2020 will be forever remembered as the year Bitcoin made its winning lap and rose from the ashes of $ 3,700 to beat its all-time high so far. While countless central banks deliberately devalued their fiat currencies, Bitcoin raced like an unstoppable freight train as institutional investors boarded en masse. Of course, digital gold wasn’t the only winner: it was a banner year for crypto in general, with the explosion of digital credit markets, record-breaking acquisitions, and significant improvements in everything from payment systems to privacy.
In this feverish whirlpool, few companies really stood out – TRON was one of them. Building on the success of 2019, Justin Sun’s decentralized network continued its quest for world domination, building castles in the sky dedicated to trustless value transfer and entertainment, and enjoyed by far the best year yet. Here’s how they did it.
TRON’s year in numbers
It’s hard to know where to start when looking closely at the past 12 months: every other day, it seemed, TRON announced the launch of a new product, the integration of a data oracle, or the acquisition of a protocol its ever-expanding expanding ecosystem. Since everyone loves big numbers, let’s start with some big ones.
This year, TRON broke records for the number of network transactions with 1.3 billion. In this context, 3.1 billion transactions were carried out in all public networks in the last decade (2009-2019). To date, over 16 million wallets have been created on TRON, and around 100,000 users daily interact with the various tentacles of the network, from exchange protocols and live streaming platforms to the breakthrough decentralized storage protocol BTFS.
While many are talking about onboarding the next generation of crypto users, TRON is busy with the work. Especially when it comes to decentralized finance (DeFi). The part of the cryptoeconomy devoted to trustworthy financial primitives has seen explosive growth this year, and a number of automated market makers, derivatives, governance tokens, and income farming projects have picked up speed. In February, the value set in the DeFi protocols was just $ 1 billion, down from $ 276 million twelve months ago. Fast forward to December and DeFi TVL could top $ 20 billion before the New Year.
TRON boss Justin Sun made DeFi one of the cornerstones of his strategy this year and built the DeFi infrastructure to keep up with Ethereum. Within a few months, TRON had launched its own TRC20-based DEX (JustSwap), a collateral-based stablecoin (USDJ), a dApp governance token (JST) and a credit platform (JustLend). No wonder the daily dApp transaction volume at TRON now exceeds $ 12 million.
Tether (USDT) remained the currency of choice in DeFi, and to date the TRON has reached a record $ 6.4 billion – nearly 30% of the dominant stablecoin’s market cap.
A buying frenzy like no other
Between Binance’s purchase of CoinMarketCap and FTX’s acquisition of Blockfolio, 2020 was a year when crypto giants went shopping. TRON was no different and has poured capital into a number of projects to expand its end-to-end crypto service. First came the purchase of the microblogging network Steemit in February, whereby Sun ushered in a “new era of decentralized social networks”.
The war chest broke out again in October when the blockchain-based streaming platform Dlive was integrated into the BitTorrent ecosystem, which was renamed BitTorrent X. With 7 million users and 200,000 content creators under its roof, DLive has been recognized for its potential to advance TRON’s vision of a decentralized Internet. BitTorrent X is supported by the BTT token, which can be used to receive rewards and given to content creators.
In other countries, TRON dApps were launched in both the Samsung and Huawei app stores with a total market of over 3 billion smartphone users.
A look into the future until 2021
Don’t expect TRON to put pressure on the brakes – there are already signs that 2021 could be even bigger. Recently, the network followed in the footsteps of Bitcoin and Ethereum and integrated with the Opera browser, allowing 350 million users to interact with its dApps. Coinbase also announced that it would consider supporting TRON’s assets, which could indicate renewed institutional interest in the ecosystem.
Whatever the future of crypto holds in store, expect TRON to be paramount.
