Tron is scintillatingly hot today.
When I find a cryptocurrency that I like, I like to take a different approach. I find a project that I like that heavily utilizes that blockchain, offering a stream of income in that crypto. That way I'm benefitting from the appreciation of the underlying crypto as well as earnings from the platform/dApp that will serve to further accelerate the size of one's bag to HODL.
Behind the larger-than-life personality of Justin Sun is a Ethereum blockchain fork that has introduced some innovative tweaks to Vitalik's mainnet. The value offered by Tron is readily apparent to me and now this price action will introduce further discussions. While an excellent DeFi platform, even after the increased gas fees DAO proposal that passed, Tron has a lot going for it.
- Frozen TRX produce Bandwidth and Energy, useful when doing arb or any other type of trades or smart contract interactions.
- A well designed TronLink wallet chrome extension that makes the process of freezing, sending, and transacting TRX pretty seamless.
- Visibility offered by Justin Sun's meeting with Warren Buffet and prominence on Chinese television as a student of Jack Ma.
- A strong dApp ecosystem, YouTube influencers whom speak positively about the blockchain, and vibrant dev community.
- A concerted effort to remain relevant in the space with Sun's almost placing the winning bid for the Beeple NFT
The biggest knock I see on Tron is usually the over-exuberance of Sun as a pitch man touting his project via every avenue available. On Twitter, crypto influencers I respect have called him out on follower buying, eponymous project names, paying for celebrities to shill Tron through associates, and other tactics that aggressively speak to his commitment to marketing Tron. I think we can forgive this fervid desire to grow a brand by looking at these tactics as characteristic of someone who is doing anything it takes to make his project a success. Lest we forget "Spamazon" and Jeff Bezos' similarly aggressive growth email marketing tactics.
While Justin Sun is a marketing man at heart, he also does have something meaningful to bring to the DeFi discussion alongside Vitalik Buterin and Hayden Adams. His JustStable, JustSwap, and JustDeFi platforms are excellent versions of MakerDAO, Uniswap, and Compound that extend a similar functionality with a tiny fraction of the gas fees that is choking out Ethereum mainnet activity.
All of these DeFi solutions are owned by Justin Sun, however, so other then staking in JustSwap for a TRX-based crypto pair, there's not a lot of room to invest on Tron's entrance into DeFi, except for one well-regarded platform, the largest dApp Div management tool and third most visited Tron tool: TronDash.
I've been reporting on TronDash since early 2019
There is a lot to like about TronDash:
- They the first to bring to market a Tron dApp Div management tool that allowed one to claim divs on dozens of platforms from a centralized screen, saving an abundance of time for those scrambling to their many dApp investments to claim the offered daily rewards. For many dApps, if you didn't claim your daily divs then they would be forfeited.
- The longevity of the project: it's been innovating and holding strong for years. Many flash-in-the-pan projects are here and then gone within a week. When a project has been around for 100+ weeks then I start to take notice. Longevity is a very positive investing signal. It also speaks to the quality of a projects devs, community building, and the strength of their tech.
- Use case innovation: their introducing pools a la JustSwap pre-dates the DeFi craze and their BTT, DASH, and TRX pools were one of the first to show how a simple Solidity smart contract can be effectively used to earn an income from users going in and out of the pool by setting the stake and forgetting it, earning a handsome ROI in the meantime.
- They utilize Aragon's DAO architecture for governance, allowing the platform and the tech introduced to take center stage.
- Their whitepaper is well-written, visually arresting, and nicely communities the platform's value.
There are two ways to plant your flag, as it were, in this crypto project.
1) The TDD-TRX JustSwap page
This provides you with access to TDD to hold in your TronLink wallet and stake JustSwap, if you choose, to earn a good-sized stream of TDD and TRX on transactional volume.
2) The TDD Liquidity Farm
With this method you are given TDDFRM tokens that give you a portion of a daily pool, exposure to TDD-TRX held in that TDDFRM smart contract pool, and recurring divs as users get into the pool. All of this is done within the contract and updated when you interact with the smart contract.
You can buy TDD directly from the internal swap, but recognize that due to the complexity of the smart contracts that it'll take very likely 25 TRX to successfully perform the function. It used to be 1 or 2 tron, but the DAO gas fee proposal magnified this number. This proposal and more aggressive burn of TRX just goes to further create that demand, by the need to pay these gas fees to interact with the blockchain, that has boded so well for Ethereum. JustSwap gets it done for 8 TRX, at the moment. It bears repeating that these gas fees do not have to be paid if you freeze a healthy amount of TRX. The Tron network will daily refresh one's Bandwidth and Energy.
I like the potential of Tron to continue to grow as a player of increasing importance and TronDash to remain a mainstay part of the discussion of continued Tron-specific blockchain innovation platform.
