• December 1st 2018 saw the opening of TRON’s (TRX) much-hyped million dollar contest for DApp Development.
• Based on their announcement, TRON’s “accelerator program” would distribute a total of $1 million in prizes for successful dApps.
• However, a number of participants no believe that TRON misled participants and reduced payouts to participants

Was the much-hyped TRON Blockchain dApp Development competition (worth a whopping $1 million dollar) a scam? That’s the question circulating social media in the last few days.

The Million Dollar Contest

According to their website, TRON Accelerator is a million dollar program designed not just  to empower developers but also foster innovation within the blockchain space.

Dubbed as one of the most ambitious Blockchain hackathons yet, the program invited developer teams to submit their very own decentralised applications and build on the TRON protocol.

Participation was open to all and a four-judge panel (including TRON Founder and CEO Justin Sun) determined the winners. The motivation behind the accelerator program was indicated on their webpage:

“We would like to share our high performance blockchain infrastructure with all the developers, providing a platform for developers to build their dApps on TRON’s Network with high transaction speed, low development fees and user-friendly experience, and at the same time, boosting the TRON dApp ecosystem.”

TRON is considered among the leading blockchains in terms of data throughput with 600, 000 wallets and over a million transactions daily. However, when it comes to dApp adoption, number of daily active users barely exceed 3, 000.

While there are no distinct requirements for the type of dApp they want created, special categories included “Excellent Application Tool” and “Excellent UI Design.”

Ambitious Hackathon or Grand Ruse?

Redditor gHIL presented evidence that allegedly shows TRON’s million dollar contest is deceptive. What is certain is that TRON not only delayed the announcement of the winners, they also changed the prize payouts.

For instance, the $5, 000 prize was slashed to just a mere $1, 000 at the last moment. In addition, the total number of winners ballooned from 56 to more than 100 projects.

According to participants, TRON sent an email to contestants stating:

“Due to the unexpectedly high volume of competitive projects, we have made some adjustments to the prize structure, one of them is to award over 100+ projects instead of 56 projects. More details to be announced soon. Please stay tuned.”

The apparent lack of big winners also became a cause of concern among participants. gHIL reported that developers who supposedly won the $1,000 prize money did not come out in the open while the entity who claimed to have bagged a $200, 000 prize was unfindable anywhere on the Internet except on their supposed Instagram channel.

As of this writing, the TRON team has yet to post a response to the accusations.