Tron blockchain's success may have come as a surprise to some in the crypto community. With the growth of being the #13 coin by market cap at the time of writing, the future of this blockchain looks to stay competitive.

The Tron blockchain mainnet went live June 25, 2018, and has been on a rollercoaster ride with the Founder and CEO Justin Sun. Sun is a tech entrepreneur from China and is linked back to the co-founder of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma.

Blockchain and Social Media

Tron has been in the spotlight for the past couple of years. One headline that would stand out to most in crypto with Tron would be the over-hyped lunch with renowned American investor Warren Buffett that was canceled due to Tron's CEO Justin Sun falling "ill" of kidney stones. Sun paid roughly $4.6 Million USD for the charity lunch with Buffet however, many speculate on the sudden cancellation of the lunch event and wonder if reports of the Chinese government intervened during the time when tensions were really high with the U.S. was a possible reason.

While the story hit Washington Post and reported that Sun wrote a letter on Chinese social media platform Weibo, apologizing for the cancellation and mentioning "concerns from regulatory authorities".

“But my immaturity, hubris, blundering, and neglect of public responsibilities have produced unexpected consequences totally contrary to my original intentions . . . and triggered concerns from regulatory authorities,” -Washington Post

Tron dealt with many controversies including a police raid at their office in Beijing in July of 2019.

Tron was designed with a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus protocol with a 3-second transaction speed making it able to compete with many blockchains.

Full detail on Tron's specifications can be found in the Whitepaper.

Tron Acquires BitTorrent

If you aren't familiar with BitTorrent, it is a peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing software that uses the underlining torrent technology. Tron acquired BitTorrent back in 2018 and in 2019 launched BitTorrent Speed that integrated a wallet for BitTorrent Tokens (BTT) on the Tron network.

Tron Acquiring Steem?

Rumors swirled the crypto community as the Steem platform was next to be acquired after its recent acquisition of BitTorrent.

As the rumors made its way to the Steem platform, many had their take on it.

However, no official acquisition took place. Yet...

Tron did make another acquisition of another platform that did originate on Steem.

Tron Acquires DLive

At the end of 2019, BitTorrent made an announcement of merging the DLive decentralized live video streaming platform with its own BLive platform that runs on the Tron blockchain that it launched in early 2019.

DLive first started on the Steem blockchain at the beginning of 2018 and even launched their mobile app. By September 2018, DLive migrated to the Lino blockchain. The platform grew as they scored a high profile live streamer knows as PewdiePie.

The likes of Jumanji actor Jack Black has a little cameo in a live stream PewdiePie had playing Minecraft.

Although it seems PewdiePie is no longer streaming on DLive, it was quite a milestone for the platform.

With the latest merge of DLive to the Tron blockchain, it's the latest race in 2020 as news of many blockchains are launching social media platforms as a way to create an ecosystem on the blockchain and incentivize the usage of a network. When it comes to video and live streams, it can take a lot of bandwidth, data storage, and resources to build a social media platform. Especially one that is decentralized. If they can find better solutions than the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) then they just may have the chance to compete with the likes of YouTube and many other video streaming platforms.