TRON Buys BitTorrent — Now What?
BitTorrent officially confirmed that they are now a part of TRON.
BitTorrent didn’t confirm any specifics, but its been rumoured that TRON paid around $126 million for the company.
Originally launched in 2001, BitTorrent allows users to download files via a client such as uTorrent. BitTorrent uses a communication protocol for peer-to-peer sharing (P2P), which works by downloading small pieces of files for a user from many different sources that host the file.
The BitTorrent client has a said that they have over a 100 million users, but there a few issues with the way the network works.
A key problem is that most users generally stop seeding (download a file and then host it) once they have completed downloading a file. Another problems is that older less popular files aren’t actively downloaded and therefore not seeded, leading to slower speeds when downloading or not working at all.
Tokenising the BitTorrent client with TRX could potentially solve or at least alleviate these issues.
Potential Business Model
TRX could be used as a reward for seeders to host portions of files.
For example: a TRX reward could be given every time a seeders file is downloaded, incentivising more active hosting.
It could also be possible to create a market place where seeders could advertise their hosting.
Whats Next
It still remains unclear what TRONs plans are with BItTorrent, but one thing does seem clear is that there is an opportunity to monetise the BitTorrent network and maybe even solve some of BitTorrents file-sharing problems.