Justin Sun recently announced a $20 million giveaway. The full details of the airdrop haven’t been released yet, but he is definitively giving away a Tesla. This reporter’s been thinking about it: if a million people sign up for a $20 million giveaway, that’s $20 each. That’s actually a decent amount of cryptocurrency for nothing at all.
To celebrate #BTT & #USDT–#TRON success, I am planning a $20m free cash airdrop. Good news-it’s coming, bad news-I may decide to give away more! First, I will randomly pick 1 winner for a #Tesla up until 3/27! To apply, follow me and RT this tweet! Simple! #Blockchain pic.twitter.com/wFyzwtB3ur
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) March 12, 2019
No matter how you feel about Justin Sun or his creation, it’s undeniable that the explosive growth of the Tron ecosystem is a positive sign for the blockchain industry. A recent exchange with Charlie Lee illustrates the power that user-friendly, affordable tokenized platforms actually have. A woman had passingly heard of Charlie Lee’s Litecoin, speaking to the creator himself. But she knew all about Tron, and was eager to tell him about it.
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A Tron lady asked @SatoshiLite: do you know Tron? It’s always TOP-10. Charlie replied: do you know other TOP-10 coins? Not really. Litecoin? Tron lady: Yeah, I’ve heard of it. We kept laughing. She seemed very puzzled and asked: what’s so funny? pic.twitter.com/5gDdhVlfBn
— Xinxi Wang (@TheRealXinxi) March 13, 2019
Can users make use of $20 in TRX or BTT? Well, yes. You can make some investments, have some fun, or all of the above with that amount of TRX. Like most tokenized platforms, the base token is the most liquid. TRX is more widely used and accepted than any of the tokens running on it, however BTT is also accepted at most of the casinos.
TronLink: The MetaMask of Tron
There are multiple wallet options for Tron. For holding Tron, this reporter chose TronWatch. But for daily use, you need a browser-based plugin that allows you to interact with decentralized applications. A popular option for this, that works with TRX.market, Tronscan.org, and most other dapps, is TronLink.
Unfortunately, TronLink is only available for Chrome at this time. This is a drawback from Ethereum’s MetaMask, which is available for Firefox and Chrome.
Getting Tron
If you don’t want to wait for the airdrop from Justin Sun, you have the option of buying Tron now with other cryptos or stablecoins. Binance has a thriving TRX market and was the launchpad of the BitTorrent ICO. To acquire $20 worth of TRX via Dogecoin, this reporter used Changelly. The cost was 9300 Doge.
#1 Invest in a Casino
Another aspect of the casinos is their “token mining” aspect. It’s a cool feature of several TRX casinos: for every bet you place, you earn a small amount of a token. You can then stake that token or burn or it or sell it on a decentralized market.
One of the most valuable tokens in the TRX market is Ante, which is worth over 25 TRX on a normal basis. ANTE derives from TronBet.io, perhaps the most popular casino by volume. The more Ante tokens you control, the greater your share of the dividend. A popular model adopted by both Trontbet and TronDice is to return 70% of profits to the daily dividend pool. The dividends are paid via smart contract.
So, you can also buy Ante and Dice tokens, and stake them on the site, like so:
This is what dividends look like on TronDice. To earn a real amount of TRX, you need 10s of thousands of dice tokens. Dividends are paid out at midnight UTC every day.
The dividends may be small, but for this reporter, at least, something is better than nothing. The dividend varies by day. If we consider that we’re in a bear market for both interest and value in the crypto space, it’s probably a long-term decent investment. At any rate, it’s safer than actually gambling on the site. TronDice, which is pictured in the screenshot above, pays 2.5 dice tokens for every 10 Tron bet. Each token is worth roughly 1 100th of a TRX at this point, meaning you can purchase a 100,000 token stake in the casino for 1000 TRX, or roughly $3.
The dividends may be small, but they’re better than nothing. And the casinos make money. While many people win every day, plenty of people lose. That’s the nature of casinos. The cool thing about TRX casinos is that they don’t take more than each individual bet. The ones discussed in this article, at least – TronDice.org and TronBet.io – require you to sign each transaction. TronLink has a feature that allows you to automatically sign for a set period of time.
So, for an investment of $20, it seems you could make 25 to 50% in a few months time. And if you get that investment stake for free from Justin Sun’s airdrop, you’re making free crypto.
#2 Gamble
For the purpose of this article, the author converted about $20 worth of Dogecoin to TRX, and commenced to play on Tronbet. They have three game offerings now, but they will soon be launching live poker.
The most fun game is definitely Moon, a chart game which allows you to bet on the rising price of a fictional asset. Moons range from 1.00x (which is a loss for everyone who bets) all the way to 9900.
The minimum bet on both casinos is 10 TRX. If you bet 10 at 1.4x and you win, you get 4 extra TRX. You also get a small amount of Ante. The amount of Ante you receive is relational to your level. You get less per bet as your level increases. Eventually, all the Ante will be mined out, and the value will go up, as it is the only way to obtain a stake in the casino.
This reporter has seen it get as high as 300. Here’s a short recording of a game of Moon:
There are a variety of other casinos out there. Another one this reporter tried was TronVegas. They use the same model as most Bitcoin-based casinos, where you make a deposit and then play. This is riskier than on-chain betting, of course, because you can’t know that your funds are safe. TronVegas also took the reporter’s money.
As a side note, TronBet intends to give away 5 Teslas soon.
🚗#ANTE 5X TESLA GIVEAWAY🚗
Date: 18/3 – 31/3
🎊Chance to win for only 10 $trx
✅Any leftover Tesla after event end we will choose random winners from twitter
✅Tag 3 friends + Follow + RT + comment with addy
✅Min Lv. 15 on https://t.co/WqCzbG1Fo9 @justinsuntron @PokerStars pic.twitter.com/7zQ6L5hxjB— TRONbet (@TRONbet) March 13, 2019
Casinos are one of the most popular dapps. For the purpose of this article, the author only really fully investigated two of them. But a full list of Tron casinos is available here.
#3 Play Games
Tron has a number of cool games running live on it. The most popular game is a massively multiplayer role playing game called TronLegend. The second most popular requires less time investment and is called TronGoo.
TronGoo has an in-game economy based on the production Goo. Players can fight, improve their kitties for fighting, and employ workers to earn Goo. Ownership of goo entitles you to TRX rewards. The game does require a bit of a learning curve, but fortunately they grant you a free intern kitty when you sign up.
TronGoo is good for people who aren’t necessarily interested in gambling. The basic premise is that you produce Goo and lock up Goo. In-game items can be purchased for TRX, part of which goes into the “research pot,” which is given back to users proportional to their goo production and holdings.
The coolest thing is that you can raise an army and steal Goo from other players.
This reporter successfully attacked another player and stole millions of goo.
Other Ways You Can Use $20 In Tron
You can, of course, play the token’s market. $20 gets you about 800 TRX at current prices. If you take that an invest in dice tokens, for instance, you can get about 80,000 of them. Then you can sell them at a higher price as the market fluctuates. You can invest in BTT, Ante, and other tokens as well, all by virtue of having a TronLink wallet and access Trx.market.
You can of course just speculate on Tron’s eventual return to market highs. Simply hodling tokens works in Tron as well, but the point of this article is that the nascent system has exploded with dapps. You don’t have to be a Tron bull or fanatic to have a lot of fun there.
After you use Tron for awhile, you’ll understand why it has such a high volume of transactions. Every bet on TronBet is a transaction, as well as TronDice and many other places. The blockchain is handling this volume of transactions and interest seems to be on a quick trajectory. It’s hard not to get excited about Tron after using it for awhile.
One thing that bears mentioning: to transact on Tron, you need bandwidth. Everyone gets a small amount for free, but if you freeze your TRX at Tronscan (on the wallet tab), you can get more proportional to how much you freeze. This will save you TRX in transaction costs.
