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Some community members are crying foul after blockchain content distribution startup TRON exercised a bit of creative license to promote it partnership with Chinese company Baofeng.
TRON Announces Partnership with Public Chinese Firm Baofeng
On Wednesday, TRON founder Justin Sun announced that the startup had entered into a partnership with Baofeng, a publicly-listed Chinese company that Sun described as the “Chinese Netflix.”
We #TRON are proud to announce the partnership with Baofeng group. Baofeng, aka Chinese @netflix, boasts more than 200 million users as a video portal giant and has achieved 8 billion CNY listing in Shenzhen stock exchange (300431.SZ). https://t.co/f9MJZcmSDD #TRX $trx pic.twitter.com/jZJF32mmvi
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) January 10, 2018
Though the partnership announcement had been teased for a while, the timing was convenient for TRON, which is currently facing accusations of plagiarizing the IPFS and Filecoin whitepapers.
‘Creative Marketing’ May Oversell Partnership
At first glance, the news appears to be a coup for TRON, as having its tech tapped by a video playback service as popular as Baofeng would lend significant credibility to the startup’s content distribution platform.
While an achievement for TRON, there are several indications that the true nature of the partnership is perhaps not quite as flashy as Sun’s headline suggests.
First, a variety of community members criticized Sun for his characterization of Baofeng as the “Chinese Netflix” and other TRON supporters for comparing the company to YouTube.
Moreover, as explained in the announcement, the partnership is — strictly speaking — with Baofeng BFC, a division within the company that is developing the company’s Blockchain Consensus Network (BCN) and producing hardware devices. This division is separate from Baofeng’s video playback service, which has an estimated 200 million monthly users.
Under the agreement, Baofeng BFC hardware devices will run full nodes to support TRON’s blockchain once its main network launches in the future.
“As a large-scale P2P network operator, we know how difficult this network is and how great the technical challenges are. We look forward to the TRON team overcoming the difficulties and launching the network,” Tianlong Cui, CEO of Baofeng BFC, stated in the announcement.
Finally, Baofeng BFC has signed similar partnership agreements with a variety of other blockchain startups over the past several weeks, including Qtum, Metaverse ETP, and an obscure bitcoin fork called BitcoinFile.
These other partnership agreements attracted little attention, both because the blockchain startups in question had smaller market caps than TRON and they did not use the same creative licensing employed by TRON.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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