TRON Blockchain to Augment BitTorrent Protocol

The TRON Foundation has revealed some details about Project Atlas, an experimental framework that aims to serve as a trailblazer for decentralized content distribution. In a press statement released on September 27, 2018, the foundation, which is building out an infrastructural basis for a distributed and decentralized internet experience, for the first time gave some details about the role of BitTorrent in Project Atlas following its recent acquisition by TRON.

Role of BitTorrent

In July, BTCManager reported that TRON founder and CEO Justin Sun successfully wrapped up the acquisition of BitTorrent, a.k.a Rainberry after a protracted negotiation and buying process that took the best part of a year and resulted in a court case at one point.

TRON has now revealed that in the first phase of Project Atlas, BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer infrastructure will be integrated with the TRON blockchain, giving its 100 million active monthly users immediate access to TRON. This will be achieved through the use of BitTorrent protocol extensions, a custom token and an in-client token economy, which the company says will make BitTorrent’s user experience faster and more responsive.

Speaking about Project Atlas, Justin Sun said:

“Project Atlas is the foundation for a new way of content distribution. To start, the product will feature faster downloads, more seeds, no mining, and backward compatibility. It is adapted to the world we live in today: mobile, connected, and transparent. We aim to eventually empower all content creators and their communities by eliminating the middleman and enabling content creators to distribute directly to users.”



To begin with, BitTorrent peers on Project Atlas will have the ability to spend tokens as incentives for users with faster networks to seed longer, which leads to increased swarm longevity and all-around quicker download speeds for everyone. In other words, BitTorrent seeders will now be able to earn TRX tokens depending on how long they seed for and how fast their upload speeds are.

The statement also mentioned that TRON uses a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) system as against a Proof-of-Work (PoW) system, which means that hashing will be carried out based on resources provided, and not by computing power.

Technical Details of BitTorrent-TRON Integration

According to the statement, the implementation of TRON integration on BitTorrent is being carried out using backward-compatible protocol extensions. Users will experience no disruptions to their services, and all torrent client will continue to function as usual regardless of whether or not a user downloads from or seeds to a newer generation of users or a torrent client outside of BitTorrent and uTorrent.

BitTorrent has also stated that it intends to carry out the implementation across its desktop and mobile platforms and that it will shortly release a detailed explanation of the implementation to the developer community.

A TRON’s Project Atlas is available for a sneak to peek here, and further information about Project Atlas will be revealed on September 28 at 7 P.M. PST in a live stream here.