The BitTorrent ICO bucks the market trend

ICOs have received a lot of criticism over the past year. Yet when BitTorrent partnered with Tron and Binance, those ICO worries seemed to disappear, as their ICO sold out in a matter of minutes. It seems that a high-level marketing campaign by some of the biggest names in cryptocurrencies is enough to make us all forget about how poorly ICOs have performed.

BitTorrent will make it possible for users to be rewarded for sharing files as well as rewarding users for staking the file to other users (to continue to be a seed). The world of torrenting is quite a different landscape to the one 10 years ago when torrenting sites were all the rage.

Tron and its creator Justin Sun have received their fair share of criticism since launch. This can largely be attributed to two threads. The first criticism is the excessive and overhyped marketing employed by Sun. For one example, Sun claimed that they had partnered with the Chinese Netflix, Baofeng. Those who dug a little deeper into the announcement soon realised that not only is Baofeng a video software provider, but that the partnership was with a subsidiary of Baofeng.

The second criticism lies in the accusation that much of Tron’s code was plagiarised from other projects without acknowledgement to the original projects. Despite these two criticisms and other elements of FUD thrown towards the cryptocurrency, it has performed remarkably well in recent weeks thanks to the BitTorrent ICO.

A former executive of BitTorrent who has recently left the business has also gone on to claim that the Tron network will not be able to handle the BitTorrent tokens. With all of these issues surrounding the Tron network, why hasn’t this stopped the ICO from selling out in a matter of minutes?

One reason is that there is still plenty of dumb money left in the cryptocurrency market. Whilst many might have thought that the bear market would have driven such money from the scene, this clearly doesn’t seem to be the case. Marketing, a gripe that has annoyed me many times before, still seems to be placed above fundamentals, and it isn’t healthy.