Amid the hype and excitement surrounding Tron and their BitTorrent ICO, one group of insiders is less than impressed with the tactics of Tron and its leader Justin Sun – a collection of former employees who are using the former Telegram channel to bash the project. The group actually quit Tron in 2018 to work on their own app, but use the old Tron chat and announcement groups, to which many Tron fans still subscribe, to offer candid opinions on the project and, recently, the BitTorrent ICO.
A Telegram Takeover at Tron
When announcing their split in 2018 the group described themselves as “Some Ex Tron team members (who) quit their jobs at Tron…because we didn’t agree on some major points regarding Tron’s future.” Having usurped the Tron chat group for their own project’s use, they did the same with the official announcements group and ramped up the posting just as the hype around the ICO was building up.
Suspect Practices
The splinter group have previously commented on various aspects of Tron’s plans and policies, calling their desire to decentralize the internet “marketing bullshit” and claiming that Justin Sun used employees’ Binance accounts to sell Ethereum raised for an ICO, while Sun himself is described as a “marketing machine”. This much was evidenced in the run up to the BitTorrent ICO when he was interviewed on CNBC’s Crypto Trader show and by Bloomberg, and paid to get the BitTorrent ICO featured by a number of top crypto social media influencers. This helped create a huge buzz that sent the price of the TRX token soaring, which Sun also reveled in, before it crashed again following the ICO.
Code Speaks Louder Than Promises
Another criticism of the project by the splinter group is that the code isn’t up to scratch, something that can be easily verified by running Tron’s code through Sonarcloud, a scanner that developers use to check the health of their code. Both the code belonging to the Tron project and the Java studio that Tron dApp developers use receives an E grade when run through the scanner, which is the lowest grade possible. 955 bugs and 978 vulnerabilities were reported between them – the worst rating on the site by some distance. Sonarcloud also shows that an average of 24% of the total code is duplicated from other projects, reflecting another argument from the group that the code is heavily copied from other projects.
Whether Tron developers can get the code fixed in time to decentralize the internet remains to be seen, but investors will want to see something for their money soon and there is only so far a marketing machine can take you – at some point Sun and his team will have to deliver more than just promises.
