The Tron price surged more than 17 percent on Tuesday amid reports that founder Justin Sun is now in the final stages of closing a deal to acquire peer-to-peer protocol developer BitTorrent.
Tron Founder Justin Sun to Acquire BitTorrent for $140 Million
Rumors about the acquisition had circulated for weeks, but several disputes — including allegations that BitTorrent had violated a no-shop clauses — had hampered the negotiations.
However, TechCrunch is now reporting that Sun and Tron have agreed to acquire BitTorrent for $140 million and that approval documents have already been distributed to shareholders.
Neither Sun nor Tron has publicly revealed how they intend to use BitTorrent, which claims to have approximately 170 million users, but it’s likely that the network will leverage the peer-to-peer file distribution architecture as it seeks to build its “Web 4.0” platform and shake off the perception that the project is predicated on plagiarism.
Tron Price Rallies 17 Percent
The Tron price rallied more than 17 percent on the news, despite the fact that the negotiations had more or less become public knowledge.
At the time of writing, TRX was trading at more than $0.05, up from $0.042 the day prior. Tron now has a market cap of $3.3 billion, enabling it to secure the 10th spot in the market cap rankings. Prior to the rally, it appeared that Tether’s USDT token might supplant Tron and expel it from the market’s top tier.
Both the TRX price surge and word of the BitTorrent acquisition come as Tron is preparing to activate its official network. As CCN reported, Tron is currently in the process of migrating its TRX token to an independent blockchain.
Previously, the coin — which was distributed through an initial coin offering (ICO) — had been constructed as an ERC-20 token. The migration began in late May with the release of the Tron mainnet beta software and should be complete by the end of the month.