Ethereum’s UpFiring Targets TRON’s BitTorrent As Sun and Buterin Draw P2P Battle Lines

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Ethereum’s UpFiring Targets TRON’s BitTorrent As Sun and Buterin Draw P2P Battle Lines

January 21, 2019 by Paul de Havilland

UpFiring, a file sharing dApp on the Ethereum network, announced its launch on the same day that Justin Sun’s TRON-affiliated BitTorrent announced that BitTorrent Speed–formerly Project Atlas–would be ready by summer. This is the latest episode in the Sun vs Buterin war of words… and platforms.

Also read: Bakkt Acquisition: Backend Buyup to Boost Crypto Amid Payments Wars

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The Empire of the Sun

TRON founder Justin Sun acquired BitTorrent Inc. in June last year for a reported $120 million USD through Rainberry Acquisition Inc., a San Francisco-based company Sun owns. The purchase created a fair amount of conjecture about the future of BitTorrent and the ambitions of its new owner. The popular p2p platform saw a number of employees depart, including high level managers and inventor Bram Cohen.

Distrust of Justin Sun is not misplaced. TRON and network affiliates have notoriously made announcements bordering on fictitious, such as the integration of Poppy into the Clover POS system. And Vitalik Buterin’s legendary tweet accusing Justin Sun of plagiarism in the TRON whitepaper (an accusation leveled by many) has become the stuff of legend:

But the TRON network, to Sun’s credit, is a very active one. As “one of the largest blockchain-based operating systems in the world” in its own words, it enjoys an active ecosystem of apps, tokens, super representatives, and voting coin holders. Blocktivity ranked it third for usage in mid-December last year, albeit trailing EOS significantly:

(It has since fallen from the 20 most active blockchains, with EOS still first and Ethereum at 6.) Disciples of Justin Sun are also ferocious defenders of their emperor, as demonstrated by the anger-fueled response to this Bitsonline article from April, 2018:

“… anyone with half a brain and just a little research can see that you are purposefully writing to influence the price of TRX most likely because you were too blind to see the value before the price went up a little.”

Needless to say, the accusation was baseless and entirely irrelevant. (It also failed to proffer any of the “research” its author suggested could be identified.)

The Return of the Non-Giver of Ether

Ethereum’s woes over the past 18 months have been well-documented. It almost ground to a halt as a result of the trading of CryptoKitties in December, 2017. And dApp activity on the network paints quite a glib picture, as reported by Bitsonline last month.

According to State of the DApps, My Crypto Heroes is the Ethereum platform’s most active dApp, with less than 4000 users. Strikingly, IDEX ranks second, at less than 600. Its highly anticipated Constantinople hard fork was postponed to February only last week:

But UpFiring has given Ethereum something to get excited about. It is no doubt set to compete directly with Sun’s BitTorrent as a p2p protocol with tokenized incentives to seed, and its date of release of January 17th coincided neatly with the news of the later-than-anticipated launch of BitTorrent Speed. Maybe, a little too neatly.

In The UpFiring Line

Buterin’s passive-aggressive aloofness makes for an interesting contrast with Sun’s gasconading tendencies, and their rivalry makes for an interesting sideshow to the serious business of decentralized platforms:

There is no love lost between the two, and new battle lines have now been drawn in the p2p protocol arena. UpFiring has upped the Sun vs. Buterin ante. May the force be with both men.

Who would you rather have a beer with? Justin Sun or Vitalik Buterin?

Images via Pixabay

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