TRON is now the 10th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, at $10bn, with one unit trading at about $0.15.
The team behind TRON has not released its working product, a decentralised YouTube-like platform for videos and music which would be based on blockchain, the digital ledger technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
But after a January 4 tweet from chief executive Justin Sun, claiming the start-up would soon announce a partnership with a “very prestigious public listed [sic] company”, TRON’s price more than doubled within 24 hours, hitting a high of 27 cents.
Despite only launching last year, Dentacoin, which claims to be a “blockchain solution for the global dentistry industry”, has a $1.9bn market cap. It is not due to release its testnet, a blockchain used for testing, until the end of 2018. Its development team wants to provide services including a website for reviewing dentists and a database of patients’ medical records
And some alt-coins are outright jokes. For Jackson Palmer, creator of Dogecoin, which is based on an internet meme of a Shiba Inu dog, his digital currency’s market cap acts as a “barometer for crypto mania and speculation”.
According to CoinMarketCap, Dogecoin has a market value of $1.7bn.