The “Independence Day”, announced by Justin Sun, founder of the TRON Foundation, marked the end of a four-week testing period. The Foundation’s team made sure that the safe transition of the ERC-20 tokens to the new network is possible, protecting investors' funds.
The aim of the independent MainNet is to guarantee a free, autonomous, and self-governed decentralized protocol with robust community consensus.
As part of the process, a total of 1, 000, 000, 000 TRX coins worth of $50 million will be burnt, reducing the TRX amount at the beginning of the launch to 99, 000, 000, 000. The remaining amount of 33,251,807,524 TRX tokens will be held and locked by the TRON foundation until the 1st January 2020.
The TRON team provided a communication platform for the community and the stakeholders for releasing updates and testing the new and different features via a 12-hour livestream. The move is planned to run in 4 different stages: Preparation, Guardian Phase, Genesis Phase, and Constitutional Phase.
The running of an independent MainNet places TRON among Ethereum’s competitors. TRON’s team announced that their internal tests showed that the network is “400 times faster” than Ethereum.
TRON’s decision for an independent MainNet launch was also influenced by the characteristics of the ERC-20 tokens. They can be used solely on the Ethereum platform, falling back on certain standards which allow them to be shared, exchanged, or transferred to a crypto-wallet.
Though ERC-20 also makes the creation of new tokens extremely easy, there are situations that tokens might be unintentionally destroyed when they are used as payment for a smart contract. To solve this problem, the Ethereum community is working on a new standard called ERC-223.