(Beijing time: March 31, 2018) TRON team successfully launched its test network, making the announcement to the world via livestream on Twitter and Periscope. The launch of the testnet means that TRX will soon have its own mainnet, leave the ERC20 network, and provide features for developers and users. According to the official information, TRON’s testnet has achieved all the functions of the basic chain, including the operation of nodes, custom token creation, transactions, voting, and data browsing.

The announcement was made by founder Justin Sun and the technical team led by Lucien Chen, CTO. The technical team livestream focused on the R&D process of the testnet and the expectations for the testnet after its official launch. In addition, the team members also introduced various features of the P2P network, the global community developer rewards program, and the functions of the testnet. The following is a recap of the team’s presentation.

Lucien Chen

Lucien Chen

The CTO at TRON. He used to work at Alibaba(P8), Tencent, and NetEase, focusing on distributed, advertisement, and recommendation systems.

Lucien Chen introduced the contents of live, technical developments and team members.

On December 28th, 2017, we published our first open source code on GitHub. Just three months later, we’ve launched testnet. None of this would be possible without a swiftly growing team and amazing team players with superhuman skills. Our tech team started out with only 10 people. Now there are 100. The team consists of some truly amazing, talented people, most of who used to work at Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. With the rapid development of our company, TRON’s teams have been further refined as well. I’d like to give you an overview of our product team’s organization structure. We have three main teams:

The first focuses on backend blockchain infrastructure. The team is working on a high-throughput, high-availability(HA), and scalable blockchain-based operating system that will be able to support more application scenarios. Our primary goal is to optimize capacities and surpass Ethereum in all aspects, including throughput, availability, and scalability. We’re aiming to provide the best public chain in the blockchain world.

The second team works on blockchain products. They optimize user experience for our blockchain explorer, wallet, forums, and official site. The team also works to bring powerful applications into our public chain, which will meet the demands of different product scenarios. That’s what decentralized apps are all about.

Last but not least is the operations team. They research what and how other blockchain projects are doing, including R&D, applications, operations, and products, which gives us a clear picture of the market landscape. They also keep tabs on the newest technical developments in the blockchain world.

Blockchain projects are open-sourced, so they move really fast. That’s why we need to know what the newest technologies are, and develop what works best with our architecture and innovations.

The operations team is also in charge of organizing things like developer conferences and developer rewards act. The main purpose of blockchain projects is to encourage developers around the world to join in on project development. Code enhancements and iterations, tool development, wallets, blockchain explorers, exchanges, all of it. We will host events like programming competitions, hackathons, and code submissions, providing different incentives along the way, which will help our team work alongside developers around the world. This creates a very positive cycle. Some of the best contributors may even choose to become part of the TRON family and work with us to make a TRON ecosystem a reality.

Lucien Chen not only introduced the developments, but also answered a question that all TRON supporters concerned, TRX token migration.

Lucien Chen said, after testnet, we will launch a more secure and stable mainnet on May 31st. Migration will be around June 20th, and we will tell you more about it around April 15th.

Later, the four directors of talked about the four topics Lucien Chen mentioned before.

TRON technical director, Master of Beihang University, who used to serve in various top enterprises such as Alibaba(data mining expert), Dangdang(development manager), Zenmen group(senior algorithm platform architect), VMware China development center, China Academic of Electronics and Information Technology etc.

Marcus Zhao said, there were four divisions: architecture, consensus mechanisms, storage, and security. He’ll talk about the testnet and our 2018 development plan.

After some intense work in Q1, I’m proud to say that TRON has officially activated testnet, Odyssey v1.0. The testnet product has three main features.

The testnet product has three main features.

This first is our high-performance TRON Protocol.

We adopt a refined variant of DPoS as our consensus mechanism. Its performance is rather remarkable, with TPS exceeding 2,000 in offline tests.

In the testnet, we generate one block every three seconds, and the reward for each block is 32 trx. All the rewarded trx will come from TRON Foundation and there will be no additional issues within four years.”

The second is our token distribution platform(TDP). Thanks to its innovative architecture, TRON enables people to distribute tokens with smart contracts. Compared to Ethereum’s VM-based approach, our system is more secure, efficient, and convenient.

Even people with zero programming experience will be able to distribute their own decentralized tokensby using our API and smart contracts.

It costs 1,024trx to create a token, which will be completely burned. Transactions are free on TRON, whether it’s in trx or any other token. You don’t even need to hold any trx to make transactions if no trx is involved. In this way, the cost of users, developers and enterprises will be decreased and efficiency will be increased. ”

Finally, the testnet launch includes a web-based TRON wallet and blockchain explorer (TronScan.IO) with more user-friendly interfaces.

We have a total of 11 seed nodes in the US, Europe, Singapore, Korea, and China for testing purposes. The codes and tech docs are available for download on GitHub. You will be able to start testing after compilation. There is also a comprehensive code guide on GitHub.

Marcus also said: we will be releasing one new version every quarter, so that we’re constantly improving our products.

Odyssey 2.0 is expected to launch on May 31st. Its primary goal is to provide a reliable, secure, and high-performance settlement network and an on-chain smart contract platform.

Key features include:

1. Performance and security trial run

2. Improve the DPoS mechanism

3. On-chain Resource isolation

Odyssey 3.0 will come in September. It aims to provide reliable, stable, and systematic support for third-party apps. More specifically, we will launch high-performance unpluggable smart contract VM, and keep optimizing our P2P network.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, we will move on to Great Voyage 1.0, which focuses on cross-chain communication and privacy protection.

Olivier Zhang

TRON technical manager, he has a master’s degree in Beijing Institute of Technology and served as technical expert, he has profound knowledge in search technology, distributed computing and big data platforms

Olivier Zhang is mainly responsible for the protocol layer and P2P module of TRON. He said that “TRON uses the D/Kadmelia algorithm that we developed especially for the DPoS consensus system. In any Kadmelia network, each client is considered as a leaf node on a binary tree. Each node is identified by a number or node ID.”

The Kademlia algorithm uses the node ID to locate hash values. When searching for nodes, the algorithm will explore the network using the hash value of local or target nodes. Each step will find nodes that are closer to the key, or target, until the contacted node returns the value or no other closer nodes are found. Like many other DHTs, Kademlia contacts only O(log(n)) nodes during the search out of a total of n nodes in the system. Unlike standard Kademlia algorithms, Kademlia networks under DPoS consensus mechanism have much to improve on given the existence of delegate nodes. In considering convergence and rating, we need to integrate lags and other measures related to these nodes. In this way, we find a set of nodes where the 24path distance is the shortest between themselves and delegate are highest, so that the delegate nodes may distribute generated blocks to the entire network as fast as possible. In turn, the time spent on transaction confirmation is minimized globally, more transactions can be made at any given moment, and the loss rate during jamming is lowered. In other words, we have a more robust and efficient network.

By using this, TRON protocol not only raises the stability but also solves the congestion caused by data increasing.

Hutchin Zhao

Technical operation manager who is working on technical research, documentation, and developer community operations. He graduated from Beihang University, got a master degree at America. He is an early contributor of blockchain.

He said that we will occasionally collect information about who has contributed to TRON Github, code submissions, and feedback. After review, we will distribute awards based on the information we have on hand to encourage developer participation. Just a few days ago, we sent out our first batch of rewards in TRX to eligible contributors. Check our twitter account if you want to learn more. Please make sure you check your Github messages and email to see if you’ve been selected, and get in touch as soon as possible!

We have even more exciting reward programs in the pipelines, like programming competitions, where applicants are asked to develop third-party apps for our public chain, like wallets and explorers. We have big prizes for the winners. The total prize pool will be 1 million dollars and we are open for applications starting April 15th.

According to live stream, TRON is also planning a joint evaluation board that consists of KOLs and our team members. They will regularly select and award top contributors.

Besides that TRON will also launch all kinds of activities, with awards like TRX and even a Tesla! Follow us on Twitter and our website for the latest news on exciting events.

Wendy Yi

TRON product manager, master graduated from Hunan University, who used to be the senior product manager in Baidu.

Wendy introduced three products on testnet: blockchain explorer, TRON wallet, and node map.

Block explorer

The block explorer is the dashboard of TRON’s main chain. It records how blocks are confirmed and how TRX is generated and distributed. You can also see the exchange rates between TRX and other tokens. Stock, turnover, and other metrics of TRX are completely transparent and fully visible.

Blocks information

Here is some information about our blocks.

Blockchain information

Here you see height, hashes of latest transactions, and the number of active delegates.

Recent transactions

Here you see how people make transfers: to and from, amount, token type.

Latest Blocks

In Latest Blocks, you see the height, size, number of transactions in any block, as well as the block generator.

Accounts list

The accounts list starts from those with most TRX, and includes information like ranking, address, name, and account balance, showing up to 6 figures after the decimal point.

Delegate

Apply for delegate

Any account with a positive TRX balance can be voted for delegate. The handful of accounts with the most votes will be selected as delegates, who will be able to generate blocks and get rewards in TRX.

Vote

Any account with positive TRX balance can vote for delegate candidates. This page shows how many votes were made in the last round. Here are the rules. First, the number of TRX you have equals the maximum number of times you can vote. You are also able to distribute your votes amongst multiple candidates. Second, you can change your mind during any voting but only the last vote will be counted. Third, votes are tallies at midnight each day, and those who get the most votes become delegates.

Delegates list

This list shows today’s delegates, who received the most votes yesterday and are eligible to generate blocks and get rewards in TRX. Ranking, address and votes are displayed here.

Token distribution

Any account that has more than 1,024 TRX can create tokens. The issuance fee for each new token is 1,024 TRX. The user will need to enter their account name and password, token name, total token supply, token quantity, TRX quantity, time of issuance, cut-off time, token description, and description URL.

Participation in issuance

If you want to purchase tokens, go to the “List of Tokens” page. There you’ll be able to see all issued tokens, what they’re called, who created them, how much is available, and the period during which you can join. Then you can choose your favorite token, specify your share, type in your password, and you’re good to go.

Web wallet-transfer

To make transfers, you need to type in your private key and specify your send-to address, quantity, and token name. We currently support transactions in TRX and other tokens.

Node map

On the node map, you can see how many TRON nodes there are and real-time operations.

The TRON team is very proud to have made huge improvements in its technical optimization and communications; for all of the investors and supporters of TRON.

The TRON testnet is now live. This is only the beginning. The TRON team will continue their nonstop work to ensure that the mainnet launches on May 31. We look forward to the launch of mainnet in two months and the grand blueprint for TRON’s global decentralized entertainment ecosystem.