TRX on Solana makes as much sense as ETH on Bitcoin
Tron blockchain founder Justin Sun has decided to bridge some of the Tronix (TRX) coin that secures Tron onto an entirely different blockchain.
In a move that makes as much sense as Vitalik Buterin moving ETH to another blockchain, TRX is now available to purchase on Solana.
Sun called the move “a real collaboration” and a fulfillment of his March 18 promise.
Branded as an “integration” to facilitate cross-chain swaps between Tron and Solana, Sun assured his followers that his social media wasn’t hacked. He heralded the move as removing the need for an intermediary to trade across the two blockchains.
Read more: Explained: Why hackers keep exploiting cross-blockchain bridges
TRX cannot be a native token on Solana
Of course, both of these blockchains rely on their own coin — and their coin alone — for transaction fees, payment to validators, and securing their network against attacks. No blockchain can process the native token of another blockchain for its own, on-chain processes.
In order to accomplish any type of bridge, people establish funds, smart contracts, or other liquidity pools to simulate the financial effect of price parity or the locking/unlocking of tokens across wallets of various blockchains.
However, these financial arrangements introduce a variety of additional risks and don’t literally merge any coin onto a different blockchain.
Saying TRX is on Solana is like saying BTC is on Ethereum. BTC isn’t on Ethereum despite escrow, wrapped, or custodial financial products like Wrapped BTC (WBTC) available for trading on Ethereum. In reality, bitcoin (BTC) always stays on the Bitcoin blockchain while third parties make promises about the financial ties of that BTC via third-party products.
In the same way, Sun has promised “liquidity” and other financial promises that link TRX, which actually remains on the Tron blockchain, to the contract address that Sun claims is the Solana version of TRX.
Historically, some of Sun’s promises about pegs and bridges have been questionable. Indeed, he promised to link BTC and Tron-based WBTC, then he removed that WBTC from a proof of reserves dashboard.
Read more: Justin Sun’s HTX redeems $500M in WBTC it wasn’t supposed to have
Justin Sun’s second blockchain migration for TRX
Sun’s guarantee to financially link TRX to a Solana contract address is actually his second blockchain migration. TRX started life in 2017 as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. A year later, Sun created a separate TRX coin on the Tron blockchain and then conducted a series of burns to reduce the supply of the ERC-20 TRX token.
Today, Sun is conducting a similar financial migration: using assets to financially link TRX on Tron to a separate contract address called TRX on Solana.
Tron-based TRX also carries voting rights called “Tron Power” for super representatives.
Solana (SOL), in contrast, is the mainnet native token of its own blockchain. It does not exist on Tron or any other blockchain.
There are, of course, many wrapped, pegged, bridged, or financialized versions of these tokens on various third-party blockchains.
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