A Brief History of TRON
TRON is a decentralized, open-source blockchain platform founded by the Chinese company TRON Foundation, which is registered in Singapore. The main cryptocurrency of the platform is TRONIX (TRX). For the first time, the platform became known in the summer of 2017 from the Chinese entrepreneur Justin Sun.
In 2017-2018, the company held one of the largest and largest ICOs, during which $ 70 million was raised. About 40% of the total issue was sold to investors, and the rest went to TRON's reserve fund (35%), for pre-sale to other investors. The project team consists of very experienced developers from different countries: China, USA, Japan. Initially, TRX represented the token on the ERC 20 standard, but after the ICO in 2018, the cryptocurrency moved to its own blockchain.
Features of the TRON platform
The main idea of the project is to create an entertainment network similar to AppStore or GooglePlay, but in which developers can create their own entertainment applications and directly offer them to users without intermediaries.
Initially, the currency was based on the ERC-20 standard, but in 2018, the project moved to its own blockchain network Odyssey 2.0. TRON started on the basis of Ethereum, followed its development path and inherited the main distinguishing features of Ethereum: the presence of smart contracts and the creation of their own tokens using funds through crowdfunding.
TRX is the main currency, which serves to pay for content on the platform, as well as to pay compensation for the extraction of blocks. But in addition to the native currency TRX, the platform also supports:
- TRC10, which allows application developers to issue their own tokens inside the TRON platform. They have been available since the launch of Tron on the main network, when it moved from Ethereum to its own blockchain. The ease of issuing the TRC10 token makes TRC10 a great way for teams to evaluate interest in their 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 migrate Ethereum-based smart contracts to Tron. In 2019, USDT was earned on the basis of the Tron blockchain. Stablecoin has become a direct competitor to USDT ERC20, because the main advantage of USDT TRC20 is the fee — just a few cents.
- TRON Power (TP), providing voting rights on network development issues (token cannot be sold, but can be bought for TRX).
The distinguishing features of Tron include:
- Virtual Machine (TVM), smart contracts and TRON token standards are compatible with Ethereum, which simplifies the migration of projects to this blockchain.
- Users can make transactions on the TRON network for free, that is, without commission fees due to the presence of special parameters: Bandwidth and Energy.
- Even when bandwidth is exceeded, network fees remain very low compared to the Ethereum network.
- The ability to simplify the creation of tokens (TRC10), without a lot of money and time.
- To create a new TRC-10 token, you need 1024 TRX, and to create a new account, 0.1 TRX.
- Unlike the Ethereum network, when sending tokens to the TRON network, tokens themselves can be used as a commission for paying for the network, rather than the main TRX currency.
- Developers have the opportunity to create decentralized applications not only in the main protocol language (Java), but also in others, including Scala, C++, Python and Go, and with support for the Protobuf structured data serialization protocol.
- The average confirmation time per transaction is 1 min. In order for the transaction to be confirmed, 19 network blocks will be required (a new block is created approximately every 3 seconds).
- Cryptocurrency emission is 100 billion.
Energy and bandwidth
The main competitive advantage of the Ethereum TRON network is that network users can make transactions without commission.
Bandwidth is required to complete TRX transactions. This is the value that will be reduced with each transaction. By default, the account is given 5000 units. bandwidth daily. Throughput units for one transaction is the number of bytes of the transaction times the speed of throughput units. On average, about 250 units of bandwidth are required to complete one transaction on the TRON network.
Energy — this is a special resource that is used to process smart contracts on the TRON network. Smart contracts consume energy in addition to bandwidth, so it’s important to make sure that both indicators are sufficient on the wallet when making transactions.
The wallet's throughput and energy can be increased by freezing funds for 3 days, during which the funds cannot be used. After this time, these values will be increased. If there is not enough bandwidth, TRX will be used directly from the sending account.
Popularity and problems of the project
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 networks, online casinos and other forms of entertainment.
In December 2017, capitalization reached $160 million, and the price increased to 6 cents. The TRX rate reached a peak of $ 0.278030 in January 2018, the project capitalization exceeded $ 2 billion. At the end of February 2018, the TRX token was on the 15th place by capitalization among cryptocurrencies with an indicator of $2 819 972 849 US dollars. At the end of February 2020, over 900 million transactions were conducted in the main token network, which indicates the rapid development of the currency.
Despite the great popularity, there is a lot of criticism of the creators on the network: the high-profile statements of Justin Sun have been repeatedly doubted. Also, the developers were accused of plagiarism and similarities with other blockchain projects.
There is an opinion in the network that the value of TRX can be controlled artificially, since after the ICO it is still not clear who is the main holder of the coins and how much he owns them.
How to get started with cryptocurrency?
To get started, you will need to have a wallet on which funds will be stored. You can choose both the official TRON wallet developed by Getty/IO Inc and a third-party multi-wallet that supports working with this currency. More details about wallets can be found on the official website
Transaction processing speed in the TRON blockchain
Only 1 TRX blockchain confirmation is needed to complete the exchange. On average, it will take up to 3 minutes to confirm your transfer. As the number of active nodes increases, this time may change.
