Justin Sun is the 28-year-old founder of Tron, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency platform that is integrating crypto into BitTorrent.
An estimated 80 percent of the companies that raised funding via initial coin offerings (ICOs) have been called scams by researchers at the Satis Group. But Justin Sun, the 28-year-old CEO of Tron, wants to prove that his company is different.
Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur who became wealthy as the creator of Peiwo, China’s version of Snapchat, has been working on a sometimes hard and ambitious battle to earn trust for the year-old Tron and its TRX cryptocurrency. Tron raised $58 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) in September 2017.
Last summer, Sun acquired BitTorrent, the 15-year-old file-sharing company that is one of the biggest decentralized networks in existence for $140 million. He wanted to take advantage of blockchain, the decentralized ledger that is both secure and transparent, and combine it with the decentralized file-sharing app, offering crypto rewards to those who share their computers for file sharing.
And this week, Sun appeared on stage with former basketball star Kobe Bryant at the NiTron Summit, which drew more than 1,000 attendees. Tron has also created a $100 million fund to convince game developers to make games that use Tron’s protocol and its TRX cryptocurrency. The promise is to create a crypto network that is both fast — at 2,000 transactions per second — and reliable.
I interviewed Sun backstage at the NiTron Summit, where he said he wanted his company to become the major blockchain platform that could one day be the decentralized alternative to the centralized internet networks of Google, Facebook, and Apple. But to make that happen, Sun has to get mainstream people like the 100 million BitTorrent users to trust cryptocurrency, even after a coin market slide that has wiped out billions in value, including taking Tron’s TRX market value down from near $20 billion to $1.6 billion today.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
VentureBeat: Are you happy with how the conference is going?
Justin Sun: Yeah, definitely. We should have more. We get more developers on board. Everybody creates more trust with each other.
VentureBeat: What do you think the attraction is? What is everybody wanting to hear from Tron?
Sun: First, the Tron difference compared to other crypto and blockchain–we want to serve users better. In recent days, most of the decentralized blockchains are just communities, self-governed. There are no services or support at all from the founders. But now, with Tron, we’re trying to support developers. Not only with things like this conference, but also with fundraising and investment, or helping them find traffic. We’re helping them distribute their apps and get users. We’re answering their technical questions and helping them launch smart contracts so they can more easily deploy their apps.
All these solutions help developers get on board. It’s very professional. We want to provide world-class support to our developers. That’s one of our biggest advantages. At the same time, we’re trying to organize developers to work together and help each other as well. Building a strong developer community is also one of our goals.
VentureBeat: A lot of people wanted to hear more details here about how the integration with BitTorrent was going to work. Is that clear enough now? Can people basically go to work now?
Sun: The idea, the first step, is to find a better solution for the BitTorrent protocol itself, to improve the efficiency of the protocol. Right now the BitTorrent protocol–most of the time, people seed for goodwill. They don’t have an incentive to seed. Trackers and swarms become obsolete very quickly after people abandon them. So the first step is to make BTT (BitTorrent’s cryptocurrency) available to the people who contribute to the network.
The second step will be a move to decentralized storage plans, decentralized CDN, decentralized live streaming. But this is the first step. Right now we have 800,000 to 1 million already testing the BTT. We’re supposed to launch to 20 million users in Q1 with the test mode. In Q2 we’ll move to production mode, so other people can enjoy the protocol.
VentureBeat: The currency itself, then, when users get it, what can they then use it for?
Sun: At first we’ll give it away to BitTorrent users.
