Accusations were flying on social media over alleged plagiarism by cryptocurrency newcomer Tron (TRX).
Many of the pages in a Tron whitepaper appear to have been lifted straight from an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) whitepaper. Juan Benet of IPFS provided most of the analysis the details the alleged plagiarism.
The introduction is Tron’s own, but that is where the originality ends, critics charged.
Much of the whitepaper is made up of basic ETH contract, Kademila, and P2P messaging information that is widely available to the public. As the most damning piece of evidence, Tron reportedly goes on to describe IPFS’s BitSwap strategy almost verbatim.
Tron lists the function of their BitSwap strategy as:
- “Maximize the node and overall transaction performance”
- “Prevent greedy nodes from taking advantage of or reducing the swapping performance”
- “Efficient and exclusive to other strategies”
- “Be friendly to the credit node”
IPFS describes the function of their BitSwap strategy as:
- “Maximize the trade performance for the node, and the whole exchange”
- “Prevent freeloaders from exploiting and degrading the exchange
- “Be effective with and resistant to other, unknown strategies”
- “Be lenient to trusted peers”
Both BitSwap strategies are presented in this same four bullet points. Subsequently, each paper goes on present the same mathematical formula as applied to the BitSwap strategy.
No references are made at any point in Tron’s whitepaper citing IPFS.
Bad translation?
Justin Sun, founder of Tron and Peiwo, took to Twitter to defend himself. He blamed translators.
“Our original version of the whitepaper is in Chinese and we have a very detailed reference to the latest Chinese version. The English, Korea, Japanese and Spanish versions are translated by the volunteers. The translation missed numerous important details not just reference,” Sun wrote.
It has not all been bad news for Tron however. They recently just received a big show of support from the Chinese government.
Peiwo App, part of Tron Labs, was awarded the National High-Tech Enterprise qualification. This would allow them favored status when it comes to issues such as hiring and further research.
All of this come on the heels of huge gains for Tron.
What has already been a wild 2018 for Tron is now looking a little uncertain as these plagiarism accusations have come to light.
As recently as Dec. 4, Tron was worth $0.0021. It then soared to a new ATH of $0.2317, at which point it has been on a steady decline since.
