Why is the price of Tron going up?
Tron has skyrocketed over 40% in the past 24 hours. What's going on?
Tron (TRX) is now the 14th most valuable cryptocurrency with a market cap of US$4.8 billion, up over 100% in the last 7 days.
List of exchanges and guide to buying TRON in Australia
TRX is currently trading at US$0.075, up from $0.032 around Christmas time, and managed to avoid the big dip that the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum faced towards the end of the month.
What's causing Tron's price to shoot up?
Tron has had a solid month in general, up over 3000%, but the jumps of the last few days have perhaps been the most significant, and are due to some news from founder Justin Sun that Tron has some big partnerships lined up.
Sun tweeted overnight that some of these partners are NASDAQ listed giants.
More partnerships are coming! Even #NASDAQ listed companies and the giant companies with more than 100 million users started to contact us for partnership. We will be huge soon! #TRON #TRX $TRX
— H.E. Justin Sun🌞🇬🇩 (@justinsuntron) January 2, 2018
Like many of the fast growing coins and tokens at the moment, Tron's TRX isn't trying to be a new currency but rather is used as part of its blockchain based system which is trying to be a worldwide free content distribution system.
It wants to do this by allowing users to freely publish, store and own data. In this decentralized autonomous form, the user decides the distribution, subscription and push of contents and enables content creators by releasing, circulating and dealing with digital assets.
As part of this, to grow, it's crucial to its success that it signs strong, meaningful partnerships to build upon. This is why the news of potentially big partnerships with NASDAQ listed companies had such an effect on the price.
Late last month, Tron announced it had signed a new deal with Singapore bike-sharing company oBike, which has 10 million members across Asia, Europe and Australia.
The deal will see oBike launch its own token based on Tron called oCoins for users to pay for rides. Riders can also earn oCoins the more they ride, those coins can then be used not only for more rides but to also buy content on the Tron platform.
Currently, content partners on the Tron platform include live-streaming app Uplive and community audio service Peiwo.
It's also been heavily rumoured that Chinese giant Alibaba could partner with Tron due to the connections between Tron's Justin Sun and Alibaba founder Jack Ma. This could also be one of the companies Sun was talking about when referring to a NASDAQ listed company, as Alibaba listed on it in 2014 with the world's largest ever IPO.
What is Tron trying to do
Tron claims it is the answer to content creators getting gauged by existing big platforms such as YouTube, iTunes and Google Play, where these platforms can take up to 40% of revenue from artists.
Its platform, due to the nature of blockchain, will allow creators to charge consumers for fractions of cents, something that can't presently be done with traditional currency. This will allow creators to charge per article read or song stream, at rates consumers are likely to pay and it all goes in their pocket.
The Tron network itself is completely decentralised, meaning that there is no need for an individual server, and data is encrypted and spread across miners across the world who get rewarded in TRX tokens. This also becomes a new way to spend on the network, as if you don't want to directly pay for content, the TRX you can earn for offering up storage space to the network could earn you enough to transact.
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