Blockchain company Tron announced today that it has closed the deal to acquire Peer-To-Peer firm BitTorrent. In a blog post on the company’s website, BitTorrent explained that all employees will now operate from Tron’s San Francisco based office which remains its center of operations for its global market expansion. Additionally, the post elaborates that BitTorrent “will provide robust support for TRON’s global business development and partnerships, while pursuing its vision for the world’s largest decentralized ecosystem”.
It's official. BitTorrent is now part of #TRON. We pioneered the world's largest decentralized p2p protocol, now we're joining forces with TRON to build the future of the decentralized internet. Read more at https://t.co/ZoCPl5c5wS. @Tronfoundation @justinsuntron pic.twitter.com/EI3xP8Gdz2
— BitTorrent (@BitTorrent) July 24, 2018
BitTorrent has about 100 million globally active users across its iOS and Android apps, web client as well as Desktop clients for Mac and Windows PCs. Concerns about BitTorrent beginning to charge for its services, or perhaps plan mining of cryptocurrencies through its P2P user network were assuaged by both the companies, with Tron declaring that there no such plans in mind. Tron stated that the torrent firm will continue to provide its services in an unhindered manner to its wide user-base.
BitTorrent was founded in 2004 with a revolutionary P2P model that sped up serverless file sharing over the internet. It quickly went on to replace Napster as the best way to share illegal content over the web and continues to remain so to this day. While the actual amount of the acquisition is not known, sources peg the figure somewhere close to $126 million. It remains to be seen whether this deal will live up to its promise or will eventually end up associating itself with cryptocurrency-mining down the line.
