By PopPopPrego (via PublishOx)
The internet gambling/cryptofaucet/cryptostaking/raccoon-enthusiast site BetFury announced this week that they are proposing fusing their two house tokens into a single token, BFG. At the time I joined the site, BetFury had two tokens, one pegged to Bitcoin, BFG(BTC) and the other pegged to Tron BFG (TRX). You “mine” these tokens by betting with their underlying crypto. For example, when you bet Bitcoin satoshi, win or lose, you mine a little bit of the BFG(BTC) token.
Because BetFury has a Bitcoin faucet, it was time-consuming but very possible to keep growing your Bitcoin stake while also gambling just enough to mine 10 BFG(BTC), which means you can make daily staking claims on their set of crypto, which currently is BTC, ETH, BNB, BTT, USDT, TRX. They also have SUN, but the Bitcoin stake doesn’t pay out to that coin. I didn’t have any Tron (TRX) to deposit, and I am more interested in free-for-free-sake plays anyway, so mining BFG(TRX) was essentially impossible.
So, I was quite interested to read through BetFury’s proposal to merge the tokens. They laid out their rationale, which mostly sounded like an effort to solidify their BFG token, asked for my vote, and more or less said “sorry Tron fans.” The voting is HEAVILY in favor of the fusion, which itself heavily favors the value of the BTC token over the TRX token. For me, this is good news because it means that my little pile of BFG will now pay out in all the tokens they offer (again except for SUN).
But does this backing away from Tron on a site that seemed enthusiastic about the coin portend weakness and escalating votes of non-confidence in TRX? I have not read a single bit of encouraging news about Tron lately and a lot of the writers I follow seem to view it as a scam. It seems to me that the BFG fusion is likely a preview of BetFury eliminating their TRX-backed tokens altogether. As I mentioned above, they already have cut off all paths to earning SUN on the site, and relative to BTC, ETH, and BNB, the other Tron tokens are pretty worthless.
In my curiosity, I wanted to know if there were any other indications of weakening in support for Tron. This is actually my first shared splashing about in the financial data for a cryptocurrency, so I hope I don’t make a mess of it!
Tron makes its case, in a sense, as a smart contracts for gaming and entertainment. I honestly don’t know if there are other coins that are as important to betting and gambling, but there are a lot of emerging competitors for entertainment and regular gaming, including the WAX ecosystem and it’s bigger enabler EOS, what Theta and Hive seem to be trying to do, and additional niche players like Library. Please note that I did not do much of a search for competitors to Tron in these spaces. Cointelegraph names its competitors as a blend of what to my mind are huge smart contract and finance rivals like Ethereum, Cardano, and Tezos, as well as EOS.
I just think that it is a little odd that this coin that seemed designed to have partnerships with companies like BetFury is losing that partnership at the same time that BetFury has amped up its relationship with ETH and BNB. Might be a one-off. How about Tron’s currency performance?
Tron’s token, TRX, has a market cap of $3.5 Billion, and a 24 hour trading volume of $1.48 Billion, according to Coinmarketcap.com for 5 March, 2021. Tradingview.com lists TRX as its 19th largest coin by market cap and 15th largest by trading volume. How does that compare historically for TRX?
This chart comes from Coinmarketcap.com and shows more than 2 years of market cap data on TRX. The blue line represents market cap in US Dollars, the yellow line, which is very cool for those considering altcoin investments, is market cap in Bitcoin. You can see that the market cap of TRX was pretty steady through the last couple of rough years and has climbed a bit in USD terms in this 2021 bull run. However, it is actually a smaller market player in Bitcoin terms than in nearly any time since its launch.
Is that a bad thing? I don’t really know, tbh. I am out of my element here, but given the flood of innovative players in the gambling, gaming, entertainment, and smart contract spaces, AND given the occasionally spotty track record of Tron leadership (Hi! Helpful tip…don’t plagiarize your whitepaper!), and the fact that BetFury seems to be giving TRX the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk, I am not bullish.
But, but, is it really a big deal that BetFury is fusing TRX into oblivion? Well, according to dapp.com, BetFury holds a balance of 3,000,000 TRX. This is out of the total estimated pool of 71,659,657,369 TRX in circulation. Yeah, just change that middle 9 to a 6 and you have the total impact that BetFury could exert. Not very much at all.
With that being said, I will be keeping my eyes open for news of new projects and adoptions of Tron. It has some major partners like Samsung, has the BitTorrent partnership, and is still a Top 20 currency, after all.
What do you think?
Is BetFury burying TRX altogether? They have been quite savvy at adding ETH and BNB with nearly perfect timing considering all the planning and marketing setup they need to do for a successful launch. Are they equally savvy at calling the end to Tron?
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