Our old pal TRON hasn’t been performing especially great during the last couple of weeks. Ever since it clocked its July highs of $0.062047 USD/806 satoshi on the 4th, it has been a rather uneventful voyage further on. The price stagnated in a slow bleed for the entire month, and TRON closed it at $0.033798 USD/440 satoshi (nearly a 50% drop in that period). The month of August kept on keeping on, and there seems to be no end to TRON’s bleed in sight.
Currently one TRON is worth $0.018008 USD (11.91% drop in the last 24 hours)/0.00000296 BTC (9.25% drop in the last 24 hours). A solid daily trade volume of 19,608 BTC is achieved mostly by trading on Binance, Okex, Upbit and Bithumb. With a market cap of $1,183,960,045 USD, TRON is currently the 12th most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.
As always, the news cycle was full of updates regarding TRON. BitTorrent just recently announced that they’ve been officially elected to be a Tron Network Super Representative. The announcement was made via Twitter and Tron Foundation/Justin Sun immediately spread the word around via their own Twitter accounts. The news came weeks after the company confirmed its candidacy for this position. Clearly they’ve done enough to convince the TRON community to vote them in as one of their network validators.
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Meanwhile, first projects are starting to pop up on top of Tron Network and one of them recently got called out as a possible scam. Tron Gold, a token with a rather enticing name, was analyzed in this Medium post by a crypto enthusiast calling himself Johnny DG. In short, Mr. DG pointed out several red flags about this project, including associative marketing, lack of communication with the public, lack of gold backing (something that the devs claim their currency has), lack of whitepaper or technology details, lack of team member information, objectives, use case etc. He adds many more details about why he thinks Tron Gold is a scam and you can read his complete analysis here.
One new project sums up most of the tokens that have been created in top of the Tron Network perfectly: we are, of course, talking about Shitcoin Classic. This project is self-aware though, an ironically this makes it more legitimate than most other cryptocurrencies not just on Tron Network, but the entire market. Shitcoin Classic markets itself as a meme currency, similar to Dogecoin, Memetic, Nyancoin, NorrisCoin, CoinyeWest, CraftCoin etc. The idea behind a meme currency is simply to offer the investors an alternative cryptocurrency which they can buy and own and perhaps trade/buy things with. Doge has been the most successful one in the pack, at one point reaching a market cap of $2 billion USD. The developers of Shitcoin Classic explained the idea behind this project:
“Inspiration for ShitCoinClassic came during the initial few months of the Tron blockchain. Initially on the Tron blockchain, tokens were roughly USD$30 to create and there was no regulation. Due to the ease of creation and the low cost barrier, most of the tokens created… were crap. A lot had no use case and would never have a use case. These tokens were referred to as “shitcoins” on all Tron social media channels. ShitCoinClassic was born from the idea that a shitcoin, doesn’t have to be a shitcoin. A shitcoin can have a use and can be valuable.”
The meme currency will look to break into the minds and TRX-20 supporting wallets of many TRON holding memers out there. For this purpose, they released their official Brown paper on August 13th in which they detailed what the project is about and when will the tokens become available for purchase.
Another important update for the average TRON holder should be the recent addition of TRON as a payment option to Bitcoin Superstore. The business model of this company is relatively simple: they offer their customers a chance to purchase products from over 200 thousand retailers like Amazon, Wallmart, Nike etc. You simply find the product you want on their website, submit your order, pay for your product in one of 7 cryptocurrencies they support (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Ethereum, Litecoin, TRON & XRP) and then they purchase the product with USD and send it to you. While there haven’t been any complaints that we know of, this model doesn’t seem very safe, as you are basically trusting a third party to purchase something with your money without any guarantees they’ll do it. An escrow-like service which would hold your funds until your product arrives would probably be something they should look into.
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Tron mainnet launch has gone without many issues and the network is so far holding its own admirably. There weren’t many growing pains with it and the chain recently clocked 308 thousand transactions in a single day. Redditor bamila gives us a clearer insight into these transactions, revealing a concerning pattern:
“I have spent 10 minutes watching their recent transactions and loads of them are 0.0001TRX transactions. A huge bunch of them.
https://pasteboard.co/HyZX9hX.png
I think about 70% of the total transactions are these fake ones. Therefore I should not hype up for something that is clear BS in your eyes.”
One user claimed that this was a bug with TronScan but this is rather unlikely. While most of these transactions are apparently fake, at least its good news that Tron’s blockchain is handling that many of them without any issues.
Finally it’s worth mentioning that Tron Foundation completed the purchase of Blockchain.org domain. Justin Sun plans to turn this into a platform that offers big data analysis, project evaluation, information searching and similar services to users from the field of blockchain. By collecting a big data, his company will become better at analyzing what the community wants, what the blockchain field needs and what the current and future market condition is, believes Mr. Sun.
I agree that most of the coins created on the Tron network are made as jokes and are “scams”. However the reddit user that pointed out that most of the transactions are fake is a false claim because a lot of transactions are made with the created tokens and on the homepage it shows their value in TRX. But when you click on the transaction page it shows you what is being transfered…so they arent fake