Following weeks of speculation, a deal seems to have finally been struck between Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron (TRX) crypto-currency, and peer-to-peer file sharing protocol Bittorrent.
Chinese-based Tron is the 10th largest crypto-currency in the world by market capitalization, according to analytics website coinmarketcap.com, with a cap of $2.87 billion. This entertainment-focused “altcoin” has been making a lot of ground recently with new partnership announcements and by separating from the Ethereum network to launch its own independent blockchain.
The Bittorrent deal was widely reported by numerous crypto industry publications to have closed last week, although financial details have yet to be made public.
The Tron Foundation is now working on what it terms as a ‘decentralized internet’ allowing developers to build blockchain based applications on its platform. It is unclear at the moment how Tron will integrate Bittorrent, which is used by hundreds of millions of people across the world. The protocol is responsible for a sizable share of all internet traffic and earns revenue by running advertising on its file sharing software, µTorrent.
In total, in its 14 years of existence, eBittorrent has raised $35.8 million in three rounds of funding rounds. The funding was intended to build an entertainment business on top of its peer-to-peer platform, but the project never reached full fruition and Bittorrent was forced to lay off staff and recapitalize in 2008. The company closed its live streaming business last year and co-founder Bram Cohen left the firm to start his own unrelated crypto-currency, Chia.
The move could be the first major step for Tron to achieve its ambitions of usurping Ethereum and becoming the global standard decentralized application platform. As crypto companies start acquiring technology firms to integrate with their own networks, it could be a sign that blockchain is really moving to take over the internet, heralding the next step of infotech evolution.
The price of Tron’s crypto coin, TRX, was not affected by the news and continued to slide along with Bitcoin and all crypto-currencies in the current bearish market. At the time of writing TRX had lost 8.4% during the day and had fallen to a two monthly low. Bitcoin, meanwhile, is heading precipitously towards a new yearly low below $6,500, which could send cryptos spiraling even further downwards as the sell-off continues.
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