According to Justin Sun, founder and Chief Executive Officer of TRON (TRX), the public sale of BitTorrent tokens (dubbed BTT by its developers) was a “tremendous success,” after the token sale was able to raise millions of dollars in less than 20 minutes. The BitTorrent token public sale, which was organized on Launchpad, a token sale platform operated by Binance, ended in the sale of over 59 billion tokens.
The sale was initially split into two sessions: the first was for investors who were purchasing BTT with Binance Coin (BNB), while the other was for investors who were buying the BTT tokens with TRX. A confirmation by Sun revealed that at the end of the trading day, the TRX-BTT trade saw the sale of 35.64 tokens, while 23.76 billion BTT tokens were traded in 13 minutes.
BND-BTT sale.
The BTT tokens were sold at a price of $0.00012 per token. After only just 15 minutes, the tokens were completely sold out, with $7.2 million raised.
In his statement, Justin Sun said, “We had tremendous success during our crowdfunding on Binance Launchpad, which sold out in less than 15 minutes amidst a very positive response, right before the Q2 launch of BitTorrent Speed and its accompanying products. The BTT token will be instrumental in its ability to incentivize users on BitTorrent, to share and seed [media] on the platform.”
BitTorrent was acquired by Justin Sun and TRON last summer, in a deal that reportedly made TRON the biggest decentralized exchange in the world, as BitTorrent was added to its suite of platforms. Although it was reported that Sun was in the process of purchasing the company in 2017, the Chinese entrepreneur eventually put together a letter of intent in January 2018.
News of a new tokenized file sharing system was first circulated in September 2018. However, BitTorrent Speed, which was announced earlier this month, is expected to launch later in the year.
Skepticism Amid the BitTorrent Sale
The BitTorrent sale was met with criticism from various quarters, especially considering the capacity of the TRON blockchain to handle the volume of transactions going through the BitTorrent platforms on a daily basis.
Speaking in an interview with BreakerMag, Simon Morris, former Chief Strategy Officer at BitTorrent, said that the integration of a token to prioritize downloads on the platform could very well reduce the network’s speed by about 40 percent.
Morris stated that the TRON blockchain could not handle the transaction volume that the BitTorrent system would need, adding that while he served at BitTorrent’s CSO, his team required hundreds of transactions to begin.
Integrating BTT into BitTorrent
The BTT token, which is run on the TRON blockchain, will be a major part of BitTorrent’s latest sharing system, BitTorrent Speed. The whitepaper for BitTorrent Speed shows that users will get BTT tokens in exchange for “seeding” content with their bandwidth and file space. It is expected that clients’ increased use of BitTorrent Speed will help enhance the file sharing process on BitTorrent, one of the most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms.
However, despite the massive success of the deal and the amount of money raised, the sale did experience certain difficulties as well. The enormous traffic on the Binance Launchpad overwhelmed the trading platform, making it difficult for some investors to acquire the tokens.
“Both sessions concluded. Took about 18 minutes, due to a system issue, would have taken 18 seconds otherwise. Demand was astronomical,” Binance CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao explained.
However, Sun, via a tweet, opined that everyone who was unable to take part in the sale, could get some tokens via airdropping efforts. Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, agreed to the suggestion and announced that the airdrop would take place. However, details have not yet been revealed.
