The TRON blockchain, created by Justin Sun in September 2017, has demonstrated excellent performance since the launch of its mainnet in May 2018. In July 2018, BitTorrent, a pioneer of decentralized services with nearly 100 million monthly active users, was acquired and integrated into the TRON ecosystem. In April 2021, TRON surpassed Tether (USDT) on Ethereum in terms of circulating stablecoin supply. By December 2021, after full decentralization, the TRON network became fully community-governed as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
The TRON Foundation, often referred to as TRX, released TRONIX, the network's utility token based on the TRON protocol. In the TRON blockchain, TRX coins serve as the primary unit of account, and the value of all tokens is determined by the value of TRON. The TRON ecosystem includes tokens such as BitTorrent (BTT), JUST (JST), USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT), Decentralized USD (USDD), and NFTs.
All TRC standard tokens use TRX as a means of paying for gas and exchanges. Due to several application scenarios that govern transactions and applications on the blockchain, TRX acts as the unifying element of the entire TRON ecosystem.
How TRON Works
For the TRON ecosystem, a compact, Turing-complete virtual machine called the TRON Virtual Machine (TVM) was created. Its goal is to create a specialized blockchain system that is efficient, stable, practical, secure, and scalable. Tokens compatible with TVM are implemented via smart contracts using the TRC-20 technical standard and are fully compatible with ERC-20.
The architecture of TRON consists of storage, core, and application layers. Consensus, account management, and smart contracts are various modules of the core layer. Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) is the consensus mechanism used in TRON to achieve consensus.
The blockchain consensus technology known as Delegated Proof of Stake allows users to use their TRX balances to vote for various delegates. Once elected, these delegates gain the right to decide important issues affecting the entire network.
Twenty-seven super representatives (SRs), responsible for tracking the transaction history in the TRON ecosystem, validate these transactions. A super representative is elected every 6 hours and is rewarded with TRX coins mined by the blockchain mechanism for their services. Every 3 seconds, a new block is added to the TRON blockchain, and the entity that adds the blocks receives 16 TRX coins.
TRON employs an efficient instruction set and a stack-based virtual machine. TRON smart contracts are written in the programming language Solidity and other advanced languages. Block Storage and State Storage form a distinctive distributed data storage protocol created by TRON. To better meet the demand for diverse real-world data storage, the idea of a graph database was incorporated into the storage layer architecture.
On the TRON platform, developers can create a wide variety of DApps and unique wallets. The possibilities for useful applications are limitless since TRON allows for the deployment and execution of smart contracts.
Nodes and Accounts in the TRON Network
There are three different types of nodes in the TRON network: witness nodes, full nodes, and Solidity nodes. Witness nodes are created by super representatives and are mainly responsible for creating and voting on proposals, as well as producing blocks. Full nodes broadcast application programming interfaces (APIs), transactions, and blocks. Blocks from other full nodes are synchronized through Solidity nodes, which also offer indexable APIs.
The TRON blockchain offers three different types of accounts: ordinary accounts, token accounts, and contract accounts.