Tron (TRX): An opportunity or risk?

Whether you love it or hate Tron, luck has not been on its side.

First, due to the overall crypto market growth Tron had tremendous inflow of inexperienced buyers who wanted to double/triple their money overnight. Although Tron's whitepaper clearly outlines long term strategy of growth, it has been perceived as get rich overnight scheme. This was partly fueled by the initial "cheap" price that could get many on board buying thousands at a time. This led to massive selling during the fake "Korean crypto ban" and the most recent the selloff due to comments from JP Morgan.

Second, highly successful profile of its founder has been tainted by his narcissistic posts like "look , I have x amount of followers now on twitter". Justin may be a scholar, business visionary or entrepreneur, but it takes another set of skills to market the product. And he doesn't not have that set. And when I say market the product, I do not mean merely to advertise it, but also to communicate the benefits of the product to the consumer and the investor. Justin's inability to communicate effectively has led to additional selloff each time he communicated through social media.

Third, it had to compete with XRP. This was not due to having similar product, but due to its price. XRP's "cheap" price, high market cap and the media hype allowed it to sway away many who could potentially be buyers of Tron. But same could be said other way around: Tron swayed away XRP buyers. So either way you look at it, they had to compete for the same crowd of "cheap" coins that were famous at the same time.

So what is next for Tron? Will it survive or will the influx of new coins/tokens make it a history?

Lets look at some facts.

1. Top 5 holders own 90% of the tokens (Source: https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/0xf230b790e05390fc8295f4d3f60332c93bed42e2?range=5)
   This indicates that the float of these tokens are relatively low and any news can move the price. This being said, if Tron will be able to gain any partnerships in US it will move the price of Tron very fast. I say US, because majority of of buyers/investors expect US partnerships and have purchased Tron because there indication of a such partnership.Many of these buyers/investors sold immediately after the announcement that the partnership is with a Chinese company.

2. Partnerships - In a short period of time Tron was able to strike partnership with several companies. The most important of them, Baofeng is listed on Shenzhen Stock Exchange and has 300 million (!) users. Those customers could potentially be using Tron tokens in the future. Also, there is an indication that there are other partnerships in the pipeline. Either way, for a startup to partner with an established company of size of Baofeng is impressive and obviously signals other partnerships are likely.

3. Team - If you ever worked as a white collar professional you know that pay is not always as important as career prospects, because the latter increases your potential of earning more than you are being paid or offered to be paid. The fact that several engineers left Alibaba and other prominent companies to join Tron indicates that they believe in the future of the project so much that they were willing to leave giants like Alibaba. At the very least, these people have a better knowledge of the technology than most who have read the whitepaper.

4. Volume - so far the volume of Tron allows it stay on top of the other coins on one of the largest exchanges-Binance. This allows a significant exposure to new buyers and gives more confidence to the HODL'ers of Tron.

5. Coin burn - If the coin burn plan goes as planned in Q1, it will definitely increase confidence in Tron and as a result will boost its price.

To sum up, currently the factors that I outlined above indicate that Tron will not loose its fame in the near future and if the founder realizes that he project is in a great need for a marketing specialist, we could could see the price of Tron break previous high of 0.00002047. Until then we will continue watching the price action and I will post technical analysis of the price in my upcoming posts. Let me know your thoughts and if you disagree with my assumptions I would love to hear those comments too.