A Brief History of TRON
TRON is a decentralized open-source blockchain platform, founded by the Chinese company TRON Foundation, registered in Singapore. The platform’s main cryptocurrency is TRONIX (TRX). For the first time, the platform was announced in the summer of 2017 by Chinese businessman Justin Sun.
In 2017-2018, the company held one of the largest ICOs, during which $70 million were raised. About 40% of the total issue was sold to investors and the remainder was allocated to the TRON reserve fund (35%) for pre-sale to other investors. The project team is made up of very experienced developers from different countries: China, the USA, Japan. Initially, TRX represented the token in the ERC 20 standard, but after the ICO in 2018, the cryptocurrency changed to its blockchain.
TRON Platform Features
The main idea of the tron token development is to create an entertainment network similar to AppStore or GooglePlay, but in which developers can create their entertainment applications and offer them directly to users without intermediaries.
Initially, the currency was based on the ERC-20 standard, but in 2018 the project moved to its own Odyssey 2.0 blockchain network. TRON started based on Ethereum, followed its development path, and inherited the main distinguishing features of Ethereum: the presence of smart contracts and the creation of its tokens with the help of funds through crowdfunding.
TRX is the main currency, which is used to pay for platform content as well as to offset mining blocks. But in addition to the TRX native currency, the platform also supports:
- TRC10, which allows application developers to issue their tokens on the TRON platform. They’ve been available since Tron’s release on the main network when it moved from Ethereum to its blockchain. The simplicity of issuing the TRC10 token makes the TRC10 a great way for teams to gauge interest in your project without spending a lot of money on development.
- TRC20 extends the functionality of Tron-based tokens as TRC20 tokens are used in smart contracts. The TRC20 Token Standard is fully compatible with the Ethereum ERC20 Token Standard. This means developers can easily transfer Ethereum-based smart contracts to Tron if they so choose. In 2019, USDT was powered by the blockchain Tron. Stablecoin has become a direct competitor to USDT ERC20. After all, the main advantage of the USDT TRC20 is the commission — just a few cents.
- TRON Power (TP), which provides the right to vote on network development issues (the token cannot be sold, but can be purchased by TRX).
Tron’s distinctive features include:
- Virtual Machine (TVM), smart contracts, and TRON token patterns are supported by Ethereum, which simplifies project migration to this blockchain.
- Users can make transactions on the TRON network for free, i.e. without commission fees due to the presence of special parameters: Bandwidth (bandwidth) and Energy (energy).
- Even if bandwidth is exceeded, network rates remain very low compared to Ethereum networks.
- The ability to simplify token creation (TRC10) without a lot of money and time.
- 1024 TRX is required to create a new TRC-10 token and 0.1 TRX is required to create a new account.
- Unlike the Ethereum network, when sending tokens to the TRON network, the tokens themselves can be used as a commission by paying the network instead of the main TRX currency.
- Developers have the opportunity to build decentralized applications, not only in the core protocol language (Java), but also in others including Scala, C++, Python and Go, and with support for the structured data serialization protocol Protobuf.
- The average confirmation time per transaction is 1 min. For the transaction to be committed, 19 network blocks are needed (a new block is created approximately every 3 seconds).
- The issuance of the cryptocurrency is 100 billion.
Power and bandwidth
The main development of TRON token is that network users can make transactions without commission fees.
The bandwidth required to complete TRX transactions (bandwidth). This is the amount that will be reduced for each transaction. By default, the account receives 5000 units. bandwidth daily. Transfer rate units for a transaction are the number of bytes in the transaction times the speed of the transfer rate units. On average, it takes about 250 units of bandwidth to complete a transaction on the TRON network.
A special resource used to process smart contracts on the TRON network is energy. Smart contracts consume energy in addition to bandwidth, so it’s important to ensure that both metrics are sufficient in the wallet when making transactions.
Wallet yield and energy can be increased by freezing the funds for 3 days, during which the funds cannot be used. After this period, these values will be increased. If there is not enough bandwidth, TRX will be used directly from the shipping account.
Popularity and project issues
For the first time with the advent of TRX in September 2017, its cost was 1 cent, with a capitalization of $70 million. Thanks to a strong team and a clear development plan, the platform quickly gained popularity among people who actively use social media, online casinos, and other forms of entertainment.
In December 2017, the capitalization reached $160 million and the price increased to 6 cents. The TRX rate peaked at $0.278030 in January 2018, the project capitalization exceeded $2 billion. As of the end of February 2018, the TRX token was ranked 15th among cryptocurrencies with a gauge of $2,819,972,849.
By the end of February 2020, more than 900 million transactions had been carried out on the main token network, indicating the currency’s rapid development.
Despite its great popularity, there is much criticism of the network’s creators: Justin Sun’s high-profile statements have been questioned more than once. Furthermore, the developers were accused of plagiarism and similarities to other blockchain projects.
There is an opinion in the network that the value of the TRX can be artificially controlled, as, after the IOC, it is still not clear who is the main holder of the coins and how much he owns.
Transaction processing speed on the TRON blockchain
Only 1 TRX blockchain acknowledgment is required to complete the exchange. On average, the transfer confirmation takes up to 3 minutes. As the number of active nodes increases, this time may change.
