TRON was founded by Justin Sun in 2017. The TRON Foundation was established in July 2017 in Singapore. The TRON Foundation raised $70 million in 2017 through an initial coin offering shortly before China outlawed the digital tokens. The testnet, Blockchain Explorer, and Web Wallet were all launched by March 2018. TRON Mainnet launched shortly afterward in May 2018, marking the Odyssey 2.0 release as a technical milestone for TRON. In June 2018, TRON switched its protocol from an ERC-20 token on top of Ethereum to an independent peer-to-peer network. On 25 July 2018, the TRON Foundation announced it had finished the acquisition of BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing service. With this, TRON declared its independence with the creation of the Genesis block, along with July 2018 acquisition of BitTorrent. Upon this acquisition, in August 2018, BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen also disclosed that he was leaving the company to found Chia, an alternative to bitcoin created to be a less energy-intensive cryptocurrency. By January 2019, TRON had a total market cap of about $1.6 billion. Despite this market performance, some authors viewed TRON as a typical case of the complex and disordered nature of cryptocurrencies. In February 2019, after being acquired by Tron Foundation, BitTorrent started its own token sale based on the TRON network.
At its core, Tron is a smart contract platform. Specifically, it is built to be Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible, meaning it has a Turing complete virtual machine capability. Executing smart contracts on Tron is similar to Ethereum. On the other hand, whilst Ethereum operates on the gas fee transaction model, Tron operates on the Bandwidth model, which is similar to that of EOS. This is how transactions on Tron can be much cheaper and more seamless than Ethereum. Just as one can issue smart contract tokens such as ERC-20, ERC-1155 and others on Ethereum, it is also possible to issue smart contract tokens on the Tron too. There are currently 2 token standards possible on Tron, namely TRC10 and TRC20.
MiguelFTCurado
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@Touchies, Thanks for your comment and useful information!