A look at TRON and the peculiar way its founder markets the project

TRON is one of those projects that seemingly popped out of the nowhere. In a little over a year, the project’s native token, Tronix (TRX), climbed up the CoinMarketCap rank, settling at approximately $1B at the time of this writing. It is now the 10th largest cryptoasset by market capitalization. The climb was far from smooth, however. Regular followers of the crypto-space already know about the reports of Tron’s plagiarized white paper and the claims that it had copied code from other blockchain projects.

TRON is something of an enigma. Earlier on, the project promoted itself as a blockchain-enabled entertainment platform. As recently as June 2018, visitors of the English version of TRON’s website would be greeted with words “global broadcast platform” nestled under the cliche call-to-action to “decentralize the web.” More recently, however, TRON has pivoted its focus, and marketing, to the decentralized the web aspect of its message.