🌺 A Thousand Flowers Bloom — Issue No. 10
/🗞 News
The team behind TRON announced their plan to integrate BitTorrent into the protocol, providing an incentive layer for seeding files on the platform. TRON, which is still pre-launch and viewed skeptically by many in the technical community, had previously purchased BitTorrent for over $100 Million with funds raised from their ICO. Link.For an idea of what this might look like, check out "What if BitTorrent had a token?" by John Backus. Notice, this piece was written last month, before any of this was announced. Prescient! John's recent work, putting crytpo-networks in context with historical decentralization movements, is all must-read material. Link.
Meanwhile, the Cardano project launched a new testnet, this one including their smart contract platform. Cardano has a live network, but it still lacks many of the grand technical features their team has promised. Link.
Finally, Martti Malmi announced his own new cryptocurrency project. Malmi, who goes by the online handle Sirius, was the second-ever developer to work on the Bitcoin codebase. Technical details on the project remain vague for the moment. Link.
It seems self-evident that at some point, we have to stop launching new crypto-networks and focus on scaling and building on ones that already exist. Clearly, though, that day has yet to come. At times, this can be frustrating for those of us who want to see these technologies adopted, but I think it's a healthy phase. Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. The winners and losers will surely shake out in due time.