Tron’s BitTorrent Network Sees 2 Billion In Downloads

The little brother of uTorrent, BitTorrent, stands as a peer-to-peer file sharing service. Now, however, the service has seen over two billion in downloads from various platforms. Back in 2019, BitTorrent managed to contribute 3% of the total downstream across the internet, with a staggering 28% of all the upstream as well.

Massive Success Attributed To Popularity

The company has attributed its figures to its long-standing popularity as the de-facto desktop torrent clients. Alongside this, credit is given to the new web-based torrent player and downloader built for the streaming age. As it stands now, BitTorrent also has an Android version of it on Google Play Store. It’s said that this app is the most popular torrent downloader within the Google Play store.

During the announcement, Justin Sun, the CEO of TRON and BitTorrent, made a hint that he would release a new product. He explained that BitTorrent, as a whole, is eager to fulfill its mission of improving the protocol. He hinted that they would introduce new use cases, such as live streaming products and decentralized file storage, as well.

Some Success, Some Failure

BitTorrent was acquired by the Tron Foundation back in July of 2018, with a rumored price tag of $140 million. It’s said that the BitTorrent service holds 170 million users. Back in early 2019, the peer-to-peer file sharing service launched its own token, the BitTorrent (BTT), which served to incentivize its users to hold files on the network. This, in turn, helped increase the download speeds across the platform, as more copies of various files would be available to download from.

However, things didn’t seem to work out as well for the token. By March of 2020, the token’s all-time-high had long since gone away, with the trading price 90% lower than that. As it stands now, the current price for a BTT is 0.000459, which is a stark 74% down from its ATH.

Sun and Tron Acting On Their Nature

With Justin Sun being the controversial figure that he is, it’s no surprise that this controversy spread into this project, as it does with most of them. This time around, allegations went around that the BitTorrent File System (BTFS) file sharing service had started copying elements from the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). This all came to a head once BitTorrent, in its infinite wisdom, rebranded the BTFS logo to something that’s eerily similar to the IPFS logo.

Juan Benet, the founder of IPFS, was quick to call this out. He mocked Tron, claiming that they can’t even think of an original logo.

Aaaaaahahaha it’s not enough to fork all our code, rebrand it and lie its theirs; copy paste random chunks of our papers, and defraud their investors with a nonsensical mishmash. Tron also can’t even think of an original logo 🤯🤣 https://t.co/h6EGPNwXzQ

— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) April 16, 2020

Benet went into a heated twitter thread, decrying Tron’s many actions he found reproachful. He cited how Tron forked all of IPFS’s code, rebranding it and then claiming it was their own. Further allegations were that they copied random chunks of the IPFS whitepaper, and even managed to defraud investors with a “nonsensical mishmash.”