Sun Unveils TRON 4.0 Era as Blockchain Scalability Era Kicks In

Sun Unveils TRON 4.0 Era as Blockchain Scalability Era Kicks In

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The TRON 4.0 era is about to start. That’s according to the project’s founder Justin Sun, who has been busy building hype for the upgrade in recent weeks.

On June 3, Sun took to Twitter to ask his followers which features of the forthcoming network they most expected, saying he would reward 10 lucky winners with a TRON merch pack. Most of the replies highlighted interoperability, private transactions, security and scalability.

A New, Privacy-Focused Blockchain

Sun has been pulling back the curtain on TRON 4.0, announcing in a recent video that it will arrive later this year. 

Imagine what we can have if we can introduce high scalability, privacy, a cross-chain solution and an enterprise application all together,” Sun mused in the video. “We will see amazing programs on the protocol itself which empowers more enterprise developers to build a better solution for the blockchain industry.”

TRON 4.0 will leverage zk-SNARK technology and a Byzantine Fault Tolerant mechanism to achieve advancements in privacy and scalability, with the aim of outperforming Ethereum 2.0. As well as supporting anonymous transactions, the revamped network will act as a smart contract gateway between different tokens, with users able to convert privacy tokens into traceable ones. 

A new cross-chain solution, meanwhile, will let enterprises build their own blockchain on top of TRON, with the network acting as a hub from which disparate blockchains can communicate with each other.

TRON 4.0 vs Ethereum 2.0

If it wasn’t obvious from Sun’s frequent potshots at Vitalik Buterin, TRON 4.0 is positioning itself as an alternative to Ethereum 2.0, which will introduce staking and sharding later this year. The long-awaited upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain remains on track, according to project developer Danny Ryan. 

In a June 2 blog post entitled The State of Eth2, Ryan called Ethereum 2.0 “an ambitious, multi-year project that will be rolled out in phases” and provide “little disruption to the way things are done today.” Multi-year is certainly true: the upgrade was first announced in 2018 while a launch date remains unclear.

Where Sun’s video was succinct and to the point, Ryan’s blog is a more exhaustive look at what users can expect from Ethereum 2.0, when the network will move from proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm to a new proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm: “All of the applications we know and love become integrated in the upgraded eth2 consensus mechanism, retaining the feature-set we are used to while simultaneously opening up the vast new landscape of a secure proof-of-stake consensus with native access to a highly scalable data layer.”

Speaking of scaling, Vitalik Buterin recently indicated that Layer-2 solutions were starting to bear fruit, explaining “what’s left is refinement and deployment.”

Blockchain’s endless scaling battle isn’t just between TRON and Ethereum. New network Elrond is currently preparing to launch its final testnet, having commissioned a $40,000 bug bounty. Elrond has promised a 1,000x improvement in blockchain throughput and speed, delivering up to 10,000 tps. Like Ethereum, Elrond will use sharding technology to achieve its throughput ambitions.

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