Tron is looking to entice BitTorrent’s 100 million users into joining its ecosystem

Tron founder Justin Sun has revealed his platform’s 2019 plans to integrate BitTorrent’s 100 million users into their decentralised protocol.

Speaking on CNBC, Justin Sun said: “BitTorrent has been around since 2003. This is a very successful P2P network responsible for P2P file sharing. At the same time, it has more than 100 million active [monthly] users around the world.”

The Tron founder went on to say that at the moment, the majority of BitTorrent users are seeding files on goodwill. He blamed this behaviour on the fact that there are no clear economic rewards in place for seeding files today.

His solution is “to provide tokens to incentivize people who are seeding the files.”

To enable this solution, the Tron team announced the creation of a BTT token that will run on top of the current Tron blockchain.

Blasting off from the Binance Launchpad

Yesterday, the BTT token was sold for BNB and TRX tokens on the newly created Binance Launchpad. The BTT token sale raised $7.2 million, with the token sale completely sold out within 15 minutes.

A Tron sidechain

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

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.

From the details released, it looks like this process will look to be directly integrated into the BitTorrent protocol, with payments ‘streamed’ in real time as users are uploading or downloading their chosen files.

When is it all happening?

Sun announced that he hopes for the BitTorrent and Tron test protocol to be launched by the end of Q1 2019. Following this, a live network will be launched by the end of Q2, and finally he hopes that BitTorrent users would have full access to start receiving the BTT airdrops by the end of Q3 this year.

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 to change the way they behave on the platform.

If they can pull this off in 2019, then it may end up being one of the largest deployments of decentralised blockchain technology the industry has ever seen.