DLive, a ‘decentralized’ streaming service originally ran on the SteemIt network, then Lino and now it will be adopted by Tron. BitTorrent, operated by Justin Sun, announced yesterday that DLive will be migrating onto the Tron blockchain.
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Research shows that Poloniex market share is trending downwards since Justin Sun’s acquisition
The Block, crypto research and news outlet, released statistics of Poloniex’s market share and it has begun to trend downwards since mid-November.
On November 13th, Justin Sun, founder of TRON and CEO of BitTorrent admitted to being part of the investment group that acquired Poloniex from Circle. This is almost exactly when their market share began to trend downwards.
On one hand, the decrease in users could have more to do with a change in management rather than Sun’s involvement. Even when my local taco place said “under new management,” I had this instinctual urge to never go back, because I liked how it was.
On the other, Justin Sun has an unquestionably controversial reputation because of the impression that TRON is more centralized than they advertise to be, he started a fund to censor journalism and kicked DigiByte’s coin off of Poloniex a day after the founder criticized the exchange.
Immediately after the acquisition, Poloniex purchased TRONs most popular “decentralized exchange.” People joked that you can’t buy a decentralized exchange, but in a recent piece, we clarified that even in DeFi there is no truly decentralized institution. This month, Poloniex also said that there would be no listing fees for any TRON based assets.
Here’s Justin Sun essentially thanking his one company for helping his other out:
Thanks for the support from @Poloniex & @PoloniDEX ! All #TRON based assets have a good place to go! #TRX $TRX https://t.co/Kn6tbTMUdr
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) December 3, 2019
Obviously, people who are media trained and keep up with the crypto space daily will understand that Sun is playing 4d chess with all of his businesses. That might be the reason why their market share had started decreasing so quickly. The exchange still might have a fighting chance in the future if they play their cards right.
Now that Sun has merged his projects together, it might be best for Poloniex’s market share to just stop talking about TRON. Eventually, new people will enter the space and others will forget about the affiliations.
Justin Sun paid someone to make memes clowning The Block crypto news outlet
Coindesk talked to the a Twitter user who was paid by Justin Sun to make ‘derogatory memes’ against The Block staff members. This was a result of Changpeng Zhao and Justin Sun being upset about The Block reporting that a Binance office in Shanghai was raided and shut down in early December.
Sun is involved in buying Poloniex, founder of TRON blockchain network, and CEO of BitTorrent. Zhao is the CEO of Binance and founder of BNB. The two could be considered competitors but are closer than one might assume. Binance has had complete control over TRON’s voting system for a while now.
They both teamed up against The Block after Zhao denied their reports of a Shanghai Binance office existing, and being shut down after raids. Both Zhao and Sun offered 100 Bitcoin to begin a fund aimed against news that could hurt the crypto market. Zhao also threatened to sue The Block in via Twitter, but the topic hasn’t been brought up since.
In fact, last night, Frank Chaparro posted announced an upcoming interview with Catherine Coley, CEO of Binance.US. The podcast has not released yet but commenters are wondering whether or not they touched on the Binance drama.
$1000 of that 100 BTC fund was used to hire meme-maker and TRX investor, Tommy Mustache to make create some anti-The Block pictures. Here’s what he came up with.
Mr. Mustache told Coindesk why he decided to give to take the cash.
“Investors like me are getting hurt [by rumors] and we are sick of it.”
With long term investments in TRX and BNB, it’s easy to see why he’s frustrated. Cryptocult does not condone harassment in any way whatsoever, but Mike Dudas and Frank Chaparro have been good sports throughout this, posting some of the memes themselves.
Binance allegedly controls 56% of voting power in TRON
Today, Brian Fabian Crain, CEO of Chorus One, tweeted a screenshot showing that Binance has submitted 55.81% of all votes on the TRON proof-of-stake network.
“What a joke: @binance controls 56% of the voting power on @tronfoundation. If they split their votes across 25 nodes, they’d have 499k per node and would control 25 out of 27 validating nodes. Decentralization theater. Centralized exchanges are an existential threat for crypto.”
TRON has a slightly unintuitive voting system in which 27 “Super Representatives” make all decisions. Any holder can still “freeze” (stake) their TRX to vote for representatives, but those stakers can also vote for themselves. This is exactly how Binance became the most powerful voter, staking 12 billion TRX tokens to vote themselves into office.
A big congratulations to our newest SR @binance. ???
Binance rocketed to the top of the #TRONSR today with more than 12,000,000,000 votes!
Check out https://t.co/VxhQhE7giQ for all the details! #TRON #TRX $TRX pic.twitter.com/bVCSlXCGzE— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) October 1, 2019
Super Representatives are frequently revoted, but there is no limit to how long they can hold power. Each TRX token equals a vote, and 12 trillion votes would equal the equivalent of 168 million dollars at the current price of $0.014.
Tron isn’t the only “decentralized” operation that ends up looking like a plutocracy. We have reported that even the reputable MakerDAO platform, creators of the DAI stablecoin often have one rich voter making important decisions.
Arguably the biggest update to ever hit maker, Multi-Collateral Dai was given a 3 day vote to be implemented, and would require $100 million with of DAI to be manually converted, had one voter controlling 50% of power for a majority of the duration. They ended up providing around 35% of the consensus.
Ethereum, the second largest market cap coin is in the process of moving to a proof-of-stake network, and some people are fearing for it’s security. There won’t be a voting system implemented like in TRON, and it would cost way more to take over the network, but TRON and Maker’s voting system are good examples of what can happen when allowing money to control the blockchain.