In the history of the Web, a protocol has never become mature before being adopted by a successful app. More commonly, a new app grew up starting from some existent protocols, pushing the creation of new protocols to satisfy its needs.

An example based on my personal experience

At the end of 2006, Tara Kelly and I founded Passpack, an Online Password Manager for Teams, and one of the first Host-proof Hosting apps in the world.

During those times, there were a lot of discussions about identity and single sign-on protocols.

Most believed that OpenID was the future and very soon the concept of passwords would have become obsolete. I could not agree with that.

It was clear to me that it had no chance because the big actors (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.) were introducing their OpenID, but didn’t allow to sign into their services using other OpenIDs.

During 2007, I was so sure that the winning SSO would have come from the most used apps, that I wrote to Twitter asking them if we could build a “connect with Twitter” feature.

At that time, everyone was looking at Twitter as a silly service, that was down any other day, but I was sure that a news broadcasting system was needed and Twitter would have had a bright future.

Someone from Twitter responded nicely to my proposal, but nothing happened until, much later, they adopted OAuth, a protocol very similar to the one on which I was working. This confirmed to me that having the technology without the users is useless.

In the summer of 2007, Facebook launched Facebook Connect, managing to mass distribute a usable SSO, while a well-designed protocol, OpenID, failed to reach an even decent adoption, despite the strong community support.

OAuth won because it was needed by the apps who pushed for it.

🤔 How does this connect with Tron?

In 2017 I was working at Yahoo. I had just moved from the Growth Team to Flickr. The team was fantastic but my interest in cryptocurrencies was becoming prevalent. So, when we were acquired by Verizon, I had a few ideas I wanted to build on the blockchain, and I decided that it was time to leave and focus on the amazing Ethereum world.

My first project was 0xNIL, an experiment on the perception of value in the new Internet of Money. Later, I theorized an alternative approach to token distributions that I called Initial Free Offerings (IFO), and I consequently run the first round of the IFO of 0xNIL at the beginning of 2018.

Looking at the results, I realized that for the second round, some kind of control on the participants was necessary, so I built an identity system: Tweedentity.

Then I was forced to face reality: Ethereum was not good enough for what I was trying to do.

The first version of Tweedentity was fully decentralized, but it was too expensive and impractical. The second, where I moved most of the logic outside the blockchain and left in the smart contracts just the indispensable, was working but its cost was fluctuating crazily.

While during the development the gas price was stable, between 1 and 3 Gwei, when I finally launched Tweedentity the gas price went up to 60 Gwei because of some crazy ICO going on. In practical terms, this meant that to create an identity you needed to spend almost $10 instead of ¢20, making it an unattractive deal.

Then, I realized that Ethereum was a splendid idea, but it was almost unusable for applications that did not have a strong appeal (like exchanges) and would not justify a high cost.

In July, I was very disappointed and was almost giving up when I met on Facebook Tian Han, then the only engineer at Tron US. He was looking at people to hire. I was leaving for three months in Italy in a week.

“If you guys accept remote workers,” I said, “I could be interested”.

“Yes, we do,” he responded.

A few days later we were having a nice conversation about Tron.

Like many others, I had followed the crazy ascension of Tron after the ICO, in the fall of 2017, and the many discussions about its “controverted white paper,” the “huge value created on nothing,” and so on.

Like many others, I was very suspicious about the entire project because it looked to me like a well-orchestrated marketing operation. But Tian looked like a brilliant guy that could not have joined a bad project, so there was something that (like many others) I was missing.

When I went to talk to him, I wasn’t thinking of joining Tron; I was just curious — as always.

The conversation was frank. Tian told me that Tron had not that much at that moment, but the China team was working hard on the core technology and that the new US team was starting working on documentation and had plans to build tools for developers, something comparable with Web3js, Truffle Framework, Ganache, Infura, etc. The goal was to launch Tron’s smart contract platform and the related dev tools in October.

It sounded very optimistic to me.

But I like challenges, and I accepted the offer.

On September first, in Rome, I started working remotely for Tron.

🤕 The first two weeks were very headachy, but at some moment, magically, my brain emerged over the clouds and I became productive.

At the end of September, Tron was preparing the launch of the platform. TronWeb 2 had just been released, and TronBox 2 (a fork of Truffle) was finally working well. At the beginning of October, I also created Tron Quickstart, a local private network comparable with Ganache, putting inside a Docker image a full node, a solidity node, an event server, and an HTTP-proxy to allow CORS for dApps. In the meantime, Tian, Joseph, and Jialiang had built TronGrid, an infrastructure similar to Infura.

At the beginning of October, Tron launched officially its smart contract platform with the tools I worked on and since then there has been an incredible growth, with thousands of downloads and more than 50 dApps on the platform.

😳 A few days later, Tian left the company, and Cong asked me to become Technical Lead Manager at Tron US

I thought about it for a few days, but I knew, immediately, that I was going to accept. Why? Because I recognized a pattern:

Tron is somehow an app, not just a protocol, and apps drive the future.

The last 50 days confirmed my vision.

If you look at DappRadar, you will see that on Ethereum the most used dApp, IDEX, generates fewer than 10,000 transactions per day while TronBet, on Tron, makes almost 2,000,000 transactions. Look by yourself: