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About 80% of companies that raised funds via initial coin offers (ICOs) were referred to as scams by researchers in the Satis group. But Justin Sun, the 28-year-old CEO of Tron, wants to prove that his business is different.
Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur who has become rich as the creator of Peiwo, the Chinese version of Snapchat, has engaged in a sometimes difficult and ambitious battle to win the trust of Tron, a year-old, and his cryptocurrency TRX. Tron raised $ 58 million during an initial offer of coins (ICO) in September 2017.
Last summer, Sun acquired BitTorrent, a 15-year old file-sharing company, which is one of the largest existing decentralized networks for $ 140 million. He wanted to take advantage of the blockchain, the decentralized registry both secure and transparent, and combine it with the decentralized file-sharing application, offering cryptographic rewards to those who share their computers for file sharing.
And this week, Sun appeared on stage with basketball star Kobe Bryant at the NiTron Summit, which drew more than 1,000 participants. Tron also created a $ 100 million fund to convince game developers to create games using Tron's protocol and cryptocurrency TRX. The promise is to create an encrypted network that is fast – 2,000 transactions per second – and reliable.
I interviewed Sun behind the scenes at the NiTron summit, where he said he wanted his company to become the main blockchain platform, which could one day be a decentralized alternative to Google's centralized Internet networks, Facebook and Apple. But to achieve this, Sun has to convince the usual people, like the 100 million BitTorrent users, to trust cryptocurrency even after a plummet in the coin market that has destroyed billions of dollars, including by lowering Tron's TRX market value from nearly $ 20 billion to $ 1.6 billion. aujourd & # 39; hui.
Here is a transcript of our interview.
Above: Justin Sun is the founder of Tron. He has also started Peiwo and is on Forbes 30 under 30 list for Asia and China.
Image credit: Dean Takahashi
VentureBeat: How satisfied are you with the way the conference is going?
Justin Sun: Yeah absolutely. We should have more. We have more developers on board. Everyone creates more trust with each other.
VentureBeat: What do you think is the attraction? What does everyone want to hear from Tron?
Sun: First, the difference between Tron and other encryption and blockchain systems is that we want to serve users better. In recent days, most of the decentralized blockchains are only self-managed communities. There is no service or support at all from the founders. But now, with Tron, we try to support the developers. Not only with things like this conference, but also with fundraisers and investments, or helping them find traffic. We help them distribute their apps and get users. We answer their technical questions and help them launch smart contracts so they can deploy their applications more easily.
All of these solutions help developers to engage. It's very professional. We want to provide world-clbad support to our developers. This is one of our main advantages. At the same time, we are trying to organize developers to work together and help each other. Building a strong developer community is also one of our goals.
VentureBeat: Many people wanted more details on how the integration with BitTorrent would work. Is it clear enough now? Can people go to work now?
Sun: The idea, at first, is to find a better solution for the BitTorrent protocol itself, in order to improve its efficiency. At present, the BitTorrent protocol – most of the time, people feed on goodwill. They have no incentive to sow. Followers and swarms quickly become obsolete after people have abandoned them. The first step is to make BTT (BitTorrent cryptocurrency) available to those who contribute to the network.
The second step will be to adopt decentralized storage plans, a decentralized CDN, a decentralized live broadcast. But that's the first step. At present, between 800,000 and 1 million people are already testing the BTT. We are supposed to launch 20 million users in T1 with the test mode. In the second quarter, we will switch to the production mode so that other people can benefit from the protocol.
VentureBeat: The currency itself, so when users get it, what can they use it for?
Sun: At first, we will give it to BitTorrent users. They will all have chips for testing. From there, we will do several things. Overnight, 100 million new users will discover that they are getting cryptography. Most of them have never used crypto. The old crypto market has maybe 10 million people, something like that.
Secondly, they will discover that if they spend chips in bandwidth and transfer, their download speed will be faster. They will find more swarms and seeds. These resources will be available. Sometimes you download a torrent and you discover that a movie is great, its content is great, but no one sows it. You can not download it. But with that, many people will be sowing continuously. It is a mutually beneficial environment. In the future, if you contribute to shared storage or shared CDNs, you can get even more rewards.
It's really a sharing economy. You share your computing resources and you get encryption. Then you can use this crypto to get more resources.
Above: Beauty queens at the NiTron event.
Image Credit: Tron
VentureBeat: There are some obstacles, and I wonder how you are going to eliminate them. People can have this currency, but do they need some kind of wallet or login account to use it? Should they then believe that it will be safe and learn to negotiate or profit from it?
Sun: For most BitTorrent users, we will place their chips in a hybrid solution. Most users do not need to know the blockchain to use the tokens. We have an automatic feed mechanism that will automatically use the token. The moment they need to learn about blockchain and crypto is when they try to claim the chips. If you want to go to an exchange center to redeem them for other types of crypto or trustee money, then you need to know more about cryptocurrency and blockchain. But you are motivated to learn at that time because you want to make money.
I can give a good example of how we are adopting this new technology. When Tencent introduced WeChat and WeChat Pay to the elderly, they used this trick. You know the Chinese tradition of red envelopes, where you give yourself good luck money. I could give my mom $ 15 worth of money through WeChat Pay, and she wants to put that money into her bank account. She learned how to use WeChat. This is how WeChat has been used by many seniors. Tencent currently has one billion active users in China. Most Chinese, even older people, use it, and one of the main reasons is that they were motivated to use it.
It's the same with BitTorrent. Before that, people could look at crypto and ask themselves, "Well, can I use it?" But once they have money in crypto, they want to learn to spend it and store it. We just have to give them the right incentives.
VentureBeat: Buying BitTorrent is probably the safest solution for your confidence. But then you have all this doubt from the other side of things. The main thing you need to do when you create a currency is to make people trust it, and there are all those things that limit that. We've had all this bad publicity around post offices, where 80% of them are scams. You had a problem where people said that the white paper was copied by others. This happens sometimes. These things hurt the credibility of the effort. How do you approach this and continue your momentum to strengthen your credibility?
Sun: Trust is very important in the cryptographic environment.
For Tron and BitTorrent, we focus on the community. That's why we have our Discord group, which has more than 3,000 developers. We answer their questions day and night. We organize our Tron Accelerator competition. Everyone can discuss their different applications. We also build communities on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, as well as on all other major platforms. We have developers and opinion leaders in different environments and channels. This is one of the biggest differences for us. That's why we organized this event to bring the community together.
I believe Tron is a more community-oriented environment. Also, with regard to the types of misunderstandings you mentioned, I can give two examples. The first example, some people said that our technology is similar to Ethereum. We gave the community very good feedback on this. We are distinct from Ethereum. We use a deep host mechanism 200 times faster than Ethereum.
Above: The NiTron Summit attracted about 1,000 people.
Image Credit: Tron
In addition, for the virtual machine, we use the Ethereum tag because we want the Ethereum developers to migrate to the Tron ecosystem. They will have a very convenient environment to migrate their code. At the moment, if an Ethereum developer wants to migrate to another platform, he has to rewrite his code. Other platforms do not use the same environment as Ethereum. Tron is fully compatible with Ethereum. They can use their original code, pbad multiple tests and deploy entirely on Tron ecosystems. We hope that community members will see that we care about our community about the costs of migration.
As a second example, some community members recently had misunderstandings about Tron's accelerator. They think we gave a mysterious winner a big prize, about $ 200,000. We explained the situation to the community. We provided this developer with a full account of Github, and the price was $ 20,000. We provided all our developers with documentation and a complete list of award-winning developers, explaining how much they were rewarded and why. We create transparency and mutual trust in the environment, which is very important for developers.
VentureBeat: How much do you value games for the platform? I know you created the $ 100 million fund. How's it going?
Sun: The first application of the blockchain is for games. Most people do not know it. They even said that the blockchain has no use for games. But if you look at the blockchain of Tron, the games are great. Every day, three to five applications are downloaded to the Tron network. That's why in my speech I talked about 2,000 applications this year. We see mbadive adoption.
Most blockchain games on the Tron network give players rights. You can have your own custom characters. You can sell these custom characters to other players or exchange them. Meanwhile, developers are feeling inspiration because they can control their own games. If you publish your game on iOS or Android, it is controlled by Apple or Google. They take their cut and they control your publication. They can delete your game if they wish. But for Tron at the moment, you can increase your traffic and not have to pay an intermediary to distribute your game.
Some people explained that some of the games on offer involved games of chance, but it's a very small part. It depends on the speed of growth.
Above: Keynote speech by Justin Sun at the NiTron Summit.
Image Credit: Tron
VentureBeat: The kind of games that will attract a mbad market, what do you think? The fun thing I thought about, Sonic the Hedgehog, is running through loops and all that, but he's still picking up coins.
Sun: [laughs] The games that make the most interesting things around the blockchain are games that must be transparent and win the trust of their users. Gambling is currently very popular in blockchains because the game needs this transparency. You must know that if you win, you will get your money.
Another example would be inactive games. Tron Goo is a new one. I've played Idle Clash a lot, but for now, Tron Goo is definitely better, because when you train your soldiers, you can use and fight for real cryptocurrency. You can earn the money you spend in return. In the future, it may be possible for players to exchange items such as weapons and equipment. In something like World of Warcraft, where you have a huge collection of equipment, you can trade all those objects online. It will be fascinating to see.
VentureBeat: Is there anything you would like to receive regarding regulatory measures and anything that would concern you in this area?
Sun: We are ready to fully enact the regulations here. We have just hired our first compliance manager, who was already working for the SEC for almost eight years. We want to make sure that we are fully regulated not only in the United States, but also in China, Korea and Japan. Blockchain is like a new operating system. We believe that the world will have to adopt blockchain and we are very optimistic about how it will be regulated. I think the SEC also sees blockchain as a good opportunity for innovation in the United States. I hope this year the SEC will authorize and regulate coin-based trading. This year will be the year of full regulation.
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