Tron recently held a $1 million blockchain dapp development contest, and many think it was just a trick. Is that the case or was it a real competition?
Tron’s $1 million competition
The dapp platform held an accelerator competition from the 1st of December to the 4th of January. Tron wrote the following about the competition:
“TRON Accelerator is a $1 million program aiming to empower developers and foster innovation within the blockchain industry. Developer teams are invited to submit their decentralised application project and build on the protocol. The developers will compete for one of the most ambitious Blockchain hackathons ever hosted.”
The project is a decentralised application (dapp) platform that ranks as the ninth most valuable by market cap. They bought pioneering peer-to-peer filesharing application BitTorrent in July last year. The project is led by Justin Sun and has recently been gaining traction both regarding adoption and price.
Justing Sun earlier stated that they wanted to rescue ETH and EOS developers as their platforms collapse. However, not all people are as “fond” of the Tron project as Justin Sun. The co-founder, McCaleb, of Stellar said that Tron is garbage. There is an ongoing war between the different dapp platforms.
Did Tron mislead developers?
However, now Tron stands accused of pumping its token, TRX, by luring developers onto its platform. Some say they went under false pretences with its generous prize. Reddit user 9hil is one of the critics. He became suspicious after he read the email from Tron where they changed the conditions after the end date. He wrote:
“Apparently they decided to change the prize payouts, dropping the lowest prize to $1k instead of $5k. Many people were upset about this in the official Tron dev discord feeling they had been mislead. Some even seem to think there is something deeper going on.”
There is also an absence of big winners which has also raised concerns for the community. 9HIL found that the dapp developers who won $1,000 prize money are not coming out in the open. However, an entity who announced via its Instagram channel that it earned $200,000 was unfindable on the rest of the internet.
“Don’t bother trying to google it, nothing will come up,” the Redditor wrote. “All we were able to find about this mysterious project was [an] embarrassingly empty GitHub with only [three] commits and https://stokenstudio.firebaseapp.com/. The smart contract code is nonexistent, and if the website is even doing anything, it appears to be on Shasta testnet.”
The story is unfolding as I write and time will tell if Tron is honest about their competition or if the project is not as good as Justin Sun makes it seem.
Image Source: “Flickr”
Dennis Sahlström has been trading and investing since 2012 and has for the last two years been consistently profitable. He has been in the crypto- and blockchain space since the middle of 2017 and realized its potential for our world, not least how it is transforming the society we live in. He has now created an education platform, together with the wealth coach Marcus the Maria. They teach regular people how to invest and trade in the cryptocurrency market with proven strategies. If you want to learn more and feel like its time to get into this new asset class, download our free book and register to the next live training to get your future in cryptocurrencies started.