Taking a break from the ongoing NiTROn 2019 conference, TRON foundation took to Medium to update the community on the TRON Accelerator situation.
TRON was heavily criticized for certain issues that were previously discovered by the community regarding TRON Accelerator, project’s native development motivation program. The issues varied from TRON doubling the pool of winners (thus reducing the prizes for lower tiers of winners), having copycat applications/unknown teams winning the prizes, to generally being late on reviewing applications and informing the community on minor details of program (such as who who actually won the darn thing).
The program was completed on January 10th and the winners of the biggest prizes were supposed to be honored on stage of the niTROn 2019 conference, currently being held in San Francisco. Naturally, live on-stage presentation of the winners didn’t happen, as TRON Foundation managed to get their winners list sort-of in order today (January 18th), on the last day of the conference.
While you are here, have a look at our Tron [TRX] price prediction for 2020.
The numbers still seemingly don’t add up. While Tron claims that a total of 113 projects won the prizes in the competition, the official list of winners TRON provided so far contains only 63 projects. Out of those 63, there are plenty of projects that seemingly aren’t even active on the TRON mainnet (registering 0 active users, transactions or TRX value during the previous 24 hours).
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TRON’s developer Discord confirmed that all winners have been e-mailed. The winning projects are now required to resubmit their dapps through the tron.dapp website which they can then use to showcase their work and attract users. This could explain why the entire list of 113 winners hasn’t been populated yet.
TRON suggests that the dapps developed by TRON Accelerator participants covered various areas, from games, transactions, wallets, social, artificial intelligence and other. Almost all dapps on the list fall under the tags of blockchain “games” and “gambling”, with “other” tag being the third most represented one.
Why are there so many gambling dApps on Tron?
Tron is failing to attract any meaningful traction among serious developers that would code other types of dApps than gambling programs. Gambling is essentially just a random number generator and as such one of the easiest things to code which makes Tron a playground for junior, low level programmers who are seeking to exploit gambling addicts (a big cohort in crypto world) for a quick buck. This actually fits nicely in the whole ethos of Tron blockchain that is essentially a marketing gimmick run by Justin Sun.
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The best placed project in the competition is currently a gambling dapp called FomoSports x TRON, which will apparently be taking home $50,000. Justin Sun suggested that the winner of $200,000 – which is the sum that will go to the no.1 project of the TRON Accelerator program – will be launched on the tron.dapp website “soon”.
TRON Foundation added that the conclusion of this contest isn’t “the end, but the beginning of a new chapter” for them. The project plans to use the tron.app website to promote TRON Accelerator winners as well as any future dapps developed on the TRON platform. Justin Sun apparently plans to have over 2 thousand dapps on his platform by the end of 2019; hopefully he doesn’t forget to tell us who actually won the TRON Accelerator competition before focusing on those other plans.
Tron Accelerator shrouded in contraversy
Several months ago, TRON announced a $1 million dollar contest for TRX dApp developers. Aiming to “empower developers and foster innovation within the blockchain industry”, the program promised some lucrative payouts to the eventual winners, with the best project looking to pocket a cool sum of $200,000. However, a recent community report exposed the TRON Accelerator as possibly not delivering on the initial promises.
Reddit user u/9hil brought this information to light, explaining that TRON Accelerator was set to pick the winners of this competition on January 10th. However, the community noticed that something fishy is going on once the 10th passed and no one received any notifications whether they won anything or not. The e-mails were sent once the concern started becoming louder, but the community noticed an important “addendum” to the competition: TRON have apparently “adjusted” the prize structure due to a “high volume of competitive projects” and decided to share the award fund among 100+ competitors, instead of originally planned 56.
As a result of that, the lowest reward was set form $5k to $1k. The user revealed several other issues with the competition:
- “They changed the prizes after the contest ended
- They allowed clones to win but not the original clone onto TRX
- They allowed contestants to win who didnt meet the criteria (being on mainnet)
- They allowed projects that arent open source to win
- The Grand Winner is a mysterious project with barely any info available
- They havent posted a public list of the winners
- Some blatant ponzi games have won prizes”
The community backlash came immediately, as people started claiming foul play. Some suggested the project intentionally lied about the award structure to draw developers away from other projects with monetary incentives. Others claim TRON never intended to pay out the full prize. TRON themselves haven’t responded to the accusations; we’ll likely know more on January 18th, when they will allegedly hold a prize awarding ceremony for the winners of TRON Accelerator. The discussion is still ongoing and you can join it here or in the team’s official developer Discord. The news come on the heels of a former Bit-Torrent employee exposing Justin Sun as someone who “doesn’t have a technical bone in his body”.
