TRON blockchain 101

Anyone who has been following the latest happenings in the blockchain world has definitely come across the new buzz: TRON.

If you haven’t heard of TRON, don’t worry. You will learn something new today! (yay) This article will cover everything you need to know to stay in the game.

The focus of this article will cover the following pieces:

1. What is TRON and What do they want to do
2. Future of TRON: Project Atlas
3. The inner working of TRON
4. Future of TRX (the cryptocurrency of the TRON blockchain)

> What is TRON and What do they want to do

The TRON foundation is an open source foundation, established in Singapore in July 2017 by Justin Sun. The mission of TRON foundation is to truly decentralize the web. The decentralized web is also referred to as Web 3.0. We are currently striving really hard to migrate from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0.

When TRON thinks of Web 3.0, they are targetting content sharing at the moment. We know how the internet disrupted content sharing by first-principles. I think now its time to revisit the principles. Let’s see how TRON is “healing” the web and massively about to disrupt the entertainment industry.

The rationale lies in the idea of shifting the profit back to the real creators of the data so that they can profit off of their creation. This can only happen by eliminating the middle companies. There are some articles which focus exclusively on this point. They can be read here.

Technical capabilities of TRON which equip it to reshape the WebSource: https://tron.networkSource: https://tron.networkbody[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;}

Based on community consensus, #TRON will be upgrading to Odyssey 3.1 at 8pm SGT. The TRON Committee function & TVM will go live, marking the start of the Smart Contract Era. TRON will be 200x faster vs. ETH, 100x cheaper vs. EOS. dApp developers & users, this one is for you!

 — @justinsuntron

> Project Atlas

TRON foundation is not about “all talk and no action”. TRON bought BitTorrent recently for $120 million. The idea behind this is to incentivize the users of the BitTorrent protocol to seed the files. This project is called Project Atlas.

To keep the network in a healthy state, seeding of files is necessary but the problem is that it is not incentivized. TRON’s aim is to incentivize seeding which would definitely put the network in better health than ever. This is certainly a very good use case for Web 3.0. Going by the same principles; if you wish to get a file faster then you can pay more to get larger bandwidth. It is similar to how a blockchain transaction works; if you pay a higher fee, your tx will get processed faster. In theory, it is true that tx can go through for free of cost on the Bitcoin network but since there are so many tx to deal with, spending some fee is the only option left or else keep waiting…

> Coming back to working of TRON

Some blockchains are trying to scale the main Ethereum blockchain by sharding or sidechaining. TRON is trying to scale the main chain itself. Of course, the trade-off here is that the consensus algorithm used is Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) which is not the ‘most’ decentralized algorithm.

In such a consensus environment, voting cartels could form in a jiffy rigging the entire rationale behind blockchain in a damned minute!

TRON blockchain works on top of TRON Virtual Machine (TVM). TVM is analogous to Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It is a lightweight machine based on Turing complete. Its goal is to provide millions of global developers with a custom-built blockchain system that is efficient, convenient, stable, secure and scalable.

Furthermore, TVM employs the concept of Bandwidth to prevent overloading the network. Let’s not forget the cryptokitties frenzy on the Ethereum main chain. For this reason, to ensure smooth network operation, the TRON network grants every account a free pool of Bandwidth Points for free transactions every 24 hours. To engage in transactions more frequently requires freezing TRX for additional bandwidth points, or paying the fee in TRX.

Another concept unique to TVM is Freeze Balance. Freezing some amount of TRX tokens will give the node bandwidth, or energy and TRON Power (voting rights) to the node of the frozen tokens. Frozen tokens are “locked” for a period of 3 days. During this period the frozen TRX cannot be traded. After this period you can unfreeze the TRX and trade the tokens.

> Future of TRX

Evaluation of TRX as on 29th January 2019, 03:24 PM is as follows:

TRX spiked up as high as 134% in a matter of just a month. Of course, the idea of TRX sounds very promising.

Check out this video for further insights if you’re a crypto trader.

If you’re a TRON evangelist, you’d be happy to know that TRON is carrying forward Sir Tim Berners Lee’s (Inventor of WWW) legacy by trying the fix the web.

Tron (TRX) - Tim Berners Lee believes in a decentralized web: Can Tron lead the way?

If you wish to explore new waters in your trading field, TRON could be a nice choice. (It’s only my personal thought.)

This was a primer on TRON. In the next part of this article, I will give a hands-on demo on how to deploy a smart contract on TRON blockchain and much more.

Stay tuned. :)

If you think I should add something more to the article, please write in the comments below and I’ll update the article.

If you liked the article or learned something new today please feel free to applaud! It’d mean a lot to me.

TRON blockchain 101 was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.