Research Firm Claims that Tron Plagiarized Code from Other Crypto Projects

Tron has been suspected of copying codes from several projects in the crypto sphere according to Researchers from Digital Asset Research (DAR). Tron is seen to be facing a strong backlash as plagiarism of code is not respectful and looked down upon in the online community.

The code of Tron has been copied from several projects including the second most popular cryptocurrency which is Ethereum. Researchers have published an article about the plagiarism, legality of such actions and the future implications of Tron in the long run.

“On December 31, 2017, the project was initially accused of violating the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 (LGPL) because the project does not mention that its client, Java-Tron, was derived from EthereumJ, which is one of the first Ethereum libraries,” DAR wrote in the article.

After the accusation was made, Tron had added the LGPL license language to 14 of the files.

However, Tron was still found to have code which was copied and different from EthereumJ without references.

Lucas Nuzzi outlined how Tron tried to plagiarise and cover their tracks,  “In the commit above, developers went through the hassle of changing the title of some functions to hide the plagiarism, as evidenced by commit d4ad9c9. There is no valid reason to change the EthereumJ’s public class “name,” for example, to “dataBaseName,” other than to make it difficult to track the similarities between both repositories.”

Nuzzi spoke about the long-term effect of Tron, concerning vulnerabilities of copying. He further stated,  “The problem is when you repurpose code originally developed for a completely different system architecture, and don’t have enough time to fully test it. Vulnerabilities that were not applicable to the original system are now applicable to a new one. Plagiarism is bad, but the concern here relates to the unknown vulnerabilities that may arise when you combine all of these modules together, on steroids. Nothing wrong with experimenting, but the community should definitely adjust expectations.”

DAR usually researchers for clients, however after studying TRON’s codebase, DAR found it very important to share the details with the public.

“My job is to perform deep technical due diligence for our clients, which involves reviewing the entire codebase of the projects we cover, which is what I did with TRON,” Nuzzi said. “Most of our research is exclusive to our clients, but whenever we find something that the entire community can benefit from, we share it,” Nuzzi said.

Mainnet migration is due in two days, June 25th and this is bound to create a load of confusion for Tron, its team, and its investors.

On 6th April, Justin Sun tweeted details of why Tron was better than Ethereum.

Why #TRON is better than #ETH : 1. 10000TPS vs. 25TPS 2. zero fee vs. high fee 3. consistent Coinburn vs. no coinburn 4. Java vs. Solidity 5. strong extensibility vs. no ex. 6. 1 billion USD developers rewards vs. no plan 7. 100 million users vs. small number #TRX $TRX pic.twitter.com/WvxH5EToa8

— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) April 6, 2018

To which Vitalik Buterin replied sarcastically saying,

“8. Better white paper writing capability (Ctrl+C + Ctrl+V much higher efficiency than keyboard typing new content).”

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