There would be no central system controlling and forwarding the live streams.

“And so you say that word and say, ‘Alright, now this is a really interesting problem.’” The idea was to use the BitTorrent protocol to support the live streams. Then, management added a familiar objective: decentralize it. A confused former employee wondered, “What’s the selling point?” “It’s not hard to stream video to people on their phones,” another employee said. Sun demanded “a very, very aggressive schedule.” Employees thought the project was “cool,” but the market was saturated with live-stream apps like FaceTime, Facebook Live, and Skype. “It got canned and set aside, so it had to be revived.” But it was a “bizarre” situation where the engineers didn’t really know what they were building. In fact, BitTorrent’s brainy founder, Bram Cohen, originally coded the bare bones. On the surface, it was just a live-stream app. Complaints streamed in, like, “Hey, I just lost my life savings!” A former employee recalled Sun and the senior Beijing employees ignoring the scam warnings during weekly meetings and sometimes mocking English-only employees’ ideas in Mandarin, before telling the interpreter, “Don’t translate that.” So these people would get on our blockchain and scam. Meanwhile, questionable developers gathered on the Tron Network like ants to sugar.

Sun eventually built an office in Shenzhen, China, where programmers worked on copycats. The most successful were gambling apps, employees told me, and Tron preferred to “squash” any app by imitating it. Users purchased some apps with Tron’s cryptocurrency, and the company sometimes took a sliver of the app’s revenue. Even though Sun went to extremes to control Tron’s public image, his own app store, called the Tron Network, was a free-for-all.

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