Jed McCaleb, the co-founder, and CTO of Stellar (XLM), was recently interviewed by Yahoo Finance where he made degrading comments, referring to the TRON (TRX) project as “garbage.”
He made these comments when asked about the crypto industry as a whole and what he would like to see changed. McCaleb criticized projects that raised massive amounts of capital during their ICO, saying that they had no technical merit to back up that funding and are not worthy.
As stated in the Yahoo Finance interview, McCaleb said:
Ninety percent of these projects are B.S. I’m looking forward to that changing. Things like Tron, it’s just garbage. But people dump tons of money into it, these things that just do not technically work. In a lot of cases, it just needs to be some sort of digital payment and you might as well use Stellar or bitcoin. You don’t need a separate type of payment…
TRON Supporters are Upset
McCaleb’s negative comments on the TRON project and on the cryptocurrency market as a whole caused waves in the TRON community.
Misha Lederman, a prominent TRON community member, defended TRON with hard true facts. He took his response to Twitter, providing transaction statistics, along with charts for everyone to see which project is actually being used more.
#Stellar's @JedMcCaleb: “Things like Tron, it’s just garbage. But people dump tons of money into it, these things that just don't technically work”#TRON transactions Dec 31
2,803,372Stellar Txs Dec 31
8793#TRX did 318 x more txs vs XLMNumbers speak louder than "garbage"🖖🏽 pic.twitter.com/YUWxJ95okC
— Misha Lederman (@mishalederman) January 1, 2019
Justin Sun Returns Fire
Justin Sun responded to the tweet above saying that TRON is not a competitor of Stellar due to XLM’s significantly lower transaction volume, and stating that the 2 projects simply do not compete.
He also noted that the Stellar network is centralized and has zero decentralized applications (dapps) running on the network.
Sun took his retaliation a step further by proclaiming that TRON (TRX) will surpass the market cap of Stellar (XLM) in 2019. Currently, Tron is sitting in the 10th spot with a market cap of $1.335 billion and Stellar is number 6 with a market cap of $2.186 billion.
Sun’s proclamation of surpassing Stellar’s market cap is not far out there. If TRX were to reach a price of just $0.033, which is just over $0.01 higher than its current price of $0.02, Tron would overtake Stellar for the 6th position.
Sun’s response to Lederman’s tweet can be seen below:
We don't think @StellarLumens is our competitor at all since they have extremely low transaction volume, centralized&non-democratic system and 0 Dapps. #TRON will take their place within 2019 anyway. #TRX $TRX #XLM https://t.co/kPuTIwiI0r
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) January 1, 2019
TRON (TRX) vs Stellar (XLM)
TRON and Stellar are 2 cryptocurrencies with very similar market caps, and have battled each other in terms of market cap throughout 2017 and 2018. While both projects are in competition for both popularity and investment allocation, their use cases vary greatly.
TRON is a decentralized blockchain platform that aims at constructing a free worldwide content entertainment system. It wants to provide its users with the opportunity to securely publish, store, and own data without the need for any intermediaries.
On the other hand, Stellar is an open-source cryptocurrency that offers a platform for distributed cross-border payments. Stellar can be more easily compared to Ripple (XRP) as they are both tackling the same use case.
Stellar is more focused on integrating their blockchain technology into the traditional banking system rather than creating a decentralized open marketplace like Tron.
Therefore, the two cryptocurrencies have vastly different use cases and are tackling different areas in which blockchain technology can be used to improve upon our existing systems and infrastructure.
All in all, there is room for both these projects to grow exponentially. It will be exciting to see how they fair going into 2019.
Do you think Stellar (XLM) is a competitor to Tron (TRX)? Will Justin Sun’s proclamation of TRX surpassing XLM in 2019 come true? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.