Those keeping an eye on the cryptocurrency markets will know that the ”decentralized internet” protocol TRON’s TRX token has surged notably during the day.

This price increase comes off the heels of the news that TRON will release the latest ”Odyssey” 3.1 update to its mainnet, which brings with it a series of substantial speed improvements.

More specifically, Justin Sun – CEO and founder of Tron Foundation – has announced in a tweet that the latest update will allow for transactions that are supposedly ”200x faster vs. ETH” and ”100x cheaper vs. EOS”.

The TRON project ultimately aims to construct an ecosystem which will supposedly be superior to both the EOS and Ethereum ecosystem – a tall order to say the least, but one which would undoubtedly be helped massively if TRON can indeed offer the reportedly improvements in speed and cost compared to EOS and ETH.

In addition to this, the update will also introduce the ”TRON Virtual Machine”, which will enable developers to more readily trial their smart contracts even before these are transferred to TRON’s mainnet.

Furthermore, Sun recently commented that the TRON Virtual Machine will be entirely compatible with Ethereum’s EVM, and be available at such a minuscule cost that it is ”almost free”.

Several observers have previously hailed the TRON Virtual Machine as an important step towards easing general development and providing developers with the right tools for this.

Sun also noted that ”dApp developers and users, this one is for you!” when referring to the update, likely due to the ease which the TRON Virtual Machine will bring to the development and subsequent deployment of decentralized applications.

Furthermore, this comes as Sun – in a telephone interview with Investopedia – recently predicted that TRON would become one of the top 10 digital currencies within the coming six months. Currently, TRON is the 11th largest digital currency.

The update is slated for release today at ”8 pm SGT”, and Sun noted that the update would mark ”the start of the Smart Contract Era”, as the TRON Committee function and the ”TVM” (TRON Virtual Machine) will come online as part of it.

Moreover, these development come as TRON is continuing work on its upcoming ”Project Atlas”.

Following TRON’s acquisition of the peer-to-peer transfer service BitTorrent earlier this year, TRON has been actively working on a solution to integrate the two products.

”Project Atlas” represents this technological marriage between BitTorrent and the TRON blockchain, and Sun recently commented that it would allow the company to ”leverage TRON’s blockchain expertise to enhance the decentralized BitTorrent protocol, which has over 100 million monthly active users.”

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