Bad news for users of the TRON blockchain: a few days ago BitTorrent announced the interruption of the BTT token airdrop.
📩Announcing the End of BTT Airdrops to TRX Holders
BitTorrent Foundation will reserve all of the remaining $BTT as rewards for the BitTorrent community to encourage their participation in distributed file storage, seeding and transmission activities.
— BitTorrent (@BitTorrent) June 13, 2020
Before going into the reasons for this abrupt stop, let’s summarize some key points of this airdrop and why it was launched.
The BTT token and the longest-running airdrop in history
The BTT token was created with the intent to be integrated within the BitTorrent software, as a utility token to speed up the download and exchange of files within the BitTorrent network.
To facilitate the adoption of this token, the BitTorrent Foundation launched an 11 billion BTT airdrop campaign in February 2019 to be distributed among TRON (TRX) holders.
The airdrop started on February 11th, 2019 and was scheduled to run on a monthly basis until February 11th, 2025, for a total of 6 years, allowing anyone to access this airdrop, making it the longest in the history of cryptocurrencies.
Unfortunately, as often happens in this sector, the rules of the game have changed and so on June 11th users realized that the airdrop had not been distributed.
BitTorrent’s statement to announce that the airdrop was finished occurred after June 11th, which led many users to complain about not notifying them in advance.
The statement explains that 16 rounds of airdrop have been made and more than 25.9 billion tokens have been distributed out of a total of 100 billion, so 74 billion tokens, instead of being distributed, will be used in a different way. We will have to wait for another statement for details.
The reasons that led to the interruption of the airdrop seems to lie in the incredible activity of BitTorrent Speed, the program that allows using the tokens to request bandwidth and file upload speed or to earn them by sharing files and seeding them for other users. We are talking about over 12 million users per month and an average of 10 thousand BTFS (BitTorrent File System) nodes.
The price of the BTT token suffered during the crypto crash in mid-March reaching an all-time low of $0.0001, whereas now it is traded at around $0.0003.
