Tron Developers Plan to Financially Reward BitTorrent Seeders
In June 2018, it was announced that the TRON Foundation, founded by well-known blockchain entrepreneur and creator of the Tron cryptocurrency Justin Sun, had acquired BitTorrent, Inc., the company behind the popular μTorrent and BitTorrent clients. The deal was officially confirmed only recently, at the end of July 2018. According to unofficial sources, the acquisition cost was $120 million (initial reports mentioned $140 million, but this was denied by former BitTorrent head Ashwin Navin).
Now, Justin Sun and the TRON development team have officially discussed their future plans for BitTorrent and its products. It was previously reported that the company would not change its business model, would not engage in mining, and that the torrent clients would remain free and continue to be developed.
On the official TRON blog, a “secret project” called Atlas was announced, aiming to unite TRON and BitTorrent for the benefit of both platforms. Sun wrote:
“We are currently considering using the TRON protocol to improve the BitTorrent protocol, making it faster and extending the lifespan of BitTorrent swarms. I hope that integrating TRON and BitTorrent will allow both sides to work together and become even better. By integrating TRON and BitTorrent, we want to enhance the current spirit of altruism. Right now, peers who have finished downloading have no incentive to continue seeding content. We intend to increase rewards for peers who seed torrents, injecting more resources into the torrent ecosystem. The TRON network will be the protocol underlying our secret project. Hundreds of millions of BT users worldwide will become part of the TRON ecosystem. BT will become the largest application on the TRON network, allowing TRON to surpass Ethereum in daily transactions and become the most influential blockchain in the world.”
In his open letter, Sun also emphasized that there are no plans to integrate anything related to mining into BitTorrent products, and that these innovations will not negatively affect users.
Details about the “secret project” have not yet been revealed. It remains unclear how seeders will be tracked, how statistics will be collected, and who will be eligible for additional financial rewards for seeding content. It is possible that not all users will be able to earn rewards for seeding torrents, but only those who pay extra for this option.
Since Sun notes that the integration of BitTorrent and TRON will open up new global opportunities for payment and content distribution, it is clear that the focus is on legal content and the likely monetization of the planned system.
“Through a decentralized network, content creators will be able to reach hundreds of millions of users worldwide, without any intermediaries,” promises Sun.