- TRON responds to former BitTorrent executive
Cryptocurrency project TRON has seen a fair share of criticism during the last couple of days, mostly due to two major controversies emerging related to the cryptocurrency.
The first controversy was related to a former BitTorrent executive Simon Morris, a man who spent nearly a decade at the company as its Chief Strategy Officer, who proclaimed that TRON blockchain is in no way capable of handling the transaction volumes needed to tokenize BitTorrent. If you recall, BitTorrent was previously acquired by Justin Sun, creator of TRON, and recently went public with their plans to create a TRON-native token asset called BTT.
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“It was very clear when I was [at BitTorrent] that there was no way the transaction capacity of Tron would [work]. The transactional capacity we [were] looking at needed hundreds of transactions a second just to get started. It’s simply not there. You hear all the bullshit out there, oh, this does 10,000 transactions a second. It’s all crap. We were going to melt Tron. Literally destroy it,” commented Morris in a recent Breaker interview.
He further went on to paint Justin Sun as “young”, “scrappy”, and as someone unwilling to listen to advice. He also describes him as someone who is very good at marketing and as someone who “doesn’t have a technical bone in his body“. Morris left BitTorrent in July, as the acquisition became public, after concluding that “the path to building any sort of relationship of trust with the people in charge [at Tron] looked completely impossible.”
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TRON has since issued a response to this article with what one Reddit user called “a tremendous non-answer”. Acknowledging that Mr. Morris “got one thing right” in his interview – TRON’s “tremendous potential” – they dismiss his claims that their blockchain won’t be able to handle BitTorrent.
The reply was made via a Reddit post by Justin Sun himself who suggested that the project will take a “hybrid” approach to the matter, creating a high-performance private (and likely centralized) side-chain that will handle most of the load and later on store transactions on the public TRON blockchain. Interestingly enough, Morris hinted that TRON might roll out a solution similar to this one in his original interview:
“I suspect that what they’re really going to do is they’ll do it on some central server, they’ll wave their hands and say, ‘Oh, it’s a Lightning Network for Tron,’ or something, and pretend it’s Tron-based, but it’s not really Tron-based.”
- TRON responds to TRON Accelerator program controversy
The second controversy came after several “fishy” details about TRON Accelerator developer support contest were exposed online. The contest ended a couple of days ago and several glaring issues swam up onto the surface. From prizes being changed after the contest ended, over clones of TRX applications winning while the original applications won nothing, to almost no information existing online about the Grand Winner of the no.1 prize of $200,000, there were some questions to be answered by the project.
TRON took this task in its well-known dismissive tone, calling the abovementioned details FUD even before they addressed the actual accusations. Citing their desire to provide transparency, they answered to several popular questions made by the community regarding the TRON Accelerator program. But not before adding a disclaimer that this is their first time “organizing a competition with such high traction,” implying that they should be given some leeway in this entire situation. After some additional information about expanding the developer relations team, key issues were finally addressed:
They changed the prizes after the contest ended
TRON explains that this was done due to a high number of quality projects applying for the contest. Ultimately the pool of winners was readjusted from 56 to 108.
They allowed clones to win but not the original clone onto TRX
After listening to the community input, the project in question – TRON Anthills – was removed from the contest and had its $1000 reward withdrawn.
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They allowed contestants to win who didn’t meet the criteria (being on mainnet); They allowed projects that aren’t open source to win; The Grand Winner is a mysterious project with barely any info available
TRON explains that being open source wasn’t required to participate in the contest. They then explained how the “Grand Winner” project, STO token team, made a mistake; apparently they posted how they’ve won the grand prize of $200,000, when in reality they’ve won only $20,000. While STO remains a stealthy project, TRON reassured the community that they have the utmost belief in the project’s ability. Finally they admit that they gave projects more leniency when it comes to being on the mainnet after realizing that it was “okay” for some projects.
There was a “screening” before the dApps were being even given to the judges (by who? based on what?) One of the judges himself didn’t have the final results yet emails were sent out claiming that all prizes were announced
TRON suggests that a pre-screening did take place by several employees of the team as there were too many projects to analyze in a very short time. The projects were then forwarded to competition judges who had merely 17 hours to judge on the contest winners. The team does admit they did a poor job on designing the timelines of the contest.
They haven’t posted a public list of the winners
After describing their voting process on the contest winners, TRON team revealed that several projects are still being background checked. This process is expected to be completed by the eve of January 14th; this is when the project will send out confirmation e-mails to every winner and announce the full list on their social media.
Some blatant ponzi games have won prizes
TRON shortly answered here:
“We do not discriminate the category of dApp games, only focus on judging criteria:)”
Redditor IEX-NoAverageJoe summed up the overall feeling of the community:
“Personally i do not think it was wise to adjust the stipulations of the contest. That creates trust issues with potential devs. I also disagree with allowing and then rewarding Ponzi schemes through the contest. I see the overruled the prize for TronAnthills which is good. But they should not have made it that far to begin with. Hopefully we see them refine the contest and that we do not see its stipulations changed this late into it next time.”
Others weren’t this lenient on the project, comparing it to a house of cards and revealing details about TRON’s codebase being littered with errors. The project did explain a lot but important details remained unanswered, mostly the one concerning TRON basically lying to its developers about the prize money. What’s clear is that Justin Sun and the team didn’t do themselves many favors with these recent failures. It remains to be seen how the project recovers in the future.
