TRON — From whitepaper to reality

Introduction

The TRON foundation and it’s leader Justin Sun is one of the most discussed projects in the crypto-space. .Their fearless leader attracts some derision for his attitude and tweeting. However for all his braggadocio the young CEO has created a compelling team and executed the original whitepaper impressively. It is currently trading at approx. 10% of it’s ATH, despite having a team, partnerships, adoption and potential user streams that would be the envy of most other projects in the space.

TRX the official cryptocurrency of TRON, aims to be a decentralized content sharing platform, giving the power to the creators and consumers. They are targeting the digital entertainment industry, valued at around 1 trillion dollars yearly. This end goal would not so much disrupt the content entertainment industry but turn it right on it’s head which lends some credence to the overall roadmap lasting 20 years!

Milestones Hit

What has impressed me most about the project is TRON’s unfailing ability to forecast a milestone date and successfully hit it. In this piece I chart the major development milestones TRON has achieved to date;

1. Test Net Launch — 31st March

TRON began life as an ERC20 token, it was never the plan for it to remain this way. TRON outlined in their whitepaper a plan to develop their own ecosystem for developers to deploy dApps and create tokens.

The first step in toward uncoupling from Ethereum was the development and launch of the test main net. This development was long forecast to be complete before the 31st of March 2018 and on the 31st Justin Sun released the following short video on twitter declaring they had successfully hit this first milestone.

https://t.co/0GHSLqnOhj

2. Mainnet Launch — 31st May

TRON forecast a 2 month window for testing, tweaking and fixing any discovered errors in the test main net. While it has hard to find information or coverage of the scale of any problems discovered during the test phase. The team did forecast the main net launch for the 31st of May and were once again successful in their aim.

The next step in the evolution was the migration of tokens from the Ethereum network to the standalone proprietary network. This process was intended to be a 1–1 swop with the legacy ERC20 TRX tokens to be burned. The team forecast the 26th of June as the TRON Independence Day.

3. Migration of Tokens & Election of Super Representatives — 26th June

The 26th of June was marked by TRON with a coinburn of 1’000’000’000 TRX valued at approx. $50m at time of coin burn. It was also at this stage that we began to see the validity of the platform as a standalone ecosystem. The goal of the TRON network is to become a formidable competitor to Ethereum. Its Odyssey release uses a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm and relies on 27 block validators — dubbed Super Representatives (SRs) — to produce the blocks and verify transactions. The Super Representatives election is ongoing with some impressive players such as uTorrent throwing their hat in the ring.

At time of writing the migration of tokens is over 93% complete. The project was greatly aided by the integrating with major exchanges facilitating the migration of token without requiring any action from users. This is in stark contrast to other token swops such as the proposed UTN — UTNP swop by Universa Protocol which promises to be an onerous task for each and every token holder.

4. TRON Virtual Machine Test Launch — 30th July

July 30th was the long-forecasted release date of the TVM to beta test users. TRON had pledged to provide a sandbox and developer tools to allow early test development of dApps on the TRON platform. TRON held a livestream on the 30th of July with more than 1.2 million people tuning in for the announcement. Justin Sun and Lucien Chen detailed the release of the TVM as well as the TRON block explorer.

There was a compelling overview of the progress of the TRON blockchain since the launch of the Genesis block; TRON mainnet has been running smoothly. As of 10:00 on July 30th, 2018, SGT, the block height reached 1,005,756, the peak number of single day transaction marked 49,518, global nodes reached 362 and the total number of account address was 74,112.

TVM Spec

The TVM itself is described as a lightweight, Turing complete virtual machine devised for the development of TRON’s ecosystem. TVM aims at providing millions of global developers with a custom-built system for blockchain that is efficient, developer-friendly, stable, secure and easy to optimize. So far so good but what promises to be particularly intriguing is the purported compatibility with Ethereum. TVM will be fully compatible with Ethereum, providing faster speed and lower costs; developers can easily develop DAPPs on TRON network using mainstream development tools, including Remix, Truffle, Web3.js and browser wallet plug-ins.

5. TRON Virtual Machine Launch 30th August

There will now be a testing period of 8 weeks in which TRON will be providing a sandbox for would be dApp developers to get to work. The team anticipates relaunching the TVM at the end of August.

The TVM launched on the 30th of August should be more secure and stable. At that time, the team envisages that the compile and instruction set will be further optimized. In addition, the entire TVM ecosystem, including development tools, developer team building, and game engine building, will be more comprehensive. Eventually it will realize higher performance, simpler operation and a more robust ecosystem. The mainnet launch will be TRON’s major advance in a war against Ethereum.