Justin Sun aquires BitTorrent
Justin Sun, founder and CEO of the Tron Foundation recently purchased the file-sharing pioneer BitTorrent. He first started talking to BitTorrent about an acquisition in January and the deal was held up until BitTorrent started talking to other bidders. After Sun filed a lawsuit BitTorrent agreed not to pursue any other offers. The acquisition took place last week but staff have been advised not to talk to the press about any details. The costs of the deal are also not known, as Tron's marketcap just dipped below $3 billion, the Tron Foundation owns approximately one third of the shares.
BitTorrent has raised millions in the last decade trying to build an entertainment business on top of its Peer to peer platform but those plans failed and the company had to recapitalize in 2008 after being forced to lay off most of its staff. It started slowly growing through ads again, reaching 150 million active users monthly but last year it had to shut down its live streaming business.
The founder of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen has also left the company to work on the upcoming cryptocurrency Chia which is not conected to Tron.
During the acquisition, Justin Sun registered a company called Rainberry Acquisition Inc which coincidentally BitTorrent had renamed its corporate entity to Rainberry Inc at the beginning of last year as well. Last week they both filed a change of status with the California Secretary of State for a merger which strongly suggests that the two companies have merged.
Another interesting move is that there are pending patents of Rainberry, Inc for Peer to peer live streaming and securely sharing information via a public key-value data store which can be found here. It is interesting to note that Justin Sun is the buyer of BitTorrent, not Tron, meaning he might want to keep the businesses separated but maybe use BitTorrent for his decentralized internet that Tron strives to become in the future.
Tron has had a good start for a cryptocurrency that hasn't had much to show for. It has had large investors and buyers, one of them being Alibaba, but has also received a lot of negativity from other people in the CEO's position, such as founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin calling it a scam and saying their whitepaper is copy-pasted.
What are your thoughts on Tron and the CEO's recent acquisition?
There could have been better hands out there to get Bit-Torrent, but at least its a cryptocurrency company that got it... that makes you wonder why would they be interested in Bittorrent? Is there any sort of tech they have that they could implement on their TRX chain or is it to create a completely new side business? or do they just want to have their hands on the torrent market? I would love to be paid in TRX or any other crypto to seed torrents if it where posible :^)
This man is asking the right questions!
My thoughts are that I now feel like watching Tron Legacy after I go download a copy with Bittorrent.
Just kidding, I use Qbittorrent because I'm not a god damn plebbb.
I still use emule
Hmm when it comes to Tron, I try to be careful and wait to see how it all plays out. Tron seems to promise a lot, but everything just sounds a bit too fishy to me... And for some reason, I can't shake the feeling that things are done unprofessionally.
I feel the same way, the lawsuit seems quite aggressive too when BitTorrent was considering to pursue other buyers. Hmm.
With a company as strong as it is Alibaba I would not be surprised by its rapid growth in the market, in addition to the recent acquisition of BitTorrent is positioned much stronger because it will have the support of it.
Justin is making good deals that will elevate Tron.
The Tron Foundation owns approximately one third of the shares of what? Tron or BitTorrent? Tron TRX isn't a share, these are not stocks.
of the cryptocurrency.
Although, BitTorrent has been bought separate from Tron, I still have a feeling the two are still going to work together and this will help Tron to come back to life
Crypto is about to get ran over as a whole. There was so much good news for coins to jump double digit percentages for multiple days and they are all shitting the bed...need the puke lower for ALL of them before anything is higher and we resume the bull. Maybe happening in the next 72 hours..
You got a 22.23% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @acidyo!
Tron is a sleeping giant. Once Alibaba start to use it as an online payment coin it will go through the roof.
Man... I wish I was a 30 under 30 😭