BitTorrent (BTT) Explained: The Token Of The Largest File Sharing Platform
BitTorrent (BTT) is the native token of the world’s laregest file sharing protocol platform which launched its ICO somewhere in 2018. The ICO and token received a lot of publicity because it was the first to complete a raise on the Binance Launchpad. The ICO was also promoted heavily mainly because of the ownership of BitTorrent by Justin Sun who is also the founder of the TRON cryptocurrency.
However, let’s check whether the BTT token really has a future and what its true potential is.
BitTorrent ICO
BitTorrent is by far the world’s largest file sharing protocol and according to some there are more than 20 percent of interent traffic related to the platform. This is why it was major news when the founder of Tron, Justin Sun bough this platform for $140 million. It was even a bigger deal when Tron launched a TRC-10 token for BitTorrent with the BTT ticker. The token sale which occurred on Binance Launchpad, ended in less than 15 minutes and raised $7.2 million for BitTorrent. It is important to that it was the most successful public token sale that happened in the past years since the bear market in cryptocurrency extended and hit some of the coins for the most part. The public sale saw increased demand for the BTT token and it was so intense that the site could not handle all the traffic and many investors found themselves unable to access the site and the token sale at all.
After reaching an all-time high of $0.001250, the BTT token has pulled backs slightly but of course the investors managed to make a 7x strong return in less than two weeks.
BTT Architecture
BTT is a TRC-10 token which was created on the Tron blockchain. It was created to provide enhancement to the BitTorrent protocol initially launched in 2001 and it was later purchased by the Tron Foundation in 2018.
Tron represents the new era of decentralized platforms and BitTorrent is one of the very first decentralized networks on the internet. BitTorent is also one of the few popular networks with more than 100 million monthly users. This gives BTT a huge reach right from day one. The very first use case that has been related with the BitTorrent whitepaper is to improve the efficiency of file-sharing.
BitTorrent Speed Feature
One of the most important features of the BTT token is the BitTorrent Speed. This feature is expected to be implemented in the second quarter of 2019 and it is meant to increase the adoption rate of the digital asset. BitTorrent sped is designed to use the financial incentives on the BitTorent network so the peers will be able to make payments in BTT in order to increase their position in download queues and speed the entire downloading process. The seed will also benefit as the recipients of these payments and will make them more willing to keep their files online for seeding longer.
The BitTorrent Speed developers believe that this type of incentivization will help them optimize the utilization of the network and computing the resources. There will be a bidding system implemented.
BTT Use Cases
There are already a few use cases of BTT that will be implemented in the future which aim to improve and develop the entire BitTorrent ecosystem. All of the planned features will allow the BitTorrent users to store value by only sharing small pieces in the infrastructure. Initially, there have been three major decentralized features:
- Content delivery system which allows the users to adveretise their bids and pay BTT in order to receive the content faster
- A storage platform where the users can pay for more storage or get paid to offer storage
- Proxy service where the users with unreliable connectivity can pay clients to retrieve the content by URL
The BitTorrent protocol will be open-sourced and will allow third-party developers to easily create new and useful application on the platform. The developers will also receive BTT as a booster to create more applications. The vision of the Tron Foundation and the BTT token seems to be similar to many blockchain projects. This is only to create an economy where micro-payments will fully power the system and the ecosystem will grow organically through the user engagement over time.
BitTorrent Community
The community interest behind cryptocurerncies is one of the most important drivers when it comes to mass adoption. The enthusiasm behind the user base is something that will increase the awareness and will encourage the potential users to join the network.
Given the previous popularity of BitTorrent, they already have a pretty good community on social media. For example, they have more than 70K users who are in their Telegam channel. They have also more than 53,000 on their Twitter account and about 650K likes on their Facebook page. This excludes the impact that the Tron community can have if they dive further into the project. Given that the TRX holders will get BTT airdropped to them, they will also get involved in the BitTorrent ecosystem.
Conclusion
BitTorrent is one of the first decentralized networks that launched on the internet and has been widely successful with more than 100 million monthly users. Tron has control of the BitTorrent protocol and is looking to push the blockchain technology into the ecosystem by creating a self-sustaining economic model in which the users are incentivized to share and download content.
