In 2020, the entire cryptocurrency industry sprung to life again, fueled by institutional investments, new developments, and a wave of DeFi innovation that saw the utility and potential of major cryptocurrencies better explored.
Without a doubt, TRON has been one of the most active platforms this year. As a decentralized file storage and content sharing platform, TRON has made major strides towards achieving greater adoption, and building out the potential of the platform — thanks to a plethora of new acquisitions and developments in 2020.
Let’s take a look at what it has achieved so far.
2020 in Review
Beginning the year with a bang, TRON completed the unexpected acquisition of Steemit Inc in February — one of the most popular blockchain-based blogging networks. By doing so, it added more than 10,000 daily active users to the TRON ecosystem.
In April, TRON’s partnership with Samsung bore fruit, and an exclusive TRON section was launched on the Samsung Play Store — allowing hundreds of millions of Samsung device owners to access TRON dApps directly from their phone.
Not long after, TRON announced the stablecoin lending and governance platform JUST, and completed a sell-out token sale for JST on Poloniex. The JST token would go on to climb to 20x its listing price following a spate of prominent exchange listings.
???? #LaunchBase #JUST Token Sale in 60 minutes! ⏰
First come, first serve, so stay alert! ⚡
????https://t.co/qtZQUKsCcM pic.twitter.com/gJ3eKUOjuf
— Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) May 5, 2020
As we moved into the second half of the year, TRON’s DeFi ambitions became clear, and a bunch of new DeFi-related developments was made on the network. Starting with a development that made TRC20 tokens interoperable with the Waves platform, thanks to Gravity — a cross-chain communications protocol.
Just days later, the first decentralized automatic market maker (AMM) exchange launched on TRON — known as JustSwap. The live stream of the launch was viewed by over half a million people, and JustSwap was met with immediate success, forming the foundations of DeFi on TRON.
The JUST platform launched in August, opening up yield-farming to TRON network participants, and providing the first TRX-backed stablecoin to users. In September, BitTorrent (BTT) was launched as a TRC20 token and was added as a collateral method to JUST, while TRON forged a partnership with Band Protocol to bring decentralized oracle-based price feeds to dApp developers.
Rounding out September with a bang, TRON also partnered with BitGo to bring wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) and wrapped ether (WETH) to the TRON blockchain as TRC20 tokens. As a result, users can now transact with BTC and ETH on TRON, while benefiting from its extremely low transaction fees.
TRON was able to maintain this momentum into the final quarter of the year, acquiring DLive — one of the largest decentralized streaming platforms and the second biggest streaming platform in Turkey — in October and launching its own oracle service that same month (JustLink).
In December, TRON partnered with Huawei to bring the BitTorrent app to Huawei’s AppGallery store to bring decentralized file sharing to up to 3 billion devices, and also launched the TRON-powered decentralized lending platform JustLend to an impressive reception.
The TRX Token
The main beneficiary of these efforts? The TRX token holders. Since the beginning of the year, the TRON token has seen near-constant growth in value.
As per data from CoinMarketCap, TRX has demonstrated an overall bullish trend throughout 2020, starting the year at $0.0133 before climbing up to its current value of $0.029 — equivalent to a gain of 118 YTD.
The TRX token has seen near constant growth throughout 2020. (Image credits: CoinMarketCap)
This growth appears to have been largely catalyzed by the increasing range of new use-cases for the TRX token — which can now be used to mint JUST stablecoins, traded on JustSwap for other TRC20 tokens, staked for network rewards, and used for yield farming in various TRON-based DeFi protocols, among other things.
This also helped TRX trading volumes reach their all-time highest value in 2020, as more than $7 billion worth of TRX changed hands in a single day in September during a meteoric price rally — signaling a growing interest in the asset.
And the year isn’t quite over yet.
