TRON Caught In A Lie: Apologizes Over Claims Of Having 10 Billion Users

By way of a public apology that’s making its rounds on Tron’s official Twitter account, the organization revealed that a claim of Tron holding more than 10 billion users was a typing error. This claim had seen massive amounts of circulation before Tron could put out a public statement addressing it.

(1/7) #TRON noticed that a message was circulating today on Twitter claiming “TRON Users exceeded 10B” in English. TRON prompted an immediate investigation.

We now release the result to both #TRONICS and the public:

— TRON DAO (@trondao) September 20, 2020

A Bit Of A Classic Blunder

On the 19th of September, 2020, Justin Sun’s Twitter account posted a tweet. While this tweet is obviously deleted by now, it holds the founder of Tron claiming that the user base is more than 10 billion, in total, hoping for a 100 billion end goal. The crypto community at large found this both very confusing and highly amusing. One of the key factors for this, is the simple fact that Tron couldn’t have achieved that amount of users even if they signed every person on earth, man, woman, and child, on to their network, seeing as it’s just under 8 billion in total.

Though, from the context of the tweet itself, it was already clear that the “B” from “10B,” as was stated in the tweet, was meant to be an “M.” Just under that statement was a statistic of when the first account was made (25th of June, 2018), when the millionth user was signed (24th of December, 2018), as well as the 10 millionth user signed up (19th of September, 2020).

Improper Cleanup

This original tweet was circulated, and subsequently reposted across a number of social media platforms of Tron worldwide. For reasons quite unclear, the Tron Foundation had failed to pick up, and subsequently correct, the error within its Vietnamese Twitter handle, which still boldly claims that 10 billion users have signed up to Tron. Why Tron had failed to notice that their Vietnamese handle still holds this erroneous claim is best left to be discussed at another time, especially due to it being on other handles as well.

#TRON users vượt quá 10B! Mục tiêu tiếp theo 100B

TK đầu tiên tạo vào 25/6/2018, 182 ngày sau, TK thứ triệu tạo vào 24/12/2018, 625 ngày sau, TK thứ 10 triệu tạo vào 19/9/2020

Tốc độ tăng trưởng AVG đã tăng từ 3 nghìn lên 60 nghìn mỗi ngày, tăng gấp 20 lần pic.twitter.com/RVwSmfbLNA

— TRON DAO Vietnam (@TronDao_VIE) September 20, 2020

Controversy Abound

As one would imagine, the bold claim of having 10 billion users had riled many within the crypto space off, who, sad as it is, opted to edit the image to show that Sun only stated the 10B user count, and not the small accounting statement attached.

This, of course, led to many trying to defend the thing with a vaguely plausible argument that there are people out there with multiple accounts. It’s a stretch, but at least not downright impossible.

Tron inevitably had to delete these tweets, though clearly not all of them, and sent a twitter thread apologizing and explaining itself for the error. In the tweet, the man in charge of writing the B instead of M was attributed to the staff at the Tron Foundation. This means someone had to have been fired for this rather dramatic loss of Face.