Last month, TF broke the news that Justin Sun, the entrepreneur behind the popular cryptocurrency TRON, was in the process of acquiring BitTorrent Inc.
The San-Francisco based file-sharing company confirmed the interest from Sun and last week sources added that details of the sale had been finalized.
One of the questions that remained unanswered is how much the company is worth. This gap has now been filled by TechCrunch, which reports that TRON’s founder agreed to pay $140 million to acquire the company.
According to the report, there are still some outstanding issues regarding the terms of the deal. More than one person claims to have introduced Sun to BitTorrent, which guarantees an extra payout. This has yet to be resolved.
It is unclear what Sun’s plans are for BitTorrent but the existing products, including uTorrent, are not expected to go away. According to a shareholder quoted by TechCrunch, one of the plans is to use the acquisition to “legitimize” TRON’s business, which currently has a controversial reputation.
This is an interesting goal, as BitTorrent itself has also dealt with some controversy of its own. The company was previously asked to do more to combat piracy and a few weeks ago, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas launched an investigation into the links between uTorrent usage and images of child exploitation.
While the final details are worked out, BitTorrent – or Rainberry as it’s called now – has begun hiring new personnel. The company is currently looking for a recruiter to hire new talent as well as several developers, including a senior iOS Engineer.
BitTorrent is currently working on a new iOS app which will allow users to play videos on their mobile devices. When completed, it will be released on Apple’s App Store.
The $140 million acquisition follows a turbulent time for BitTorrent during which the company was nearly destroyed due to questionable management practices. At the same time, none of the new products, services, and business models it developed managed to surpass the early success it had with uTorrent.
Whether the deal with TRON’s founder is a turning point has yet to be seen. TorrentFreak reached out to the company to find out more about its future plans but, at the time of writing, we have yet to hear back.
Upate: Without mentioning the aquisition by name, BitTorrent has released the following statement.
“Our attention has been drawn to the news items that have appeared in the past few weeks speculating about a change in BitTorrent’s business model.
We wish to reiterate that BitTorrent has no plans to change what we do or charge for the services we provide. We have no plans to enable mining of cryptocurrency now or in the future.
BitTorrent has been a pioneer of peer-to-peer file sharing and we believe our vision of democratizing the Web by enabling decentralized, resilient access to information remains as relevant as it was when we started.
We reiterate that we are committed to our hundreds of million users worldwide and will continue to invest and innovate in the BitTorrent and uTorrent products.”
