While most cryptocurrencies have seen ongoing price slides since the market peaked in January 2018, a relative newcomer is bucking trends with solid growth over the last few months as it seeks to take on Ethereum.

Called TRON, the cryptocurrency and blockchain platform debuted in December 2017. It’s pitched as a decentralized platform that aims to build a free, global digital content entertainment system with distributed storage technology.

Among its benefits, the TRON platform can handle up to 2,000 transactions per second, compared with 25 for Ethereum and between three and six for bitcoin. It also has its own wallet that can support TRON tokens, called TRX, and other tokens that operate on TRON’s mainnet, which is a blockchain that transfers digital currency from senders to recipients.

Operating in a similar fashion to Ethereum, in that it offers both its own cryptocurrency and operates as a platform for others, TRON started gaining attention when founder Justin Sun acquired BitTorrent Inc. for $140 million in June.

It appeared to be a somewhat strange acquisition for a cryptocurrency, but more came to light when BitTorrent announced a new cryptocurrency Jan. 3. Called the BitTorrent Token, the new token, which runs on the TRON mainnet, can be used to speed up downloads.

The significance of the deal is the token tapping into a mostly noncryptocurrency community. BitTorrent claims to have 170 million users a month.

Those users, initially only those outside of the U.S., will gain access to BitTorrent Token through the UTorrent browser, the world’s most popular BitTorrent browser. In theory, even if only some users sign up, the token immediately gets a user base in the millions with real-world practical use.

As Forbes pointed out Sunday, it’s also a demonstration of TRON as a platform for decentralized apps, considered by some to be the next big thing in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Dapps, as they’re known, are applications run by many users on a decentralized network with trustless protocols designed to avoid any single point of failure.

Ultimately support for Dapps and the likes of BitTorrent Token is increasing real-world demand for the TRON Platform, and with demand comes rising prices. The price of TRON is up 42 percent over the last month, to 2.89 cents as of 9 p.m. EST.

TRON has been higher in the past. Like other cryptocurrencies, it had its own surge in price at the peak of the market in January 2018, but unlike its peers, it’s showing signs of steady recovery.

It’s also is now the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, sitting at $1.941 billion, just behind Litecoin at $1.96 billion. A small increase in its price could see it easily climb the ladder with EOS, currently in fourth place with a $2.152 billion market cap.

Price increases in any cryptocurrencies can be short-lived and always amount to speculation. But with real-world use cases being implemented, not just theorized, there’s good reason investors are taking a hard look at TRON.

Image: 159526894@N02/Flickr