TRON

“Las Vegas on the blockchain” is the best way to describe the TRON dapp ecosystem in 2019. 8 of the top 10 TRON dapps are Casino dapps. In 2019, the total transaction value of TRON was about 4.4 billion USD, of which Casino dapps contributed 3.9 billion USD. Whether it’s transaction value, gameplay or user experience, Casino dapps on TRON blockchain have led the way across all other blockchains.

In terms of the number of daily active users, Casino dapps undoubtedly have the largest, accounting for 60.81% of all users. Most Casino dapp issues dividend tokens (come back to that later). These tokens are mainly traded on decentralized exchange, which increased the user number of Exchange dapps, accounting for 10.93%. The development of Game dapps is relatively slow, and user number has gradually declined since H2 2019, accounting for only 11.36%. There have been two High Risk dapps outbreaks on the TRON platform. One was from March to April, when a large number of High-Risk dapps launched during this period. And the other was in the fourth quarter, when Tronhive went live and attracted many players. And now in top Just.Game.

In terms of transaction volume, Casino dapps once again demonstrated their dominance, accounting for 90.39%. Exchanges accounts for 8.27%.

Casino and Dividend Tokens

Wink was the most successful and profitable Casino dapp in 2019, with an annual transaction value of 2.8 billion USD. On the Wink platform, some of the games such as Live and Poker are not actually decentralized Casino games, which means only deposit and withdraw actions can be tracked on blockchain. As a result, the actual cumulative bet amount could be much higher than 2.8 billion USD.

TRONbet rebranded to be Wink when doing IEO on Binance in July last year. The original game token ANTE was also upgraded to WIN token. During the 9 months before IEO, TRONbet distributed 1.7 billion TRX dividends to the ANTE holders in total, and the accumulated transaction volume exceeded 100 billion TRX, which is equivalent to the total token supply of TRX.

Next, let’s discuss the dividend tokens issued by Casino dapps. To put it simply, many Casino dapps airdrop tokens to players in the form of “play as mining”. The number of tokens acquired is often determined by the amount of players’ bets, such as 1 game token for every 100 TRX bets. By holding and staking these tokens, users will get the right to collect dividends, which means, the Casino platform will regularly distribute a part of their profits to all token holders.

This design attracts many non-Casino users to earn money by “mining” game tokens. Theoretically, each dividends token has a so-called mining cost:

Theoretical mining cost = bet amount * house edge / number of tokens mined

User dividend = platform income * dividend ratio / total locked token * user locked amount

From a mathematical perspective, as long as a user continues to bet the same amount enough times, the mining cost will gradually get closer to the theoretical mining cost. The amount of dividends vary as the platform’s profit fluctuates. As more and more tokens are mined, it will also dilute everyone’s dividend share.

The design of token economy has always played an important role in the blockchain. Due to the improper design of token freeze mechanic, 888TRON suffered a train-like crash after creating an astonishing record of 3.6 billion TRX transactions in a single day (approximately 82 million USD, which is the highest single-day transaction volume in dapp history as well) on March 16th last year. The core design flaw was that there was no limitation on unfreezing time for tokens, which meant users could stake the tokens to participate in dividends and withdraw tokens at any time.

Smart speculators had discovered the arbitrage opportunity. They bought tokens from the secondary market right before the dividends distribution time, staked them to receive dividends and quickly unfroze and sold tokens right after collecting dividends. A large number of selling orders in a short time made the token price on exchanges much lower than the mining cost.

For miners, rather than mining to get tokens, it is better to buy dividends tokens directly at a lower price. As a result, no miners want to play the game to mine, leading to less dividends and less attractive to hold the game tokens, and then the entire game economy quickly collapsed.

However, this Russian team did not give up. It took them half a year to gradually recover the game by optimizing the token economy mechanics, introducing new games, redesigning the UI and a series of promotional activities.

In the second half of last year, more and more high-quality Casino dapps on TRON platform emerged, and some of the traditional online centralized gaming platforms began to make moves on blockchain Casino, with TRON as the first choice. The new generation of Casino dapp represented by Betfury, RocketGame, TronLounge and Bitlex has repeatedly top the ranking list in the Casino category.

Footprints of TRON Ecosystem

There have always been many criticisms about TRON and its founder, Justin Sun. Unlike other technology-driven public chain (e.g. Ethereum), TRON is more like a public chain driven by marketing and business.

Justin is very aggressive in acquisition and ecosystem building. After the successful acquisition of BitTorrent in 2018, he was looking to expand even more in 2019:

• TRC20-based USD stablecoin USDT was launched in April last year, and 916 million USDT have been issued. While ERC-USDT was issued about 16 months earlier than TRC-USDT, with a current total circulation of about 2.29 billion.
• Invest in Polonex and integrate its decentralized exchange TRX Market into the Polonex brand
• Built-in wallet of Samsung blockchain phone added support for TRON
• Acquisition of Dlive, a decentralized live streaming platform

There is no doubt that these capital operations have shown Justin’s ambition and execution ability. But it still depends on whether Justin could integrate the traffic of BitTorrent and Dlive, keep investing in excellent dapp teams to make the TRON dapp ecosystem more diverse. There are also rumors suggesting that during niTROn, the TRON Developer Conference to be held in Seoul in late February, a closer partnership with Samsung will be announced.