New research suggests that TRON’s network is being overrun with decentralized application (DApp) bots, giving some indication that the platform’s volume and usage may be skewed.
A report published by AI research team AnChain claims they discovered tens of thousands of unique accounts belonging to blockchain bots contributing to TRON’s network. The research team estimated that the bots comprised close to a third of TRON’s unique accounts on the top 10 gambling DApps and were responsible for more than $270 million in transaction volume for the platform’s top gambling applications.
According to the report,
Blockchain bots contributed to 30.7% of the 62000+ unique accounts, accounting for over $270 million USD of transaction volume in the top 10 gambling DApps on the TRON network in 2019Q1.
AnChain says that bots on blockchain-based networks such as TRON and Ethereum is a common occurrence, in addition to social media platforms such as Twitter. However, the team finds tabulating the number of bot’s contributing to a network as a useful metric in compiling their ‘Blockchain Transparency Index,’ which measures a blockchain ecosystem’s health and security.
While bots accounted for 19.3% of the total volume moved in TRON’s top 10 gambling DApps, the three most popular applications were discovered to have relatively minimal bot activity. AnChain also reported discovering a new bot strategy unique to TRON’s ecosystem called “Group Bot.”
According to the report, groups of bots exhibited low levels of activity but coordinated their transactions on certain DApps. AnChain says this behavior reduces the number of transactions produced, making it difficult for researchers to detect the bot clusters despite their overwhelming presence on the network.
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