Overview
TRON is a blockchain that allows Blockchain Developers to develop and implement smart contracts for decentralized applications (DApps) using the TRON Virtual Machine. It is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). TRON employs a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) mechanism, where 27 Super Representatives generate blocks in an election that occurs every six hours.
History
In June 2017, Justin Sun established the TRON Foundation in Singapore, and an independent peer-to-peer network, TRON, was subsequently developed. In August 2017, during the project’s initial coin offering (ICO), the ERC-20 TRX was released on Ethereum as a temporary token.
TRON’s testnet was launched in March 2018, and on June 25th of the same year, ERC-20 TRX was officially migrated to TRON with the release of its mainnet. On August 30, 2018, the TRON Virtual Machine was launched, which enabled smart contract capabilities.
On July 25, 2018, TRON Foundation announced the acquisition of BitTorrent, a file-sharing software provider, for $120.00 million. This acquisition further enhanced BitTorrent’s mission of “creating an Internet of options, not rules.”
In April 2021, TRON DAO announced that the TRX token shifted from an inflationary to a deflationary token. TRON Improvement Proposal 51 was implemented to set the price of one unit of bandwidth or energy at 0.00014 TRX and limit the fee of a single smart contract to 5,000 TRX. On December 4, 2022, TRON Improvement Proposal 79 passed, altering the fee for one unit of energy to 0.00042 TRX and raising the upper limit fee for a single smart contract to 15,000 TRX.
In May 2022, the TRON DAO launched USDD, an algorithmic stablecoin that is pegged 1:1 to the US Dollar (USD) through a mechanism of minting and burning. If the value of USDD falls below $1.00, users can burn USDD to mint TRX; if the value exceeds $1.00, users can burn TRX to mint USDD. However, USDD has not been minted or burned since July 17, 2022.
In April 2023, TRON upgraded to Stake 2.0, which separated staking and delegation into two distinct transactions. This upgrade also removed the previous three-day unstacking lock period and allowed partial unstacking to revoke only the voting power of unstacked tokens instead of the entire stake.
In June 2023, Justin Sun announced that native TRX had been bridged to Ethereum via the BitTorrent bridge and was now available as ERC-20 TRX.
On September 27th, 2023, TRON DAO announced a new partnership with ChainGPT, a blockchain-based AI project. This partnership is aimed at integrating ChainGPT with TRON, which will provide users with a toolkit to easily deploy smart contracts and NFTs on the network. Additionally, ChainGPT’s AI model will feed TRON data, enabling its chatbot to interact with TRON users. It is expected that several projects on TRON, including DexCheck, GT Protocol, and AITECH, will integrate ChainGPT.
On October 25, 2023, the TRON mainnet underwent an upgrade to version GreatVoyage-v4.7.3, also known as “Chilon”. This upgrade is optional, but it improves the development experience on TRON. Specifically, it speeds up node startup and initialization and optimizes network infrastructure performance. A complete list of the changes that come with the upgrade can be found here.
On Dec. 6, 2023, Justin Sun announced four key initiatives for TRON:
- Strengthen inscription support on TRON.
- TRON can now be integrated with BRC-20, a fungible token standard that uses ordinal inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
- Launching a $100M developer fund.
- TRON aims to reduce its energy costs to attract more users and developers.
