After months of rumors and speculations, one of the biggest deals in the crypto world has been confirmed. Tron Foundation, which stands behind the Tron blockchain media project and the Tronix (TRX) cryptocurrency, has taken over the control of San Francisco-based file sharing provider BitTorrent and all its products, Tron’s founder, Justin Sun, announced on Tuesday.
“Proud to announce @BitTorrent and @uTorrent are now part of the #TRON family. BitTorrent is supported by over 100M active users. Together we are building the future of the decentralized Internet,” Sun tweeted.
The price of the deal was not disclosed, but according to unofficial information it stands at some $140 million in cash.
BitTorrent has several very popular file-sharing products in its portfolio that will give Tron access to millions of customers worldwide. The firm is responsible for the development of one of the most used popular peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols, BitTorrent, and owns two of its widespread clients, uTorrent, which has more than 100 million users on Android-based devices, and BitTorrent Mainline with more than 10 million downloads from Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Play. BitTorrent, which moves over 3 billion GB of data monthly, also owns desktop torrent clients for Windows and Mac computers as well as BitTorrent Play, a video and music application for iOS.
Tron Foundation will continue to develop the BitTorrent protocol as the tool aims at being “the world’s largest decentralized ecosystem”, a goal that Tron shares. Both entities will merge their teams and BitTorrent will move its operations to Tron’s US office in San Francisco.
As Cryptovest reported earlier, it’s possible that this merger is part of a bigger plan to use the newly launched Tron Mainnet to facilitate P2P transactions, possibly using TRX for sharing media and information on an already widely adopted, well-tested platform.
“Anyone who has ever used the BitTorrent protocol, built their business on the protocol, or otherwise benefited from the protocol will become part of the TRON family,” Sun wrote in an open letter to Tron community on Tuesday.
BitTorrent protocol connects all users because when one customer wants to download a file, BitTorrent downloads these pieces simultaneously from people who already have them on their devices and thus maximizes transfer speed.
Tron (TRX) ranks 11th on the cryptocurrency list by market capitalization with nearly $2.3 billion market cap and $231 million trading volume for the last 24 hours at the time of the publishing.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
