Binance Launchpad, the “token launch platform” of crypto exchange Binance, has completed its sale of BitTorrent (BTT) tokens. The offering included two tokens – Binance Coin (BNB) and TRON (TRX) – with all sales concluded within a snappy 18 minutes.
“It is official: In the BNB session, all 23.76 billion BTT were sold to token sale participants within 13 minutes and 25 seconds. Meanwhile, in the TRON session, all 35.64 billion BTT were sold within 14 minutes and 41 seconds,” tweeted TRON CEO Justin Sun.
Despite the sale’s apparent popularity, Binance CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said it had taken longer than expected. “Both sessions concluded,” tweeted Zhao. “Took about 18 minutes, due to a system issue, would have taken 18 seconds otherwise. Demand was astronomical.”
The peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing network BitTorrent made headlines about a decade ago as a platform that enabled the illegal distribution of movies, music and pornography. While its technology is perfectly legal, many of its uses were not and it is clearly trying to find a new role since it became a TRON-affiliated blockchain project in July, 2018.
The new BTT token is aimed at offering its users “network incentives” for file sharing, that include access to faster and more powerful file sharing technology, but many in the sector say the reality is, since the rise of mainstream streaming and subscription gaming, p2p is redundant technology.
In the run-up to the sale, Binance claimed BitTorrent now has 100 million monthly active users across 138 countries, but many analysts, including Tomas Schultz, co-founder and CEO of the crypto-currency wallet management application Cha-Ching, are not buying the hype.
“Unpopular Opinion: BitTorrent isn’t huge. Pirating games/videos have become increasingly useless with free to play models/streaming. It’s old tech being disguised as a sexy advancement for crypto,” Schultz tweeted, adding in another tweet that BitTorrent was confusing, had poor UX and was not in trend with the market.
TRON, originally from China, is known for having one of the crypto-currency industry’s most active marketing machines and the TRX founder is never far from publicity, or indeed controversy. While Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin joined other industry insiders in 2018 to accuse TRON of having plagiarized parts of its technology, Tron’s market price has climbed by more 130% since December.
This rise has been certainly helped by the fact that approximately 10 billion of the new BTT tokens were given away to anyone holding TRON’s TRX token.
Forbes wrote at the start of this week that Tron was now seeing daily trade volumes of $400 million and this was “up from $200 million just a few days ago.”
“Amazing” tweeted Tron’s Justin Sun after the token sales concluded. Amazing indeed.