The much-hyped BitTorrent token sale sold out in under 14 minutes yesterday, as “astronomical” demand caused technical problems with the token sale platform. The result proved a success for Tron and leader Justin Sun, who raised $7 million from the enterprise, and was a partial success for Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), whose Binance Launchpad platform hosted the event for the first time.
Mixed Reactions
As is his style, Sun had been hyping up the BitTorrent token sale for weeks, and it seemed to do the job, with demand being so high that it crashed the token sale platform – CZ claimed in a tweet that the completion time would have been seconds rather than minutes had the issues not surfaced. This was despite a former BitTorrent executive claiming that the Tron network would buckle under the pressure earlier this month.
Reaction to the token sale, and the premise behind the coin in general, were mixed. Some were excited to be able to get their hands on some tokens, while others were angry at the fact that their patience didn’t pay off:
Yeah I was half hour before, I could click buy, your page would not allow me to put my order on the queue when it did it was too late
— Anderson Vasconcelos (@_andymusik) January 28, 2019
Some, who presumably didn’t participate, questioned the merits of the entire project:
Laugh all you want at @justinsuntron but he just got people to pay $7mm for something they’ve had free access to for a decade. $BTT
— ?Bitcoin Broski (@BitcoinBroski) January 28, 2019
Declining Market?
BitTorrent, which was bought out by Tron in July 2018, is a peer-to-peer file sharing site notorious for facilitating pirated videos, music, and more. The BitTorrent token is designed to allow users access to faster downloads, cloud storage, and other benefits, but its launch comes at a time when illegal file sharing is decreasing thanks to the proliferation of streaming entertainment services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify. Despite this, Tron is still confident there is enough of a market where people will pay to upgrade their downloading experience. As always, the truth will only be known when the platform launches, which is purported to happen this summer.
