The TRON Foundation launched its TRC20 exchange this week. It is a place for people to exchange tokens issued on the TRON platform. The TRC20 exchange is located at TRX.market. The TRC10 token exchange is still on Tronscan, the primary block explorer and information service for the Tron ecosystem.
TRC20 and TRC10 tokens can be understood as Tron-native analogues to ERC-20 tokens. The TRC10 token is a user-issued token that doesn’t require the writing of a smart contract. The TRC20 token provides all the functionality and power of a smart contract-based token system. TRC20 is very similar to ERC20. All that’s needed to issue a TRC10 token is 1024 TRX, which are the equivalent of Ether in the system. TRX were trading at $0.013 USD at time of writing.
Tron has a number of decentralized applications running on it at present time, and despite the overall market downturn, usage was up, according to the foundation’s own metrics, by 48% over the last week. Usage crossed the 1 million transaction threshold in a single 24-hour period. In their blog on the subject, Tron wrote:
“This week, the 24-hour transaction number for Dapps reached 1.04M, a 48% increase compared with last week; the 24-hour trading volume hit 640M TRX, an 151% increase compared with last week. We have seen significant increases in both indexes […]”
One of the more interesting projects built on Tron is SeedIt, a decentralized platform that lets users contribute funds to content creators they most appreciate. Also Project Atlas, which incentivizes people to seed content on the BitTorrent protocol, the flagship program for which Tron acquired back in July.
Ethereum DApps Not Seeing Much Usage
If we take a look at the rankings on dAppRadar and dAppTrack, we see that Ethereum dApps overall would be in a whole new league of usage if they saw anywhere near the transaction activity that Tron dApps do. There are factors that mitigate actual Ethereum dApp usage, and one is that several sub-platforms have been built and run on Ethereum which would not contribute to direct Ethereum dApp activity.
Also, not all token activity is decentralized application activity – for instance, the Basic Attention Token is not exactly a decentralized application. Yet, it sees several thousand tokens transmitted per hour. Same thing with Binance Coin (BNB), which has a volume higher than many non-token altcoins. BNB had over $15 million in volume in the last 24 hours at time of writing. Since it’s not used as a decentralized application, it doesn’t count as dApp transaction activity despite seeing a high usage.
All of which is to say we’re not insinuating that the Ethereum blockchain is currently under-used. But the data tells us that the dream of Ethereum decentralized apps has yet to be realized in the form of a “killer dApp.”
The central focus of most Ethereum developers has been scaling solutions. Second-layer scaling has been a major avenue of investment in the Ethereum world. Projects like Raiden and 0x saw massive investments, and dApps which build on these sidechains would not necessarily contribute to Ethereum mainnet’s statistics, either.
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