Binance Freezes 12 Billion TRX, Votes Itself Into TRON Super Representative Top-Spot

Justin Sun congratulated the exchange via the following tweet:

A big congratulations to our newest SR @binance. 👏👏👏
Binance rocketed to the top of the #TRONSR today with more than 12,000,000,000 votes!
Check out https://t.co/VxhQhE7giQ for all the details! #TRON #TRX $TRX pic.twitter.com/bVCSlXCGzE

— Justin Sun🌞 (@justinsuntron) October 1, 2019

Frozen 12 Billion TRX Used to Influence the Vote

By freezing 12 billion TRX, Binance essential controls 18% of Tron’s entire circulating supply of 66.68 billion. Through this move, Binance edged out Sesameseed from the top spot of Super Representatives. The latter SR has 2.55% of the total votes cast compared to Binance’s 59%. It’s also worth noting that the 12 Billion TRX accounts for 59% of the total votes cast to select the 27 Super Representatives on the Tron network. If the exchange were to continue to leverage the billions of TRX to influence voting, it would guarantee its dominance as an SR for the foreseeable future. It’s a move that is getting Binance criticized for centralized behavior and ultimately circles back to arguments about the viability of proof of stake assets and governance models.

Tron (TRX) Staking to Begin Today Binance

In addition to the exchange becoming a Super Representative, Binance will start supporting Tron (TRX) staking beginning today, Oct 1. Users of the exchange who own TRX will now have the opportunity of earning a share of the block rewards produced by all Super Representatives on the Tron Network. Binance will be taking hourly snapshots of TRX balances to calculate rewards to users with a minimum of five TRX. More on this can be found in the official announcement by the exchange. One Twitter user by the name of Khanh pointed out that Binance staking 12 Billion votes to gather 59% of the votes and consequently becoming the top SR was a big blow to decentralization on the Tron network.

A Symbiotic Relationship

Over the past few months, there has been a unique relationship between Binance and the Tron project. Evidence of this can be found in the following events:

• Binance permanently supporting migration of the initial ERC20 TRX tokens into Tron Mainnet coins
• BitTorrent becoming the first project launched on the Binance Launchpad platform this year
• Justin Sun showing support for Binance during the 7,000 BTC hack by pledging to deposit an equal amount of Bitcoin on the exchange to offset the loss
• Justin Sun invited Changpeng Zhao to the now-postponed lunch with Warren Buffett.

What are your thoughts on Binance becoming the top Super Representative on the Tron Network? Does this make Tron centralized? Please tell us your opinions in the comment section below.