In 2018, Sun Yuchen stood at the forefront of the blockchain industry. At that time, TRON was just starting to take shape, but he knew that to firmly establish a foothold in the competitive arena, he had to find a sufficiently solid foundation. That summer, he set his sights on a name that carried the memories of a generation. BitTorrent, a $140 million acquisition deal, thus began.
For Sun Yuchen, BitTorrent was by no means a coincidence. As early as his student days, he was a loyal user of this P2P tool. Those nights spent downloading resources with the little orange arrow icon made him truly feel the magic of distributed networks — this first large-scale P2P protocol, born in 2001, at its peak carried 40% of global internet traffic, achieving 'freedom of download' through technological innovation in an era when centralized servers were struggling with bandwidth issues.
'This is not just simple emotional consumption, but a reorganization of technical genes.' Sun Yuchen emphasized in an internal meeting. In his strategic blueprint, the distributed transmission framework of BitTorrent naturally aligns with the decentralized concept of blockchain. At that time, the TRON public chain urgently needed to expand its ecological scenarios, and BitTorrent's 170 million global active users were the most precious traffic treasure.
The negotiation process for the acquisition was not easy. According to people close to the deal, Sun Yuchen personally led a team to have in-depth discussions with the BitTorrent team seven times, breaking down everything from technical architecture to future planning. The vision he painted for the other party was extremely tempting: to reconstruct the incentive mechanism with blockchain, allowing 'seeders' to receive token rewards for their contributions, and transforming users' download demands into ecological vitality.
After the transaction was concluded, Sun Yuchen quickly promoted the implementation actions. He personally finalized the issuance of BTT tokens based on the TRC-10 standard and led the design of the 'BitTorrent Speed' project rules — users pay BTT to enhance download speeds, and uploaders earn tokens by seeding. This mechanism seems simple, but it hides his profound considerations: to activate the dormant P2P network with economic incentives, and then integrate it into the TRON ecosystem, forming a closed loop of 'users - traffic - value'.
In public, Sun Yuchen has mentioned more than once: 'The rebirth of BitTorrent is the best testing ground for blockchain to transform the traditional internet.' What he wanted was never a nostalgic symbol, but to transform this old tool into an important pillar supporting the TRON ecosystem in his hands. This acquisition ultimately became a highly personal mark in his expansion plan.
