San Francisco-based BitTorrent, which is the company behind the world’s most popular peer-to-peer communications protocol and products namely BitTorrent and µTorrent, has started accepting cryptocurrencies for its premium digital products.
In a press statement, the company said that customers can now pay for its Pro and Ads Free products using Bitcoin, TRON, and Binance Coin. They can purchase one-year subscriptions of BitTorrent or µTorrent products, including Ads Free and Pro for Windows. Pro includes anti-virus and anti-malware screening, file converting and playability in HD.
“BitTorrent joins a growing list of online companies whose products and services accept TRX as payment,” Justin Sun, founder of TRON and CEO of BitTorrent, said in a statement. “With BitTorrent’s over 100 million users, the move helps increase the use of TRX in online marketplaces while giving consumers more options to unlock value from BitTorrent’s premium products.”
BitTorrent selected CoinPayments.net, a provider of integrated payment gateways for cryptocurrencies, to introduce decentralized currencies into its decentralized applications.
How BitTorrent Plans to Use Blockchain
BitTorrent division TRON, which claims to be building the infrastructure for a truly decentralized Internet, recently released details about Project Atlas, an initiative that paves the future of content distribution. In its first phase, BitTorrent plans to connect the peer-to-peer network and its 100 million monthly active users to the TRON blockchain. Using a set of BitTorrent protocol extensions, a custom token, and an in-client token economy, the company aims to make the BitTorrent protocol faster and better for hundreds of millions of users.
In the initial phase of the project, BitTorrent peers will be able to spend tokens to incentivize users on faster networks to seed torrents for longer periods, which will lead to better swarm longevity and faster download speeds. BitTorrent seeders will be able to earn tokens by dedicating more of their bandwidth and storage to ensure that swarms are faster and live longer.
BitTorrent is implementing the features as a set of backward-compatible protocol extensions, meaning all torrent clients will continue to work flawlessly, irrespective of if a user chooses to download or seed to/from the new generation of users, or if a user is running a torrent client other than BitTorrent or µTorrent.
BitTorrent plans to implement this exciting evolution of the protocol across its desktop and mobile products.
