Tron Independence Day Explained: What's at Stake for a $3 Billion Blockchain

One year and nearly $3 billion later, the Tron blockchain is set to finally put its much-debated technology to the test.

At least, that's what should happen Monday, when Tron completes the token swap it began last week, migrating the last of its users' funds from ethereum to a new proprietary blockchain. For investors, the moment marks a historic "independence day" of sorts, but it could more broadly become a make-or-break moment for the project, which though controversial, already finds itself among the top cryptocurrencies globally.

Founded last July, Tron has set out to "decentralize the internet." However, the project has yet to rigorously define what this means in practice.

And while Tron's rhetoric may seemingly resemble that of many cryptocurrencies that emerged from 2017's token boom, the project is distinguished by the size of its funding and the outspokenness of its founder, former Ripple representative Justin Sun, who last week caused a stir in the tech world by purchasing the company behind file-sharing service BitTorrent.

Some onlookers speculated that Sun made the acquisition to lend legitimacy to his project - something it has been accused of lacking on more than one occasion.

More specifically, while Tron has positioned itself as a competitor to ethereum and decided to launch its own protocol to address ethereum's "inefficiencies", the project was rebuked earlier this year for using code from the protocol without providing an attribution. These allegations were closely followed by claims that project leaders had plagiarized Tron's white paper.

Despite the gravity of these claims, Tron has done little to dispel concerns. On the contrary, the significant alteration of its roadmap, specifically its decision to abandon its original plan to develop on ethereum in favor of creating its own mainnet and its decision to use a delegated proof-of-stake system, further exacerbated them.