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Justin Sun, founder of Tron, announced on December 6 he will create a new fund for Ethereum and EOS developers to migrate dapps across to the Tron protocol. The offering is that the Tron protocol has faster-transaction times and lower fees, making it easier for dapps to provide a better experience for users.
This follows on the heels of the Tron accelerator, announced last month, which is offering $1 million to likewise woo developers from across the board. According to Cong Li, head of Tron developer community division, the goal of this fund is to seed 100 new dapps.
An increase in dapps could help spearhead wider use of the entertainment-focused blockchain network, which thus far only has two dapps that account for most of its volume.
This is not the first time Justin Sun has gone after Ethereum. In one Twitter spat, he listed seven reasons why Tron is a better platform than Ethereum. It led to a scathing response by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, who added an eighth point, claiming that Tron’s white paper was merely copied from other blockchain projects.
And for months, Tron has been trying to get Ethereum developers to migrate their code. In October, it added support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine, making it straightforward to move dapps onto it. That gave it an advantage over EOS—another platform that’s fast, cheap and angling for more coders—which requires developers to create a wholly new, EOS compatible version of their dapp.
Yet despite Tron’s evangelism, Ethereum developers appear to be disinterested. Li told Decrypt that only around 10 dapps, including Bitizens by Bitguild, have chosen to migrate across, out of 1,900 on the Ethereum platform. He said he reached out to principals at the top 50 dapps, but more than half said they were not considering moving to Tron in the near term.
Some however are willing to switch. “We’re always considering moving onto other platforms,” said Graham de Barra, CEO at Festy, which built four Ethereum dapps. “In the beginning, I thought Ethereum was the future of everything but we now see it’s more of a crowdfunding platform.” He said Tron has the potential to become the most-used blockchain platform because few Ethereum dapps are serviceable.
But he noted that first, Tron must show it has the resources for developers to build on it.