Back in final days of May this year, there was a lot of speculation as to whether Justin Sun was indeed planning on acquiring the popular file sharing platform, BitTorrent. In the report by Ethereum World News, the name of the BitTorrent company was abruptly changed without an explanation.
The source of the name change,Torrentfreak.com, had this to say:
There is something fresh though – BitTorrent Inc. has a new name. While it hasn’t been published anywhere, the company formerly known as BitTorrent Inc. is now Rainberry Inc.
Rainberry’s Chief Product Officer, Jordy Berson, would additionally inform TorrentFreak that:
Rainberry Inc is the official name of the company; it was changed right around the start of 2017.
Therefore, it is no surprise that the BitTorrent acquisition can now be officially confirmed.
Justin Sun had initially sent a letter of Intent to acquire Rainberry with a ‘no shop’ clause that prevented the company from negotiating any other offers while the letter was still valid.
However, Rainberry would then violate the clause, leading Sun to sue the company. Sun would later drop the lawsuit and register a company under the name of ‘Ranberry Acquistion’. The same company has in turn filed a change of status with the California Secretary of State due to a merger. Rainberry Inc. also filed for a similar change of status on the same day indicating that the the two companies have merged.
The BitTorrent management has gone ahead and informed staff about the new deal as early as last week. As is the case with most mergers, the staff have been advised to be silent about it. The company’s shareholders have also been contacted by the agent handling the transfer of ownership.
The exact price tag of the acquisition has not been disclosed but the Tron Foundation holds about $1.65 Billion in TRX. This means that the foundation has deep enough pockets to acquire BitTorrent although it has not been indicated that they did so with TRX.
One possible utilization of the BitTorrent platform by Justin Sun and the Tron Foundation, would be to further decentralize the web as envisioned by the Tron Whitepaper. What better way to kick start your vision than to acquire an already existing peer-to-peer platform and do some fine tuning to meet your needs.
