Justin Sun, the founder of blockchain startup Tron, has officially announced the acquisition of peer-to-peer file sharing platform BitTorrent.
Proud to announce @BitTorrent and @uTorrent are now part of the #TRON family. BitTorrent is supported by over 100M active users. Together we are building the future of the decentralized Internet! Stay tuned for updates #TRONBT $TRX @Tronfoundation https://t.co/mQQqUeOaHv pic.twitter.com/eSYY4lWsXI
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) July 24, 2018
In an official blog post, Sun announced that TRON has successfully acquired BitTorrent and all BitTorrent products.
“Through this acquisition, BitTorrent and TRON will combine forces, with the TRON US team merging with the BitTorrent team,” Sun wrote. “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.”
The reports on the acquisition floated in the media last month and BitTorrent co-founder and former president Ashwin Navin confirmed to CoinDesk that the actual acquisition cost was $120 million.
BitTorrent also issued a user message stating that it “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.”