Tron TRX

Tron's main use today is transferring USDT (Tether) via the TRC-20 standard. Fees on Tron are 10–100x cheaper than on Ethereum (ERC-20) with higher speed. This made TRC-20 USDT the dominant standard for P2P transfers, especially in Asia, Africa, and among traders in OTC markets. Tron is also used for entertainment and gambling applications (historically a key market), and BitTorrent Token (BTT) works within the Tron ecosystem for decentralized file storage.

Justin Sun is a Chinese entrepreneur, protégé of Jack Ma (Alibaba). He founded Tron in 2017 at age 26. Sun is known for aggressive marketing: buying lunch with Warren Buffett for $4.6 million (2019), acquiring BitTorrent, countless partnership announcements. Criticism: whitepaper plagiarism (2018), allegations of market manipulation, US criminal investigation (suspicion of token fraud), arrest warrant in China (unconfirmed). In 2021 he became Grenada's Ambassador to the WTO. Sun is arguably the most controversial founder in crypto history.

TRC-20 is the token standard on the Tron network (analogous to ERC-20 on Ethereum). Both standards allow creating tokens on their blockchain. The main practical difference: TRC-20 fees are lower (usually $0.001–0.01 vs. $0.5–10+ for ERC-20 during congestion), speed is higher (blocks every 3 seconds). USDT-TRC20 and USDT-ERC20 are the same Tether coin, just on different blockchains. Important: you cannot send TRC-20 USDT to an ERC-20 address and vice versa — this is a common mistake leading to loss of funds.

USDD is an algorithmic stablecoin on Tron, launched in May 2022 by Justin Sun. Its mechanism resembled UST (Terra): burning TRX to create USDD. Sun launched it literally in the days when UST collapsed, which many found bewildering. USDD held its peg (unlike UST), partly because the Tron DAO Reserve actively intervened, buying USDD with real reserves. Nevertheless, USDD briefly depegged in June 2022. Trust in algorithmic stablecoins after UST's collapse is low, and USDD has not gained wide adoption.

Tron uses Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS): 27 Super Representatives produce blocks, elected by TRX holder votes. Critics point out: most SRs are affiliated with Justin Sun and the Tron Foundation; the network creator de facto controls its development. This is a typical situation for DPOS blockchains (like EOS, Steem). In decentralization, Tron significantly lags behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, this is a deliberate choice in favor of high performance and low fees.

In 2018, Tron Foundation acquired BitTorrent — one of the oldest and largest decentralized file transfer protocols with over 100 million active users. The logic: BitTorrent already proved the viability of decentralized content distribution at scale. Tron planned to monetize this through the BTT (BitTorrent Token): users pay BTT for faster downloads, seeders earn BTT for sharing. In practice the integration was not as smooth as planned, but BitTorrent remains part of the Tron ecosystem today.