BitTorrent announces new product to provide ‘faster downloads’ using its crypto token

Peer-to-peer file sharing website BitTorrent has announced a new product called Speed which will soon “enable faster downloads on the uTorrent classic clients”.

The firm outlined a simple three-step process that the platform’s 100 million active users will soon be able to try. This includes opening the new BitTorrent Speed menu to check BTT balances or activity, watching the new product “automatically bid BTT to other users for faster speeds”, and finally, when a file finishes downloading, users can seed the file to earn more BTT.

BitTorrent also mentioned that “the longer you seed, the more tokens you may be able to earn.”

Run on a Tron sidechain

To create the incentive structure to entice BitTorrent users, the Tron network will create a payment network sidechain to process thousands of microtransactions that will later be settled on the main Tron blockchain.

Tron’s layer-two scaling solution for dApps called the Sun Network is set to go live in 2019. This payment network will allow the BTT token (a so-called TRC-10 token on the Tron blockchain) to be used to either reward file sharing or be spent by users looking for faster downloads on the BitTorrent network. This, of course, will be handled through the uTorrent client via the new BitTorrent Speed feature.

Liquidity in BTT?

BitTorrent is currently listed on 42 exchanges with a total of 93 active markets. The 24-hour volume of BTT is $94 million while the BitTorrent market cap is $61 million.

Since the $140 million acquisition of BitTorrent was announced by the Tron network in summer last year, many in the industry have been looking forward to seeing how these two peer-to-peer networks can integrate with each other for mutual benefit. If Justin Sun and his team can get the economic incentive structure right, many of the 100 million users of the BitTorrent network today could have a real use case (and economic incentive) to change the way they behave on the platform.