Since the announcement of BitTorrent’s BTT token, the cryptocurrency world has been buzzing. The soon-to-be Tron based token has drawn the attention of cryptocurrency and torrenting enthusiasts alike.

The Tokenization of File Sharing

BTT will be used as a store of value and the in-house currency of the decentralized file sharing platform. BitTorrent is a pillar in the world decentralization movement and a great step forward in the fields of blockchain and decentralization.

An Important Industry for Crypto

Satoshi Nakamoto himself named BitTorrent as a great example of a decentralized network that could have a token with monetary value.

The highly influential CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao also commented on the potential importance of BitTorrent’s move to tokenize.

The grandfather of Dapp finally finds its decentralized currency and business model. Should be a very interesting case study. — CZ Binance (@cz_binance) January 5, 2019

Although many Tron fans were hoping that TRX would be the currency used on the BitTorrent platform, the move to tokenize is still exciting many in the space.

While Tron and BitTorrent have the eyes of the cryptocurrency space on them, Upfiring has been busy working on its own decentralized and incentivized file sharing platform. Upfiring had been working on their project for nearly two years by the time Tron has announced its acquisition of BitTorrent. But, with this move, and now the subsequent creation of the Tron token BTT, millions of users instantly were put in a situation where they’d benefit from using cryptocurrency.

Upfiring is Delivering

Upfiring is a P2P file-sharing desktop app that encrypts and distributes files between peers over a decentralized network. Like BitTorrent, Upfiring allows users to earn cryptocurrency in the form of UFR by seeding files. The movement of UFR and files on the network is mediated by smart contracts, allowing for trustless and permissionless transactions.

Upfiring’s founder Tyler Fallon announced late in 2018 that Upfiring would beat BitTorrent and Tron’s efforts to the punch.

“I am 99.9% sure Upfiring will be released before Tron’s Project Atlas. I expect that we will be pretty well known both inside and outside of the cryptocurrency space by the middle to end of 2019.”

They followed that up with a show of transparency by releasing updates source code and the release of Upfiring v1.0.0 in late 2018. This was quickly followed up with the release of the developer app and a subsequent bump in price.

Mass Adoption of Cryptocurrency in the File-Sharing Industry

Both of these projects have industry disrupting potential. By allowing the downloading party to reseed the file to earn additional cryptocurrency projects such as these can even change the way information travels globally. This model also has the potential to speed up downloads by increasing the network of seeders by adding the incentive to seed.