BitTorrent's BTT Surges 12% as Owner Tron Completes TRX Burn

BTT, the eponymous token of BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer filesharing platform owned by Tron, is up over 12% as the Tron network works through another burn of its TRX token.

Burning crypto involves permanently removing tokens from circulation by transferring them to an inaccessible wallet, often to reduce supply and potentially increase the value of the remaining tokens, and is considered to be deflationary.

In the past month, over 170 million TRX tokens have been removed from circulation, according to data from Tronscan, a block explorer. TRX is currently in a deflation phase with an annualized rate of decrease of 2.99%

Historically, BTT seems to react well to positive news from Tron, even if the TRX token does not move with the same velocity. TRX itself is only up 1.6% on the news, according to CoinDesk Indices data. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), a broad measure of the performance of the digital assets market, is up 3.6%.

In December, BTT surged and nearly doubled in a day after Tron’s blockchain hit 200 million users.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued the BitTorrent Foundation, BitTorrent Inc (now known as Rainberry), Justin Sun, and the Tron Foundation in March 2023, alleging that BTT and TRX constituted unregistered securities and Sun tried to artificially inflate TRX’s trading volume through wash trading schemes.