TRON
TRON is a Blockchain-based decentralized operating system
based on a cryptocurrency native to the system, known as TRX.
TRON was founded by Justin Sun in 2017. TRON Foundation
raised $70 million in 2017 through an Initial coin offering shortly before
China outlawed the digital tokens.
The white paper of TRON was accused of plagiarism.
Researchers from Digital Asset Research (DAR) have discovered multiple
instances of code copied from other projects in the Tron code base. It is also
accused of violating the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 (LGPL) because
the project does not mention that its client, Java-Tron, was derived from
EthereumJ. These accusations were denied by the TRON Foundation, the
organization behind the design of the system.
In 2018, TRON switched its protocol from an ERC-20 token on
top of Ethereum to an independent peer-to-peer network. After that, marketed to
rival Ethereum. On 25 July 2018, the TRON Foundation announced it had finished
the acquisition of Bittorrent, the biggest peer-to-peer file sharing network. Upon
this acquisition, in August 2018, BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen also disclosed
that he was leaving the company to found Chia, an alternative to bitcoin
created to be a less energy-intensive cryptocurrency.
By January 2019, TRON had a total market cap of about $1.6
billion. Despite this market performance, some authors viewed TRON as a typical
case of the complex and disordered nature of cryptocurrencies. In February
2019, after being acquired by Tron Foundation, BitTorrent started its own token
sale based on the TRON network.
In May, 2019, the cyber-security testing service HackerOne
revealed that just one computer could have brought TRON’s entire blockchain to
a halt. The revelation showed that a barrage of requests sent by a single PC
could be used to squeeze the power of the blockchain's CPU, overload the
memory, and perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The TRON protocol, maintained primarily by the TRON
Foundation, distributes computing resources equally among TRX holders with
internal pricing mechanisms such as bandwidth and energy. TRON provides a
decentralized virtual machine, which can execute a program using an
international network of public nodes. The network has zero transaction fees
and conducts approximately 2,000 transactions per second.
The implementations of TRON require minimal transaction fees
in order to prevent malicious users from performing DDoS attacks for free. In
this respect, EOS.IO and TRON are quite similar, due to the negligible fees,
high transactions per second, and high reliability, and as such are regarded as
a new generation of blockchain systems. Some researchers defined TRON as an
Ethereum clone, with no fundamental differences. The transactions per second
rate on Tron's blockchain was questioned because it was far below its
theoretical claim.