BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer platform purchased by TRON’s Justin Sun earlier last year, is reportedly planning its own cryptocurrency. Based in Singapore, the company is calling its token BTT, and will run on the TRON protocol. BitTorrent allegedly has over 100 million users.

In the press release, Justin Sun commented on the situation:

“In a big leap, we will proudly introduce the Blockchain to at least hundreds of millions of users globally and empower a generation of content developers with necessary the tools to distribute content to others directly via the web.”

Continuing To Reign

This news comes shortly after BitTorrent announced its Project Atlas back in August of last year. Project Atlas is meant to be the new peer-to-peer software implemented into BitTorrent. It enables users on the platform to earn cryptocurrencies while trading files. On the traditional platform, users must store a file on the network to access and download something. However, they have no reason to keep that file online after downloading another.

The BTT token serves as a way to pay a user to forward a file over. Users can also pay for extra bandwidth resulting in a faster download. The chance to get paid serves as more than enough incentive for a user to hold a file on the network. That and these downloads will then occur faster than usual thanks to the bandwidth addition. A TRON spokesperson claims that the company will not take any cuts from these actions.

According to the report, BitTorrent’s BTT token will be TRC-10 based. When reading the white paper, it was revealed that around 990 billion BTT tokens would be created. It will be available to non-U.S. investors on the Binance Launchpad. That and these tokens will come to users via airdrops. The time is yet to be revealed, but Justin Sun will tweet at the moment of. A spokesperson declined to comment on airdrops via TRON. However, we know that this new token will work with the traditional uTorrent Classic client – the one that has the most users. Also, Project Atlas will be backward compatible, ensuring that users who don’t want to spend BTT can still share files on the platform.

A Turning Point

Interestingly, TRON wasn’t the first company looking to buy BitTorrent. Before its acquisition in June of last year, a ton of companies approached the peer-to-peer service with the intent of buying. However, none of these groups followed through except for TRON. That, and Sun tried to get BitTorrent’s founder, Bram Cohen, to stay on board in a full-time position. However, Cohen declined as he was moving onto his own company. Sun did receive some stake in Cohen’s new venture, though. That, and after BitTorrent’s acquisition, many employees began to leave the company. Former CEO Rogelio Choy had also stepped into a manager’s position.

When BitTorrent announced Project Atlas in September 2017, it was revealed to be a “hybrid content sharing ecosystem” that utilizes cryptocurrency. Justin Sun described the software, reports CoinTelegraph:

“To start, the product will feature faster downloads, more seeds, no mining, and backward compatibility. We aim to eventually empower all content creators and their communities by eliminating the middleman and enabling content creators to distribute directly to users.”

Atlas will serve as the basis for the BTT token and is paving the way for the token file-sharing incentives. It is still unclear if these tokens will convert into fiat currencies or simply stay as a BitTorrent use case system. However, there aren’t many projects looking to incentivize file sharing and hosting. Plus, those that are will not have the backing of the TRON blockchain to help them out.