Cardano has muscled Tron out of the way for the No. 10 spot. | Source: CoinMarketCap
BTT: Top 30 Token in Q2?
Justin Sun doesn’t believe Tron will take this lying down, and says Tron will be back in the top 10 by next month. More daring than that, however, is Sun’s prediction that BitTorrent, which did its popular ICO via Binance, will be in the top 30 cryptocurrencies during this quarter.
#TRON will be back to Top 10 in June! #BitTorrent will be Top 30 in Q2! Let’s wait and see! #BTT $BTT $TRX #TRX
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) May 7, 2019
Decred currently holds the No. 30 slot with more than a quarter billion in market capitalization, while BitTorrent lives at No. 50 with about $130 million. The BitTorrent ICO famously raised $7 million in a matter of minutes.
BTT would have to see significant demand over the next couple of months to rise so many ranks. The token is used to incentivize uploaders on the BitTorrent network; downloaders can use the token to bid for faster download speeds. The token currently only works with the native BitTorrent client. It’s important to remember that BitTorrent is a protocol, not a product; so much like bitcoin or Tron itself, anyone can develop a client.
Is Demand for Both Tron and BTT on the Rise?
The BitTorrent token has seen 1,327,615 on-chain transactions in its existence. Several Tron casinos support it as a token for gambling. Torrenting pirated media is significantly less prevalent in the age of affordable streaming services. A growing balkanization of these services, in which numerous content companies are looking to launch their own, could give rise to a new era of digital piracy as the only way for people to get everything you want in one place.
Love it or hate it, piracy was the primary use case for BitTorrent for years.
The tokenization effort gives content creators a direct path to earn from their audience. You could release your album or film on BitTorrent, and users could pay you to download it faster or donate to say thanks.
This goes against the current grain, where many independent music artists have reconciled with earning via Spotify and other streaming services. YouTube and other existing streaming platforms offer plenty of ways for filmmakers to make revenue from their work. A move to the BitTorrent and BTT model cannot be expected overnight.
As Anthony Pompliano recently said in his notable interview with Charlie Lee, it’s a “fool’s game” to make serious future predictions. Would Tron retain its current price if bitcoin began to tumble, for example?
This is crypto, and anything is possible. But a strict divorce from the BTC/USD peg and a bull run is hard to call.
What’s Behind this Prediction?
Perhaps Sun knows something the rest of us don’t. What we know is that Tron recently patched a major flaw in its architecture which could have enabled a single user to shut down the entire network. We know that the majority of Tron’s applications are HYIP schemes and casinos. We know Tron faces stiff competition from EOS, Ethereum, Cardano, Aelf, NEO, and more. We also know Tron has pledged to work against some gambling applications if they enter certain jurisdictions.
Tron’s return to the top 10 is far easier to imagine than BTT”s ascent to the top 30. The token has been available to BitTorrent’s 130 million users for some time now, but demand hasn’t pushed the price very far.
1 TRX will currently buy you roughly 40 BTT. If this peg remained stable, but Tron’s price climbed up to 3 cents or so, that would give BTT a market capitalization of around $173 million. This means BTT has to gain significantly on its TRX peg to see the top 30 any time soon.
Perhaps being bullish on Tron inherently makes you optimistic on the rest, but we have to expect TRX token traders to correct with such changes as well.