Allegations Surrounding Tron’s Whitepaper Sparks Twitter Backlash

Tron has been headlining cryptocurrency news over the past week. Some of the news was extremely positive, due to the unquestioned strong gains posted by TRX over the past 10 days.

However, some of the noise around the company has been far less positive. Rumors have been engulfing the crypto community suggesting that Tron’s Whitepaper has various sections that have been completely copied from those of other digital currencies, namely IPFS and Filecoin.

.@justinsuntron why does your TRON whitepaper make wholesale copying of @IPFSbot and @MineFilecoin without a single reference? Bitswap, PoRep, PoSt, these are not your ideas?

— Bedeho (@bedehomender) January 7, 2018

In response to the allegations against him, Justin Sun also took to twitter to respond: “We can provide you with the latest Chinese version of the whitepaper and hope we can learn from your advice. Again, from the beginning, we don’t expect numerous languages versions to keep update. After our SF office opens we will have a better English version of everything soon!”

His relatively vague response does not provide enough insight or justification for the seemingly careless act. Additional replies followed suit, attempting to prove that the copying of the Whitepaper is more than just a rumor.

Wow! Absurd! TRON’s “paper” is mostly copied from other projects, or is super basic p2p passed off as original. Zero references.

Archived that PDF in IPFS, in case they take it down: https://t.co/jv7EuSYenL pic.twitter.com/GbiL7MUrnc

— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) January 7, 2018

LiteCoin Creator Charlie Lee retweeted the details illustrating the copied materials, sparking turmoil surrounding the situation. The backlash was well received by Mr. Lee, who defended his actions with a tweet of his own.

So I got a lot of hate for my TRON retweet. Shows that there are A LOT of $TRX bagholders. If you really believe in the project, some FUD is only a speed bump. When you are a top10 coin, you need to be able to survive some FUD.

These tweets help me block haters from my feed.

— Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite) January 8, 2018

While there are varying opinions regarding the accusation, the underlying factor that should matter most is whether Tron’s technology can be developed and implemented properly and in a timely manner.

As the calendar turned to 2018, TRX experienced a meteoric rise, reaching its peak level of 0.300363 on January 5^th, according to Coinmarketcap.com. Twitter began to fill with Tron supporters, who joined the rest of the blockchain community in relative awe of the coin’s swift climb to join the top 10 cryptocurrencies in the world by market cap. At its peak, the market cap of TRX hovered around the $14.76 billion mark.

Some of the positive sentiment around TRX can be attributed to Justin Sun’s announcement of an approaching partnership with a currently unknown public company.