles-memories-of-bitcoin-bubble . live.
  6. Stosic . Darko . Stosic . Dusan . Ludermir . Teresa B. . Stosic . Tatijana . 1 July 2019 . Exploring disorder and complexity in the cryptocurrency space . Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications . 525 . 548–556 . 2019PhyA..525..548S . 10.1016/j.physa.2019.03.091 . 0378-4371. free .
  7. 1806.11348v2 . q-fin.ST . Obryan . Poyser . Herding behavior in cryptocurrency markets . 29 June 2018 . en.
  8. Web site: Clark . Bryan . 3 January 2019 . BitTorrent just launched a TRON-based cryptocurrency token . 26 August 2019 . The Next Web . Hard Fork . en-US . 3 January 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20190103225702/https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/01/03/bittorrent-just-launched-a-tron-based-cryptocurrency-token/ . live.
  9. Web site: 3 January 2019 . BitTorrent unveils cryptocurrency so users can pay for faster download times . 1 September 2019 . VentureBeat . en-US . 3 January 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20190103212051/https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/03/bittorrent-unveils-cryptocurrency-so-users-can-pay-for-faster-download-times/ . live.
  10. Web site: SEC.gov SEC Charges Crypto Entrepreneur Justin Sun and his Companies for Fraud and Other Securities Law Violations . 2023-03-22 . www.sec.gov.
  11. News: Wigglesworth . Robin . 22 March 2023 . SEC goes after Justin Sun, Lindsay Lohan and Soulja Boy . Financial Times .
  12. Web site: Roth . Emma . 2023-03-22 . SEC sues Justin Sun for his crypto schemes, along with Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy . 2023-03-22 . The Verge . en-US.
  13. News: Mueller . Julia . March 22, 2023 . SEC charges Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul with crypto violations . The Hill . March 22, 2023.
  14. News: Hipes . Patrick . March 22, 2023 . Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Lil Yachty Among Celebrities Charged In SEC Crypto Case . Deadline Hollywood . March 22, 2023.
  15. News: Stablecoin USDC Ditches Tron Network, Cites Risk Management . 2024-03-21 . Bloomberg. 21 February 2024 .
  16. Web site: Wilson . Tom . 2024-02-21 . Crypto firm Circle to end support for USDC stablecoin on Tron blockchai . .
  17. Dimaz Ankaa Wijaya, Joseph Liu, Ron Steinfeld, Dongxi Liu, and Limerlina, 'Senarai: A Sustainable Public Blockchain-Based Permanent Storage Protocol', in Cryptology and Network Security 18th International Conference, CANS 2019, Fuzhou, China, 25–27 October 2019, Proceedings, ed. by Yi Mu, Robert Deng, Xinyi Huang (Springer, 2019), pp. 235-46.
  18. Web site: September 2020 . Virtual Machine Introduction . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20201124011525/https://developers.tron.network/docs/vm-introduction . 24 November 2020 . 11 June 2021 . TRON Developer Hub . en.
  19. Book: Valdeolmillos . Diego . Mezquita . Yeray . González-Briones . Alfonso . Prieto . Javier . Corchado . Juan Manuel . Blockchain and Applications . Blockchain Technology: A Review of the Current Challenges of Cryptocurrency . 2020 . Prieto . Javier . Das . Ashok Kumar . Ferretti . Stefano . Pinto . António . Corchado . Juan Manuel . Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing . en . Springer International Publishing . 1010 . 153–160 . 10.1007/978-3-030-23813-1_19 . 978-3-030-23813-1. 195656299 .
  20. Borkowski . Michael . Sigwart . Marten . Frauenthaler . Philipp . Hukkinen . Taneli . Schulte . Stefan . 2019 . Dextt: Deterministic Cross-Blockchain Token Transfers . IEEE Access . 7 . 111030–111042 . 1905.06204 . 10.1109/access.2019.2934707 . 2169-3536 . free. 2019IEEEA...7k1030B .
  21. Book: Li . Huawei . Li . Zhihuai . Tian . Na . Advances in Natural Computation, Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery . Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based on Tron's TPS . 2020 . Liu . Yong . Wang . Lipo . Zhao . Liang . Yu . Zhengtao . Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing . en . Springer International Publishing . 1075 . 944–950 . 10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6_103 . 978-3-030-32591-6. 209082724 .
  22. Web site: Brown . Mike . Is Tron Plagiarized? White Paper Controversy Hits Cryptocurrency . 24 August 2019 . Inverse . 9 January 2018 . en . 16 February 2018 . https://web.archive.org/web/20180216100913/https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal . live.
  23. Web site: Bailey . Jonathan . 1 February 2018 . The Multi-Billion Dollar Plagiarism Scandal . 1 September 2019 . Plagiarism Today . en-US . 1 September 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20190901050821/https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2018/02/01/the-multi-billion-dollar-plagiarism-scandal/ . live.
  24. Web site: Tron Foundation disclosed on HackerOne: DOS attack by consuming all... . 31 August 2019 . HackerOne . en . 6 May 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20190506230128/https://hackerone.com/reports/479144 . live.
  25. Web site: Canellis . David . 6 May 2019 . TRON suffered from a critical bug that could've crashed its entire blockchain . 31 August 2019 . The Next Web . Hard Fork . en-US . 6 May 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20190506182234/https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/06/tron-blockchain-dos-attack-vulnerability-hackerone-cryptocurrency-trx/ . live.
  26. Web site: Osborne . Charlie . TRON critical security flaw could break the entire blockchain . 31 August 2019 . ZDNet . en . 8 May 2019 . https://web.archive.org/web/20190508154649/https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/ . live.
  27. Web site: Focus: New crypto front emerges in Israel's militant financing fight . 2023-12-07 . Reuters . en .
  28. Web site: Trondao.org . Tron's Statement Regarding the UN Report on Southeast Asia . 2024-01-29 . TRON DAO . en.

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