Last Friday, Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron cryptocurrency, published a statement that sparked discussions and speculation in the entire crypto community.
The announcement stated that Tron is working on a partnership with a tens of billions of dollars worth industry giant.
Finally, First time to partner with tens of billions USD valuation industry giant. Guess the name 😊#TRON #TRX $TRX
— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) October 12, 2018
While nothing else was released, the digital currency community quickly came to the conclusion that the unnamed partner was likely Baidu.
This is one of the largest companies in China, as well as one of the most popular search engines around the world. For almost an entire week, Tron supporters speculated whether or not this is true, and what possible implications might such a partnership have.
Yesterday, the rumors were finally confirmed by the Tron Foundation.
#TRON is joining forces with Internet service giant Baidu and will continue to work with large cloud service providers to offer blockchain solutions, make the technology more accessible for users and small business alike. End goal: mass adoption of #blockchain. $TRX pic.twitter.com/v39Zm7zMc4
— TRON DAO (@trondao) October 18, 2018
Tron “Partners Up” with Baidu
The confirmation came via Twitter, in a post that explains that Tron and Baidu are joining forces in order to work on a large cloud service with the final goal of providing better blockchain solutions. This is one of Tron’s biggest steps on the road of achieving mass adoption of blockchain yet.
In the week prior to this confirmation, numerous rumors that took the Tron and Baidu partnership to be true speculated that the cooperation between the two companies will likely result in Tron’s purchase of Baidu’s cloud computing resources. This was also confirmed by the Tron Foundation.
1/ ODaily: The 'partnership' between Baidu and Tron is basically about Tron buying cloud computing resources from Baidu. "The two parties have made no contact at the blockchain business level".
Source(CN): https://t.co/GXu0KsbtGX
— cnLedger (@cnLedger) October 15, 2018
While many do not see this as a real partnership, it is still a significant move on Tron’s behalf. Not only will partnering up with such a large company bring additional exposure and new levels of trustworthiness to Tron, but it will also help with its goal of decentralizing the web.
However, this also means that Baidu will not be using the Tron blockchain for its own purposes, as some additional speculators had claimed. Instead, Baidu’s recent whitepaper indicated that the company is working on launching its own blockchain.
Sun Criticized for Misleading Marketing
With a situation like that, and the Tron, Baidu partnership mostly being nothing more than an exchange of service, many criticized Sun for making misleading announcements.
Assuming the below is accurate, this deserves to be called out as misleading marketing. If I buy a computer with Microsoft Windows installed, I should not claim to have partnered with Microsoft without clarifying the limited nature of the ‘partnership.’ https://t.co/MbOhaYgkvD
— Ari Paul ⛓️ (@AriDavidPaul) October 15, 2018
This is why multiple members of Tron’s community urged Sun to simply announce the name of the company, instead of purposefully building hype. Especially in this case, when the hype led to a somewhat disappointing revelation.
Justin, just announce the name. Tweets like this only allow your followers to romanticize who it could be and most often when people do that, they are let down.
— Bitcoin Miyagi (@btcmiyagi) October 12, 2018
https://twitter.com/worker1x/status/1050728376640659456
Despite the overall disappointment with the announcement, it is clear that Tron is still making big steps forward. While the partnership is not really a partnership, but more of a cloud computing purchase agreement, many still remain supportive of Tron for its efforts.
Of course, this will likely mean that Tron’s price is not going to spark a new bull run, as investors hoped. At the time of writing, Tron is still trading in the green, with 2.18% growth in the last 24 hours. Its current price is at $0.024661 per coin, and for now, the 11th largest cryptocurrency by market cap seems to be relatively stable.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
