By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 17th, 2024
Tron Foundation has сonfirmed its cooperation with Baidu, a China-based internet giant, with a view to use its cloud solutions.
Last week, there appeared some rumors that a blockchain startup aiming to decentralized the internet known as Tron had started working on a partnership with a tens of billions of dollars worth industry giant. This information was published by Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron cryptocurrency.
Nevertheless, the name of this potential partner was not provided. What’s more, Justin asked the audience to guess with whom they were trying to establish cooperation. As there were no further details, the digital currency community quite quickly made a conclusion that it could be China’s largest Internet search provider Baidu.
Confirmation
While this issue was being actively discussed, the Tron Foundation finally confirmed all the guesses. The announcement was made via the official Tron Foundation’s Twitter account. Now it is known for sure that Tron and Baidu are joining forces in order to collaborate on the development of a large cloud service having a final goal to offer blockchain solutions of a higher level.
This collaboration is one of the major initiatives that Tron has ever undertaken with a view to achieve mass adoption of blockchain yet.
Industry Experts’ Comments
Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that Tron is a client of Baidu Cloud. Taking into consideration this factor, it is impossible to say that Tron has entered into a formal partnership with Baidu.
For example, CnLedger has reported that “Tron acquired the services of Baidu to launch, build, operate, and debug blockchain-based products on Baidu Cloud”. Moreover, it is said that the both parties haven’t communicated at the blockchain business level.
So, taking into consideration the real circumstances of the interaction of the companies, experts believe that “partnership” is not an appropriate word in this context.
For instance, when we are speaking about one of the most prominent blockchain projects in South Korea called ICON and its signed Memorandum of Understanding with the major Japanese messaging app called LINE, we can consider their interaction to be a partnership. As it is a mutually beneficial cooperation aimed at the development of blockchain apps and application of decentralized systems for the Japanese conglomerate.
Misleading Marketing
In general, as the cooperation between Tron and Baidu presupposes nothing more than an exchange of service, experts criticized Sun for making misleading announcements in order to attract wide attention of the community.
Quoting the message of CnLedger that we have mentioned above, Ari Paul, the co-founder of Blocktower and a well-known cryptocurrency investor, wrote:
“Assuming the below is accurate, this deserves to be called out as misleading marketing. If I buy a computer with Microsoft Windows installed, I should not claim to have partnered with Microsoft without clarifying the limited nature of the ‘partnership.’”
Nevertheless, it is important to say that the Tron Foundation hasn’t announced its interaction with Baidu as “partnership”. The verb “partner” apperared only in the first Sun’s tweet.