In May, 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 while details leaked here and there, there was no official confirmation from the parties involved. That changed today.
This morning both BitTorrent Inc. and the TRON Foundation confirmed the acquisition. This means that the file-sharing company, with uTorrent as its flagship software, will be part of the TRON team going forward.
“We are excited to announce that TRON has officially closed its acquisition of BitTorrent,” BitTorrent Inc. just announced.
“With this acquisition, BitTorrent will continue to provide high quality services for over 100M users around the world. We believe that joining the TRON network will further enhance BitTorrent and accelerate our mission of creating an Internet of options, not rules.”
BitTorrent will keep its current product line intact and will be operating from TRON’s San Francisco office going forward. Both teams will merge and together they plan to take the technology behind TRON to a new level.
TRON’s Justin Sun sees BitTorrent as a great fit for the foundation’s goal to decentralize the web. The legacy BitTorrent protocol will remain, but TRON hopes to bring new life to it.
“The BitTorrent acquisition embodies TRON’s ‘All-In Decentralization’ strategy. TRON and BitTorrent share the same vision for a decentralized Web. I believe BitTorrent will gain new life from integrating into the TRON ecosystem, and TRON will continue BitTorrent’s protocol legacy.”
It’s unclear how BitTorrent technology will be integrated into the TRON network. No concrete details have been announced but both parties have decentralization as their main pillars, and that won’t change.
“With the integration of BitTorrent, TRON aims to liberate the Internet from the stranglehold of large corporations, give data rights back to the individual, and reignite the early 21st century vision of a free, transparent, decentralized network to connect the world, because the internet belongs to the people,” Sun notes.
No financial details relating to the acquisition have been released but it was previously reported that Sun had agreed to pay $140 million for BitTorrent Inc. and its assets.
While the acquisition has been causing shockwaves in the already volatile crypto market, BitTorrent’s users have been relatively quiet. Aside from a few confused uTorrent users, who feared that their clients would turn into cryptocurrency miners, the issue has not been widely discussed.
Those worried users can rest assured, though, as the uTorrent team stresses that they have no intention to change, or mine.
“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,” the uTorrent team said previously.
