While the cryptocurrency market as a whole continues to hit yearly lows, the highly popular cryptocurrency project TRON (TRX) remains optimistic. Clearly, they have enough confidence in the midst of this bear market to be willing to invest $1 million in the industry through their incubator program, Tron Accelerator.
What is TRON (TRX)
For those who don’t know, TRON is a blockchain-based decentralized platform that aims to build a digital content entertainment system.
The network and platform will use its native cryptocurrency, Tronix (TRX), for easy and cost-effective storage and sharing of digital content. Essentially, TRON is setting out to create an entire digital ecosystem filled with an endless array of dapps running on the network.
TRON’s mainnet was successfully launched in June 2018 and since then, the community and development around TRON has been focused on the building of dapps. The TRON Foundation hopes to be a catalyst for dapp adoption and a leader in the dapp development space, hence their $1 million accelerator program.
TRON’s Accelerator Program
While the cryptocurrency market is full of gloom and doom at the moment, TRON has ignited some excitement and hope with their recent announcement of a $1 million accelerator program.
The program launched on November 17 and will help support and promote developers building decentralized applications (dapps) on the TRON platform.
The program will not only award $1 million in funding, but it will provide resources to developers as well. TRON hopes this program will spur both development and growth of their own protocol, as well as growth and innovation in the overall blockchain industry.
As seen on the program’s official website, the program will feature a massive competition in which the $1 million will be awarded to 56 different projects.
TRON Accelerator is a $1 million USD program aiming to empower developers and foster innovation within the blockchain industry. Developer teams are invited to submit their decentralized application project, build on the TRON protocol, and compete for one of the most ambitious Blockchain hackathons ever hosted.
The winners of the competition will be announced and awarded their prizes during TRON’s first international summit, the Tron niTROn Summit in San Francisco, which takes place on January 18 and 19, 2019.
As for the awards, they will be divided between 5 classes of winners:
- 1st Prize will consist of 1 winner who is awarded $200,000 + free travel and accommodation to niTROn.
- 2nd Prize will consist of 2 winners who each receive $100,000 + free travel and accommodation to niTROn.
- 3rd Prize will consist of 3 winners who each receive $50,000 + free travel and accommodation to niTROn.
- 8 Special Prizes will award winners $30,000 each, across the categories of:
- Best Blockchain Game
- Application Tool
- Decentralized Exchange
- UI Design
- Innovation
- User Experience
- Most Influential DApp
- Most Onchain Activity DApp
- 42 Finalist Prizes will award winners $5,000 each.
The developers participating in this competition will be judged by experts in the fields of blockchain and VC, including TRON founder and CEO Justin Sun, US head of TRON protocol Cong Li, and many more.
Project submissions open on December 1 and close on January 4, so if you’re interested in entering the competition, check out the Tron Accelerator website for more details.
TRON Developments and dApp Activity
Despite the downward trend in the price of TRX and the cryptocurrency market as a whole, TRON continues to move forward with new developments and accomplishments.
For instance, the project has beta released their first decentralized exchange (DEX), TronWatch Market. TRON has also acquired the peer-to-peer file sharing giant, BitTorrent, and through Project Atlas, BitTorrent seeders will now be rewarded in cryptocurrency.
In addition to the developments mentioned above, TRON’s cryptocurrency TRX has seen a substantial jump in transaction count due to continued dapp usage and activity.
Sun took his excitement about this to Twitter, saying:
#TRON has surpassed #ETH IN DAPP volume. #TRX $TRX https://t.co/RWGY5sDqES
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) November 17, 2018
As TRON’s Accelerator program comes to fruition, it will be interesting to see how the dapp development and transaction count grows in comparison to those built on Ethereum.
What do you think of TRON? Do you think they could one day pass Ethereum as the #1 dapp development platform? Let us know in the comment section below.
