TRON, the 11th-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at the time of writing, celebrated its so-called ‘Independence Day’ yesterday with the burning of one billion TRX tokens, currently worth roughly $50 million. Additionally, “the remaining 33,251,807,524 TRX held by TRON foundation will stay locked until January 1th [sic], 2020,” the TRON Foundation said in a blog post. The token burn and lock are intended to increase scarcity and up the price of TRX tokens.
TRON’s ‘Independence Day’ marked the moment when the Tron network had successfully completed a migration to its mainnet (its own independent, public Blockchain .) The beta version of the mainnet was launched on May 31 on the Ethereum blockchain.
#TRON Independence Day live stream starts now, join us to be part of the free, decentralized internet. https://t.co/M5uzhyfjYf
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) June 25, 2018
According to the blog post, the migration was completed by the TRON Independent Group (TIG), a community consensus-based group comprised of 27 anonymous ‘Genesis Representatives’ who volunteered their services for free.
“During the transitioning period when the GR are being replaced by other SR [Super Representatives], TIG will be in charge until this process is complete,” a blog post said, adding that “we’d like to extend our gratitude to [these] unsung heroes during the mainnet initiation.”
The process was documented in a 12-hour livestream, during which the Tron Foundation distributed small amounts of TRX “so the members of the Tron community could test the different features of Tron mainnet,” said a blog post published by the Foundation.
The Moment of Truth Has Arrived
Now that Tron exists as its own technological entity, the network will have to prove its claims as a viable competitor to the Ethereum network, serving as a backbone for the development of decentralized applications, or ‘dapps.’ Tron’s developers claim that their network is “400 times faster” than the Ethereum network.
Unfortunately, any excitement from the developer community over Tron’s migration has not been reflected in TRX token valuation as of yet.
