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PLAY GOC makes vital announcements for LoveHearts and TRC10 WIN holders

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Part of the recent strides of Tron is the production of a token-based incentivized gaming platform known as PLAY GOC. This is a platform where Tron users can play and create games with their various tokens. At the moment, the platform boasts of 5 live games and a multi-token mining system for its users.

Play GOC platform recently made an important announcement on its official Twitter page for LoveHearts and TRC10 holders that it will pause LoveHearts deposit and withdrawals and TRC10 WIN swaps until TRC10 support resumes. That’s finished now, already. The official statement reads

“The second proposal to allow duplicated names for trc10 tokens is passing, which will cause disruption for trc10 tokens across the network. To prevent errors we are pausing lovehearts deposit and withdrawals and trc10 WIN swaps until trc10 support resumes. ”

The second proposal stated by PLAY GOC from the aforementioned tweet is seen as the change Tron is bringing into its system, and that’s only to prevent big issues that have to do with the withdrawals and deposits of Loveheart tokens. As promised, PLAY GOC paused withdrawals/deposits for a very short time and that’s a done thing as we write this.

https://twitter.com/PLAY_GOC/status/1082832571426197504

PLAY GOC was created towards the end of last year, 2018, but it had some hurdles to jump; the platform has promised that great things will kick off this year. The platform’s Telegram group earlier revealed that mining is being tested and will be ready on the 5th of January, 2019 UTC (so that’s done now, too).

As of today, PLAY GOC users can now mine and play games to earn RWD tokens (or deposit 1 million PLAY or more to get RWD airdrops), which they can redeem for their share of the pot of PLAY, GOC, and TRX. It is necessary for all users to note that the weekly timer of the pot started on Monday.

Subsequently, daily airdrops have started for PLAY holders. One of their official tweets reads,

“Daily $RWD #Airdrops have started for #PLAY Holders! Mining is live in 5 games, first Reward Party soon! Payout is in TRX/GOC/PLAY. Mine and buy tickets, or hold or sell RWD later on #GOC #DEX. play.goc.network/airdrops/#TRX #TRON @Justinsuntron @TronFoundation #crypto.”

It is important to also know that the first mining round is over 60% complete and users are advised to play the 5 live games with TRX, GOC, and PLAY tokens on the platform. Users are also advised to mine RWD tokens and buy tickets to the Reward Party.

More upcoming updates on PLAY GOC

PLAY GOC revealed on its official Twitter page about its intentions to add a new game for all gaming lovers on its platform; the game is called Three Card Poker. It tweeted:

“Three Card Poker now added to coming soon on the $PLAY platform! #tron.”

Furthermore, the platform also stated that there will be a more visual enhancement on its site, customizable user chat names, various bugs fixes, Reward pool page, mining progress page, and FAQ. Also, there will be additional site updates and a whitepaper for the platform.

Overall, there seem to be many updates coming from PLAY GOC and other tokens on the Tron platform more often now. And of course, token holders should stay alerted for important updates on Tron network. Good thing is, TronWeekly is here to keep you updated on all that!

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

A new BitTorrent cryptocurrency to be launched over Tron’s Network

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BitTorrent, the prevalent P2P  file-sharing platform, which is also the world’s largest decentralized network, is about to create a new cryptocurrency of its own using Tron’s network. The new token will get used by the users to pay for higher download speeds using the company’s uTorrent client, which runs on the Windows operating system.

Rogelio Choy, who used to be BitTorrent’s CEO, decided to leave the company behind. This happens about half a year after Tron’s CEO and founder, Justin Sun, bought the firm. That move started rumors around the technology world that Mr. Choy was not very happy about BitTorrent’s new priority to become a blockchain network.

Justin Sun about to bring blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies into the P2P file sharing world

Justin Sun, who is a consummate master when it comes to using Tweeter effectively, had this to say about the new token in uTorrent in an official Medium blog.

“BitTorrent token is the first in a series of steps to support a decentralized internet… In one giant leap, the BitTorrent client can introduce blockchain to hundreds of millions of users around the world and empower a new generation of content creators with the tools to distribute their content directly to others on the web.”

The blog post offers further detail by explaining that non-US investors will be the first to get some of the new tokens by using Binance Launchpad, which is Binance’s delegated token sale platform. Binance is a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange which has partnered up with Tron in this and several other ventures. The token will be called BitTorrent Token (BTT).

There is an official whitepaper for BTT. The total number will be of 990 billion, and it will be based on TRC-10, which is the simplest Tron technology for issuing digital assets based on TRX.

The moment in which Mr. Choy has chosen to make and publish his decision to walk away from BitTorrent kind of shows that he wasn’t too happy about the company’s new way of doing things, based on blockchain technology. Variety, which is not precisely specialized in technology news, maintained that it spoke to a company insider who told it that there was friction about BitTorrent’s new orientation. But Mr. Choy has not spoken explicitly about this subject at all.

Mr. Choy’s departure was confirmed by BitTorrent’s spokesperson a couple of days ago, a little after the news broke. The company gave no details or explanations and just limited itself to say that he “decided to pursue other opportunities.”

Mr. Choy was BitTorrent’s COO from 2012 to 2015. He then left and rejoined in 2017 as CEO. That was his position when Mr. Sun bought the company over last summer. After that operation, the former CEO served as Tron’s platform’s storage business general manager.

The announcement to create the BTT token comes about a few months after BitTorrent and Tron announced Project Atlas, which is the technology that will merge BitTorrent into the Tron network. The main idea in Project Atlas is to provide incentives for users to keep seeding their files for longer periods of time. Seeding will be rewarded with the newly minted BTT coins.

The news about the new BTT token in BitTorrent made the price of TRX go up by a little more than 2.3% in a day in which most other digital had been trading in similar numbers, but red, not green. Even today, while all other cryptocurrencies are in red, Tron (TRX) stands in green by more than 11% at the press time.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

New policies for Tron TRC10 token naming

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Tron’s super representatives are hard at work as we write this article. Last Friday, they reviewed the “Allow same token name” proposal and a decision will be announced sometime soon. This could seem like a cosmetic initiative, but it will have real effects on the Tron community’s sector that is using or issuing TRC10 tokens (TronWatchMarket, TWX, SEED, IGG, although IGG is migrating its token to TRC20 technology as we write this).

If the initiative is approved, new TRC10 will be allowed to use the same token names as currently existing tokens. Why should anybody want to have a token name that could lend itself to confusion so easily is anybody’s guess, just don’t ask us what’s the point in that?

This will force Tron-based exchanges to adopt an additional tag beside the token name so that each individual coin can be referenced without confusion.

Developers in Tron’s community are working to update applications, trading platforms, and Tron-based wallets so that a smooth transition is possible if the initiative goes through. A new tag, called “TOKEN ID” will be the new proper way to identify individual tokens. All necessary steps are being taken to ensure that dApps in the Tron network will use this new identifier.

This is unusual news for Tron. Why is it so important to allow for duplicate token names? We can’t possibly imagine, but maybe Tron’s super representatives will explain that to us, and to you, once the decision is passed.

TRC10 and TRC20 are Tron’s technologies that allow Tron community members to issue their own tokens and ICOs much in the same way in which Ethereum’s ETC20 technology has enabled lots of projects and users to issue brand new cryptocurrencies.

Indeed, projects like Tron and EOS came to life running over Ethereum’s network and issuing Ethereum-based tokens. So Tron understands exactly how important it is to keep things neat, clear and transparent when it comes to new digital assets.

Yet another interesting layer over this piece of news is that BitTorrent will be issuing a new token called BitTorrent Token (BTT). This coin’s use case will be to reward seeders in the BitTorrent network (which is the world’s largest decentralized network) for sharing their content over the network. This new token will be available at Binance for BitTorrent users to collect as they keep sharing their content.

This is relevant because it will be a TRC10 token (the kind that will admit repeated token names). So what happens if you or I get a Tron account and issue another token called BTT. As mentioned before, there will be a new tag that will allow users to tell the difference between my own (or yours) fake BTT token and the real, significant BTT. Still, what’s the point in allowing redundant tags?

In any case, Tron’s leadership has a history of taking the correct decisions and boosting the coin’s value, the project’s power and use-cases, so don’t take us too seriously as we question this particular move, which is not even official yet. We’ll see what happens, and how the community (and the markets) react.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Tron (TRX) on the cards for dx.exchange

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Dx.Exchange is a cryptocurrency exchange which prides itself in being the first whole crypto community that enables both institutional and individual investors to buy cryptocurrencies using fiat currencies, trade them, and convert them back to fiat.

It’s built using Nasdaq’s market matching technology which is considered to be one of the world’s leading technologies when it comes to trading in the stock market.

It’s based out of Estonia (don’t be surprised, it’s one of the world’s most wired and technological savvy countries). It has a reputation for transparency and ethical behavior.

Tron, on the other hand, is one of the cryptosphere’s most interesting and ambitious projects. It’s barely eighteen months old, and, in that short period of time it’s managed to become the world’s largest decentralized network, one of the busiest blockchains in the world in terms of completed transfers, and one of the most credible projects in crypto.

https://twitter.com/MotherOfCrypto_/status/1080899718744629248

Tron’s mission is to utilize blockchain tech to decentralize the whole web. It’s an incredibly ambitious project. The idea is for the internet to become decentralized and free from the influence of any central authority in a way that content producers won’t need big corporations (think Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, Comcast, etc.) to publish their material or to monetize it.

Tron was founded and is led by Justin Sun whose credibility as a technology tycoon has been well established for years as the founder of China’s most popular messaging app. Mr. Sun is also famous as Jack Ma’s protegé and former student (yes, that Jack Ma, the man who founded Alibaba).

In a year that’s been terrible for crypto, with most coins going down like a led balloon, Tron has managed to keep securing strategic partnerships, to make the project grow, to deliver milestones on time and to be one of the most solid coins in the market.

That last point is very well illustrated by one simple fact: as most other digital assets keep receding, Tron has managed to grow and to become the world’s tenth cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

It’s one of the very few blockchain projects that has consistently been reporting good news as most of the rest just try to avoid disaster in the currently bearish market

There’s even more good news in the works for Tron. While this is not an official announcement yet, DX.Exchange’s CEO has confirmed (if informally) that the exchange platform is working towards adopting Tron’s Tronix (TRX) in their platform.

This is an important development for both parties. From Dx.exchange’s point of view, it’s a good idea to adopt one of the tokens that has created more interest over the last 18 months. For Tron, and Tron aficionados, this is important because it means that they will be able to buy TRX using fiat currency, which is not as straightforward as you could think.

So far, most of TRX’s trading happens on Binance, the huge and influential Chinese crypto exchange, and all that trade is paired against Bitcoin. In other words, if you have a Binance account, you can’t buy TRX using your local fiat currency. You have to get some bitcoins first (or Satoshis) and then trade them for TRX.

So both projects keep growing and gaining relevance in the cryptosphere as the new year keeps moving. Keep an eye on both.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Tron and Ripple keep finding new partners

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The new year is here. As every year, it brings about new hopes and expectations, which doesn’t mean we’re going to forget what happened in crypto during 2018. It was a disaster (or a huge opportunity, depending on your point of view). But even in the midst of such terrible times, some blockchain projects managed to keep growing and gaining value, at least relative to the market. Those were Ripple’s XRP and Tron’s TRX.

There’s a simple reason why those to projects kept growing: they have strong fundamentals. These are tokens that have real-life use cases which are driving them forward unlike so many other digital assets that are just subject to speculative market forces.

And the news is: they’re still moving forward. They’re making strategic moves that will ensure that, in the future, they will give Bitcoin a run for its money (fiat or virtual). Let’s start with XRP.

XRP is Ripple Labs’ native token. Ripple is a private company that works on blockchain solutions that eliminate the usual friction in settling international payments. It has a very solid use case among financial institutions and remittance services the world over, and it recently became the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

It’s managed to grow against the current by securing some vital strategic partnerships (like Banco Santander, the world’s best bank which is using Ripple’s technology already at the production level) and it keeps announcing new partnerships.

Ripple has done it again as the new year starts. Twelve new companies have announced they will adopt Ripple’s software (called xRapid) to settle international payments quickly, safely and cheaply. Among those companies are Bittox, which is one of the most important crypto exchanges in the world; Bitso, a Mexican crypto exchange that’s managed to gain the crypto community’s respect; Coins.ph, a crypto exchange based on the Philippines islands and Bitstamp.

While those new partnerships are not use cases, they still mean that XRP will have increased trade volumes and demand from users that were previously unable to get their hands on some XRP tokens. It’s good for the project, and it’s good for the token’s price because that increased demand will drive the coin’s value up.

Then there’s Tron

Tron bought BitTorrent a few months ago. That alone turned Tron into the world’s largest decentralized network.

And now, BitTorrent announced that it would issue its own cryptocurrency called BitTorrent Token (BTT). This will be a new digital asset that will incentivize BitTorrent users to keep seeding the files they have.

The longer you seed your files, the more tokens you will get as a reward. The tokens will be made effective by Binance (which is one of Tron’s most important strategic partners).

The BTT coin is based on TRC10 technology which means that it’s most easily tradable for Tron’s TRX cryptocurrency. Just imagine this: it means that, if you are a BitTorrent user, you’ll get paid in BTT just for sharing your favorite books, music, movies, or any other content you can think of.

There are about a hundred million BitTorrent users in the world, and they are all going to join the Tron community whether they know it, want it, or not.

Tron and Ripple are showing the way to go, keep an eye on them.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Tron (TRX) and Electroneum (ETN) might be the FOMO coins this year

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Against a 12 month long trade, the cryptocurrency market has been gaining a bit of bullish momentum lately. It’s been going up and down in recent days. If market sentiment (which is, in the end, a meaningless jargon term) is ‘anything’ to go by (which is not) then there’s a very doubtful chance that current pump could stand, and, may turn the overall bearish trend of the last 12 months into a bullish one as the new year has started. Over the last few days, BTC volumes have gone up by more than 20%, and bullish volumes rest at 51.4%, at least for now.

So this points to an increasing demand that could end up driving the whole cryptocurrencies market up soon. If the bulls manage to hold the market and FOMO stands, then there are a few digital assets that will benefit most of all. Two of those coins are Tron and Electroneum. In this article, we explain to you why.

Tron’s Tronix (TRX)

If the bulls take over the market, Justin Sun-led Tron (TRX) is in a good position to win more than most other cryptocurrencies. One of the reasons for that is Justin Sun’s (Tron’s CEO and founder) mastery of marketing and public relations. Mr. Sun is a central element in the Tron environment.

He knows how to keep his own community (and the cryptosphere at large) at the edge of their seats by just the adept use of his Tweeter account. Significant announcements about interesting strategic partnerships, new milestones and other achievements for the Tron project are run-of-the-mill news for Mr. Sun, and the Tron community follows.

All that good marketing hasn’t managed to bring TRX’s price up for 12 months, but it managed to make TRX one of the most reliable and profitable coins during 2017 when the bulls ran the market. So when the bulls come back, chances are that Tron will be a big winner yet again, just as it was in 2017.

And that will happen because Mr. Sun’s propaganda will be backed by the market’s positive sentiment. For good or ill, marketing is a powerful force when it’s backed by driving the demand, and nobody in the cryptosphere knows that better than Tron as led by Justin Sun. When FOMO appears in a bullish market, nobody will know how to surf that wave better than Tron.

Electroneum (ETN)

Electroneum is yet another digital asset that will be benefitted from a bull run. It has very solid fundamentals (usefulness and use cases, even more than Tron’s, for the time being) and the project’s marketing is almost as good as Tron’s. The community happens to be very committed to bringing ETN to the real world. Proof of that is the robust showing of Electroneum (ETN) in the run-up to KYC feature introduction.

That characteristic is powerful on its own. Those marketing efforts by the ETN’s leadership and the community had a role in increasing demand. This gives the ETN team a major role in producing the demanding pressure about the token that can end up pushing up the price. And that could signal for the baby steps of a new bull market not just for ETN but for every digital asset.

Electroneum’s aggressive marketing which includes smartphone apps, games, easy mining, and other features that can appeal to every smartphone user in the world instead of the usual nerds or enthusiasts can make all the difference in the world (the crypto-world, to be more specific). On top of that, it could end up being really useful when it comes to instant and micropayments.

Is technology determinant in crypto? It is. Just look at Bitcoin, which is the oldest technology in crypto, but it’s solid, reliable, and it remains the mother of all blockchains. But what about marketing? Does it matter?  It does as well, and nobody does it better than Tron and Electroneum. Do you want proof? Those two coins have been the biggest winners over the last week. You think that means nothing? You’ll be surprised.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

The Tron based IGG token gets withdrawn from Tronscan DEX

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Intergalactic Gaming Gold (IGG) announced earlier that its Tron-based token has been officially withdrawn from Tronscan’s decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. This move follows the need to migrate the token from TRC-10 technology to TRC-20 (both are based on Tron’s protocols).

The IGG token is currently TRC-10 and it’s been traded on the Bancor protocol based decentralized exchange for more than a month. That exchange tends to be a little volatile, which is something the project wants to avoid.

IGG is in alpha stage for its testnet v1.0, which is quite advanced, and the next step in the way is to turn IGG into a TRC-20 token. Said token will be listed on TRXMarket which is an Order Book style kind of thing. The TRXMarket listing costs nothing but it has the advantage to make the token’s economics a lot more liquid.

So what’s the difference between a TRC-10 and a TRC-20 token, I hear you ask? Well, it’s all about flexibility and functionality. TRC-10 tokens are not that flexible nor functional, while TRC-20 tokens are standard resources in the Tron blockchain for smart contracts and they can be implemented via de Tron Virtual Machine (TVM).

Those features are essential if IGG’s vision for a tokenized standard in the online gaming industry is going to work at all. The token is meant to satisfy several use cases, and in most of them, being able to comply with a smart contract between platform users is crucial.

This is a pivotal time in IGG’s journey, and the project feels this is the moment to affect the migration towards a TRC-20. As mentioned above, that will enable the token to be deployed in smart contracts for users (which in this case are players). The players will be able to establish teams on the Tron blockchain quickly, instead of migrating once the teams are settled. And it will also allow for a freeze feature, among many others.

Besides improved functionality and use cases, the migration gives the IG project the opportunity to do a little marketing by rebranding the token that makes the IGGalaxy move. There’s a list of potential names at the project’s website for community members to cast a vote and suggest what the new token’s name should be.

The new name is already chosen and if your entry wins you’ll get a million tokens. You can join the competition by sending an email to competitions@iggalaxy.com

https://twitter.com/IG_Galaxy/status/1080548626802319367

The developing team is currently working on a script that will enable Glacticians to send their IGG to a wallet that will send them the new TRC-20 tokens back, on a 1:1 basis. The new token will be ready and functional in about 24 hours and thus will the swap process begin.

It’s important for users to know that the SR rewards and Loyalty rewards for IGG will be suspended until further notice. TRX rewards will, however, remain functional. But the suspended rewards will be backdated and honored once the new token is ready.

If you want to get official instructions for swapping tokens, just visit the project’s website, where you’ll find all the information you need. In the meantime, we suggest you be patient and prudent.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

500 million XRP go back to escrow for 55 more months

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As the new year begun, 500 million XRP tokens went back to an escrow account for 55 months. Why did that happen and why does it matter? Well, it’s a bit of a long story but bear with us and will explain it all to you.

Some time ago, Ripple committed to putting 55 billion Ripple’s XRP in an escrow account in order to ensure certainty of XRP supply and stability at any given time. The account is there and it’s releasing a billion XRP into the market every month, and whatever is left after selling tokens to Ripple’s customers goes back into a new escrow account and it’s kept there for 55 months.

https://twitter.com/XrpCenter/status/1080148841280782337

Keeping the XRP’s lion’s share secure in escrow allows people to figure out exactly the maximal market supply the token can have. Ripple still owns most of the world’s XRP supply which makes the company the token’s steward.

It’s shown to be a competent guardian with a track of investing and backing the XRP environment. The escrow lockup ensures that Ripple can’t speculate and change the assets’ price by flooding the market. It would make no sense for Ripple to do that since it would be the most affected party in that kind of scenario, but with the escrow contract, everybody can be sure about it without the need to trust Ripple’s good faith.

The lockup also ensures the community about Ripple’s commitment to build XRP’s liquidity and keep the market healthy and trustworthy. The coin’s price will be determined by demand and utility in the long term, and not by sheer speculative forces, which remain dominant in crypto.

And that matters a lot because unlike those other assets drove purely by sentiment and speculation, real institutional customers are already using XRP because they find it has real value. Moreover, central banks, regulators and governments are coming to realize that this is a cryptocurrency that could play a role in the global economy.

XRP can do something that Bitcoin does well already: to store value. But it takes things a step further by delivering transactions speeds an order of magnitude higher than BTC or ETH. It’s the fastest, most efficient and scalable digital asset in the world, which makes it suitable to process payments of all kinds the world over.

Here’s how the Escrow works: parties involved in a transaction can secure a number of XRP tokens for a fixed amount of time until some particular conditions are met. Until such conditions are cleared, the tokens remain cryptographically secured. That’s known as a smart contract.

Ripple created 55 contracts worth a billion XRP that will expire on every month’s first day for 55 months. As each contract expires, the blockchain firm behind XRP, Ripple will have a billion tokens to use to sell its clients or to offer into the market, but so far they’ve privileged the option of making the asset available to institutional clients.

At the end of each month, some of the currency will be unused and it will go back into escrow (a different one). For instance, if 500 million XRP remain available by the time the next contract is due, those 500 million will go back into escrow as the new contract delivers another billion. And that’s exactly what happened today.

Ripple has sold 300M XRP on average for several months, so December was a good month for XRP, which is now the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Ripple’s vision remains the same – to enable the Internet of Value in which money moves like information moves today – and XRP is at the heart.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Justin Sun recaps the year 2018 for Tron (TRX)

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Justin Sun ended his tweeting year recalling how successful it was for his project, as it managed to keep growing when so many other blockchain projects had to shrink because of the bearish market. In that regard, Tron stood up among all others by keeping their growth rate up and delivering in time every announced milestone in good conditions.

Tron will grow strongly in the future because it laid a strong foundation in 2018.

The last year (2018) was cataclysmic for the cryptosphere. Some crypto coins faced such great adversity from traders and investors that they were just bashed in terms of price. But the year, bad as it was for the market, saw a few critical projects develop their fundamentals swimming against the current. Tron was one of those.

Tron had great results along the year. It kept to its plan, and it delivered on every milestone in time, despite the terrible market environment. Looking back on 2018 Mr. Sun had this to tweet:

Mr. Sun’s tweet points out at the key achievement in Tron’s network for last year. Not in terms of the project’s successful development but also thinking about long-term strategic progress.

In 2018 Tron was able to develop its very own network (called MainNet) to become independent from Ethereum. This was just the beginning. It’s worked amazingly well, and the community is not missing Ethereum at all. In only 183 days as a completely independent project, Tron was able to achieve all the following things:

  • Higher transaction volume than Ethereum.
  • More active accounts than EOS.
  • More than a million registered users in barely half a year.
  • More than 80 decentralized applications after only two months of launching its Virtual Machine (TVM), which is the dApp development environment.
  • A spot in the world’s top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Those feats are all very relevant, and they attest the hard work done by team Tron all year long, but Mr. Sun is not ready to rest on his laurels despite that much success.  He wants a lot more, and he already published the project’s goals for the new year. Here’s what he wants:

  • To get into the top four currencies by market capitalization.
  • To make Tron ecosystem’s larger than Ethereum’s.
  • To complete Project Atlas (to integrate BitTorrent into Tron’s blockchain).
  • To make Tron the largest decentralized environment in the world.

Some of these goals are obviously quite ambitious, but ambition has been Tron’s hallmark since day one. And the way the team has performed for the last twelve months just shows that all those new goals for the new year are within the Tron’s community reach if they keep working as hard (and as smart) as they have for the last year.

Tron is a project with great ambition but also with solid fundamentals, and it’s managed to grow in a highly speculative and adverse environment. Keep an eye out for Tron on the new year, started today. Perhaps you’ll be as surprised as we are.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Stellar (XLM) vs. Tron (TRX): Is a new crypto feud starting?

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Jed McCaleb has built a reputation for himself over the years. He founded Ripple Labs, Mt. Gox, e-Donkey and, more recently, Stellar Lumens. Yesterday, he told Yahoo finance that Tron is “just garbage.” He also said his interviewer that, even with the year’s turbulence, the crypto market is going well.

Over the telephonic interview, Mr. McCaleb was asked what he takes away from crypto independently of the price. He answered that the way in which capital is invested in crypto projects is “wild to watch.” He added that a reduction in market capitalizations and token prices things would smooth out.

“One of the nice things that comes with the market calming down—I still say it’s not a bear market—it means there’s less of that. Ninety percent of these projects are B.S. I’m looking forward to that changing. Things like Tron, it’s just garbage. But people dump tons of money into it, these things that just do not technically work.”

It’s anybody’s guess why Mr. McCaleb chose to pick at Tron which is actually an interesting project. Tron has already outperformed Ethereum as a platform for actual smart contracts development and usage, which almost nobody could have predicted a year ago.

That is no mean feat as Ethereum was the blockchain that created the smart contract technology and even Tron came to life as a project running over the Ethereum network. Stellar Lumens itself still has no smart contract development platform that can compete with Ethereum, let alone Tron. Mr. Macaleb did not explain himself about calling Tron “just garbage.” This will probably leave many neutral observers in the cryptosphere scratching their heads.

Stellar’s marketing is poor

Mr. McCaleb had to answer an uncomfortable question. Do people generally know what Stellar Lumens is? He answered he didn’t think so.

“I don’t think they do. We’ve done a pretty poor job of marketing it and telling the world what Stellar is about. I think they have a vague notion that it’s for payments, but I don’t think they know the details and the real power of it. We’re hoping to change that in 2019, but it’s a process.”

It’s quite clear that most people in the world, even technical people with university degrees have little or no idea of what blockchain technology is. They have no idea about how Bitcoin works, not to mention Stellar which is nowhere near as famous.

Majorities have no interest so far in blockchain banking offerings. Most people in the world still prefer to use their credit or debit cards to settle payments using the USD as the mediating fiat currency. So Stellar’s market is still in diapers, maybe even in fetal stages.

Mr. McCaleb is not alone in going against Tron. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator and leader, has also had harsh words for Justin Sun and the Tron network in the past, especially as Tron became an independent blockchain (which previously ran on Ethereum) last May.

Stellar remains on the top ten list of cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. But Tron has recently entered that very same list, in a year that has seen most digital assets lose a lot of value. And Ripple which is very alike to Stellar Lumens in design and functionality (let’s not forget that Stellar came to life as a Ripple fork, which Mr. McCaleb also founded) is already the world’s second largest.

Ripple and Stellar Lumens are considered to be direct competitors because both projects pursue the same markets. Both have scored successes. Ripple has outperformed Stellar in terms of strategic partnerships and integration with banking systems all over the world. But Stellar has secured IBM’s backup, which could end up being critical, as it was for Microsoft 40 years ago.

If we go by transactions, Tron processed 2,845,490 on December 30th. By comparison Stellar did 1,024 over the same time period, and Ripple 396,354.

On hearing Mr. McCaleb’s comment, Justin Sun, Tron’s CEO and founder had this to tweet:

Mr. Sun refers in his tweet to e-Donkey which was a decentralized P2P network that became fashionable at the turn of the century (much like Napster) but ultimately failed. That very network and protocol were founded by Mr. McCaleb. Many P2P networks were online at the time, following e-Donkey’s protocols more or less (e-Mule, for instance), and they have all disappeared now.

They were all substituted by another P2P network called BitTorrent a few years later which is still active today and remains the world’s largest decentralized P2P network in the world. So why is Mr. Sun kind of bragging after Mr. McCaleb’s comment?

Because Tron bought the BitTorrent network a few months ago and it plans to merge it into the Tron blockchain. That merging is called “Project Atlas,” and it’s been on the works for several months already. When it’s completed, every single BitTorrent user in the world will become a Tron community member, whether he knows it or not. And that’s more than 100 million monthly users.

While there is little doubt that Mr. McCaleb created the P2P decentralized networks or Ripple, the fact now is that the P2P world belongs now to Justin Sun and Tron.

It’s clear that Stellar Lumens is a solid project with lots of value as attested by the many strategic partnerships it’s managed to secure. But it still lags behind Ripple, which is just too similar, and poking a stick at Tron is probably not the wisest action Mr. McCaleb has ever taken.

Time will tell if this feud remains as an exchange of a couple of tweets or if it becomes more serious.

We have the utmost respect for Mr. McCaleb, but we can’t understand at all why he had to be so vocal about a project like Tron that is actually working and rendering results.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.