TRON Cryptocurrency Founder Acquires BitTorrent

Jason Sun, the man behind the TRON (TRX) cryptocurrency, has reportedly agreed to buy the company behind the BitTorrent technology, the eponymous client, and the uTorrent client.

The acquisition closed last week, according to an inside source who spoke to Variety. Another source told TechCrunch the cost of the sale is $140 million.

Negotiations between the two companies started last September, according to a TorrentFreak report from May.

Deal almost fell through

Things got rocky between Sun and BitTorrent management last year after the two parties signed a letter of intent that prohibited BitTorrent from seeking and hearing offers from competitors.

Sun sued BitTorrent last year for breaching the letter's terms after he got wind that the company was hearing other offers. In spite of the rocky beginning, the two sides settled their differences and Sun dropped its lawsuit in February.

Soon after, Sun registered a new California company called Rainberry Acquisition, which for a few months remained a mystery to observers until BitTorrent Inc. rebranded into Rainberry, a clear sign the two had reached an agreement.

The two companies reportedly filed a change of status motions with the California Secretary of State last week, on the same day, citing "merger" as the reason.

BitTorrent's future is unclear

It is unclear what Sun plans to do with BitTorrent's core business, but many cryptocurrency experts have noticed today that Sun's TRON cryptocurrency whitepaper had referenced BitTorrent several times, meaning he was familiar with the technology and its power.

BitTorrent is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) that's at the base of today's torrent clients. The technology was extremely popular in the 2000s and up until the mid-2010s, but it has died down in recent years as most users shifted from desktops to mobiles and mobile apps.

In its heyday, BitTorrent Inc. claimed the BitTorrent client had around 150 million monthly active users. BitTorrent Inc, the company behind the BitTorrent protocol, later acquired the uTorrent client, and attempted several times to push its technology to Silicon Valley and music industry firms, but failed. Several execs shuffled through the company, and its founder has left a few years back, opting to create his own cryptocurrency called Chia.

Sun's TRON is today the tenth most popular cryptocurrency based on market cap. There's currently over $4.78 billion TRX coins in circulation, and Sun and the TRON Foundation are believed to hold over $1.65 billion of these funds.