Confirmed: TRON Acquires Major P2P Platform Operator BitTorrent

TRON’s long-rumoured acquisition of BitTorrent Inc., the operator of popular torrent client uTorrent, has been confirmed by TRON founder Justin Sun in a community letter published July 24.

The BitTorrent protocol launched in 2001 and relies on distributed “seeding’” by users who upload shareable content. In his letter, Sun celebrates the software as “the genesis of the decentralization movement,” a legacy protocol for the blockchain revolution, noting

“Bittorrent is […] the first decentralized Internet protocol with large-scale global application, [which] even today [... ] retains its status as the world’s largest decentralized protocol, once transmitting 40% of daily Internet traffic.”

According to Sun, BitTorrent and TRON will be wholly integrated, with the TRON and BitTorrent teams merging into one. Today’s letter emphasizes their shared vision, which was already indicated by the repeated mention of torrents and explicit reference to BitTorrent in the TRON white paper.

As Cointelegraph has reported, rumors of the acquisition have been circulating since late May, with the inclusion of Sun’s lawsuit against the company for allegedly violating an exclusivity clause in early negotiations. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, and unconfirmed details surrounding the finalization of the deal surfaced in June.

As of press time, TRON (TRX) is ranked the eleventh largest cryptocurrency globally, trading around $0.04 with a total market capitalization of over $2.3 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.