The hottest cryptocurrency, Tron, rekindles memories of the bitcoin bubble for worldwide traders
- TRX, as the cryptocurrency Tron is called, as a market value of about US$1.6 billion, making it the ninth-largest virtual coin according to CoinMarketcap.com
Memories die hard in the cryptocurrency market, where a digital token known as Tron has almost doubled in value over the past month.
Like many of the start-ups that surged in value before crashing during the digital-asset market bubble, the company features a young entrepreneur, questions about usage of its main product and a lot of hype.
TRX, as the token launched in 2017 is officially named, has a market value of about US$1.6 billion, making it the ninth-largest virtual coin, as measured by data provider CoinMarketcap.com.
At the centre of all the excitement is Justin Sun, a 28-year-old who founded Peiwo, a popular Snapchat-like app for China with millions of users. He then started Tron by using much of Ethereum’s computer code and using parts of other start-ups’ white papers to write his own.
Sun bought the popular software file sharing application BitTorrent for US$120 million last year. Demand for the coin has surged since the company recently announced plans for a new BTT token, which runs on the Tron and BitTorrent networks.
“A lot of people wrote off Tron as all hype/marketing and no substance, but they made a lot of noise with the BitTorrent acquisition, and now I think it’s an open question of whether they will be one of crypto’s most high profile ‘fake it til you make it’ success stories,” Ryan Selkis, chief executive officer at researcher Messari, said in an email. “It’s been wild to watch.”