Controversial software provider BitTorrent has been sold to a leading cryptocurrency start-up for $140 million.
A few years back, BitTorrent was the download software of choice for video, movie and music pirates.
But the software has fallen out of fashion as new streaming giants have entered the arena in recent years.
At one stage, BitTorrent claimed to have more than 150 million active users every month.
The peer-to-peer software allowed computers to link and swap files across the internet.
BitTorrent also acquired another P2P software brand – uTorrent.
Both apps were popular until smartphones and tablets started to dominate the market.
Hollywood rejected approaches
BitTorrent also unsuccessfully tried to persuade Hollywood to use the platform to distribute movies and music but tainted as software to pirates, the effort was doomed to fail.
Now Jason Sun, owner and founder of cryptocurrency TRON has bought the company.
Acrimonious talks were taking place for some months before both sides made up and agreed a merger.
Sun has yet to announce his intention for BitTorrent.
A post on the BitTorrent blog says: “Our attention has been drawn to the news items that have appeared in the past few weeks speculating about a change in BitTorrent’s business model.
“We wish to reiterate that BitTorrent has no plans to change what we do or charge for the services we provide. We have no plans to enable mining of cryptocurrency now or in the future.
Pioneer P2P software
“BitTorrent has been a pioneer of peer-to-peer file sharing and we believe our vision of democratizing the Web by enabling decentralized, resilient access to information remains as relevant as it was when we started.
“We reiterate that we are committed to our hundreds of million users worldwide and will continue to invest and innovate in the BitTorrent and uTorrent products.”
TRON is a top 10 cryptocurrency by market capitalisation.
Coins worth around $4.78 billion are in circulation online, and the founder Sun and his company are said to control around $1.65 billion of them.
TRON is trading at $0.047 against a high of $0.29 in January.
The cryptocurrency is promoted as an entertainment system allowing users to own, store and publish data as an updated version of the BitTorrent model.