TRON, a decentralized Internet project, confirmed rumors via an official tweet that it is joining forces with China’s largest search engine Baidu to cooperate on cloud computing resources.
The tweet that was posted by the TRON Foundation this Wednesday and was retweeted by its CEO confirms the rumors that have been circulating since mid-October. However, the first rumor to reveal that the partnership will revolve around cloud service provision popped up this week from Chinese news source ODaily.
In its tweet posted Thursday, the TRON Foundation stated:
#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 Foundation (@Tronfoundation) 18 October 2018
The report from ODaily stated that Baidu Cloud and TRON closed a “basic cloud business” deal where both parties would aim to “to build, operate and debug blockchain products” based on Baidu Cloud.
The tweet from TRON infers that the company may be working towards offering Blockchain As A Service (Baas), a service where customers can Leverage cloud-based solutions to create and use their own blockchain apps, smart contracts, and other functions.
CEO of TRON Sparks Rumors
The rumors leading up to Thursday’s announcement were sparked by a tweet on October 12, 2018, from its CEO Justin Sun, who hinted at a “partnership” with an unnamed “industry giant” that is valued at “tens of billions of dollars.”
However, not everyone is impressed with the deal. Linking to the ODaily source from October 15, 2018, well-known Twitter cryptocurrency commentator Ari Paul tweeted: “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.”