What is Stellar?

What is Stellar?

by | Oct 18, 2018 | Crypto wiki, Cryptocurrency

Stellar is an open-source, decentralized protocol for electronic money to fiat money transfers that allows cross-border transactions involving any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is encouraged by a nonprofit, the Stellar Development Foundation.

The Stellar network has been used by companies like IBM, KlickEx, Deloitte, Parkway Projects, Tempo, Wanxiang Labs and Stripe.

In March 2019, IBM announced the launching of World Wire, a real-time worldwide payments system constructed on the Stellar network.

That is good news: by simply linking controlled financial institutions into the speed and flexibility of Stellar, World Wire intends to replace the heritage correspondent banking platform with easy point-to-point transactions. From the gate, World Wire affirms 47 monies in 72 nations, and it is just likely to rise from that point.

Original author(s) Jed McCaleb, Joyce Kim
Developer(s) Stellar Development Foundation
Initial release July 31, 2014; 4 years ago
Repository https://github.com/stellar/stellar-core
Written in C++, Go, JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, Shell
Type Real-time gross settlement, currency exchange, remittance, blockchain, cryptocurrency
License Apache 2.0
Website Stellar.org

Stellar is a payment network that supports use of its native asset called Lumens (XLM). According to stellar.org, the non-profit behind the Stellar network:

“One lumen is one unit of digital currency, like a bitcoin.”

Stellar was initially forked from Ripple but gained its place as a unique network with the introduction of its Stellar Consensus protocol.

How was Stellar created?

Prior to the official release, McCaleb formed a site known as “Secret Bitcoin Project” searching alpha testers. The nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was made in cooperation with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and the job formally established that July. Stellar obtained $3 million in seed financing from Stripe.

Stellar was published as a decentralized payment system and protocol using native money, leading. In its start, the system had 100 billion stellars. 25% of these might be given to additional non-profits working toward fiscal inclusion.

Stripe obtained 2% or two billion of the first stellars in exchange for its seed investment. The cryptocurrency, initially called stellar, was afterwards known as Lumens or XLM. In August 2014, Mercado Bitcoin, the initial Brazilian bitcoin market, announced it would use the Stellar network.

From January 2015, Stellar had roughly 3 million registered user accounts on its own stage and its market cap was nearly $15 million.

The Stellar Development Foundation published an updated protocol using a brand new consensus algorithm in April 2015 that went live in November 2015. The algorithm utilized SCP, a cryptocurrency protocol made by Stanford professor David Mazières.

Back in September 2017, Stellar declared a rewards program, a portion of its Stellar Partnership Grant Program, which will award partners around $2 million value of Lumens for job development.

Back in September 2018, Lightyear Corporation obtained Chain, Inc.. The organization’s portfolio comprises StellarX.

 

What is Stellar? What is Stellar used for?

In 2015, it had been declared that Stellar was releasing an integration to Vumi, the open-sourced messaging system of this Praekelt Foundation. Vumi uses mobile talk time as money with the computer-based protocol.

Deloitte declared its integration using Stellar in 2016 to create a cross-border payments program, Deloitte Digital Bank. Back in December 2016, it had been declared that Stellar’s payment system had expanded to comprise Coins.ph, a cellular payments startup at the Philippines, ICICI Bank in India, African cellular payments company Flutterwave, also French remittances firm Tempo Money Transfer.

The cross-border payment method created by IBM comprises partnerships with many big banks such as Deloitte.

In December 2017, TechCrunch declared Stellar’s partnership with SureRemit, a Nigerian established non-cash remittances platform geared toward resolving the challenges of remittance from Africa, India, and the Middle East.

In January 2018, it had been declared that ZED Network will be creating an integrated international payments platform utilizing the Stellar distribution system and its own blockchain technology. That exact same month, Mobius Network conducted its first coin supplying (ICO) on the Stellar network. Additionally in January 2018, reluctantly gained press attention if online payment firm Stripe announced it could add support for Steller’s cryptocurrency, lumens.

what is stellar used for?

What problem is Stellar solving?

Whenever someone sends cash past foreign boundaries (e.g. sending USD in the United States to somebody in Japan accepting YEN) the trade is charged high prices (from trade rates, and also the lender’s bill ). Also, but the trade will occasionally take days to achieve its destination.

Because of this, Stellar fixes this issue by making it simpler to move money across boundaries.

What is EOS?

What is EOS?

by | Oct 17, 2018 | Crypto wiki, Cryptocurrency

EOS Blockchain is aiming to become a decentralized operating system which can support industrial-scale decentralized applications.

  • They are planning to completely remove transaction fees.
  • They are claiming to have the ability to conduct millions of transactions per second.

Development
Original author(s) Daniel Larimer, Brendan Blumer
White paper
Initial release Dawn 3.0.1-alpha[1] / January 31, 2018;
Code repository eos.io on GitHub
Development status Currently under development
Written in C++
Operating system multi platform
Developer(s) block.one
License MIT License (open source)[3]
Website www.eos.io

How EOS Works

The EOS vision is to construct a more blockchain dapp platform which could safely and easily scale to tens of thousands of trades per second while providing an available encounter to program developers, entrepreneurs, and consumers. They plan to give an entire operating system for decentralized software concentrated on the internet by offering services such as user authentication, cloud storage, and server hosting.

Be Authentic(ated)

The EOS system is a readymade platform for programs that allows developers to tap into a full-featured authentication program. User accounts, complete with different permission levels and their particular locally bonded user information come as a characteristic of the community. You are also able to discuss database access between accounts and save user information on a local machine from the blockchain.

Retrieval for stolen accounts is baked into the machine also, with numerous procedures of demonstrating your identity and assigning access to compromised accounts.

Keep It In the Cloud

Server cloud and hosting storage are a part of the EOS platform too, meaning that software programmers can build and deploy software and web interfaces with hosting, cloud storage, and obtain bandwidth given by the computer system. This opens programmers up to deliver their thoughts into reality free from the requirements of securing bandwidth and storage.

As a programmer, you’ve got access to use analytics for bandwidth and storage straight from EOS and can set limitations for certain programs to whatever amounts you select.

Scaling Up

Most frequent blockchains (believe Bitcoin and Ethereum) utilize”consensus over country,” meaning that in any stage each the computers on the system can confirm the present condition of the full blockchain so as to stop fraud and confirm trades. The blockchain in these cases is a chart of the condition of the machine, and if every new block is inserted to the blockchain, nodes around the system take each trade from the block and then update the condition of every address related to these transactions.

When utilizing consensus over occasions, the attention is on the trades (or just messages) instead of the state. Rather than verifying the condition of this network at any particular time, nodes affirm the collection of events that have happened so much to keep tabs on network condition. The outcome is a system which takes longer to fully reconfirm the background of trades when restarted but can manage a lot greater throughput of trades while running.

This means in plain English is that the system can scale to a million transactions or messages per second from the gate on a single device, with theoretically unlimited scaling potential in parallel involving multiple machines.

EOS – Free to Use

A program built on the EOS platform doesn’t demand micropayments by end users to send messages and execute jobs on the blockchain. That can be made up to the respective program developers to ascertain how trades fees (that can be incredibly reduced ) will be compensated, meaning organizations are free to produce their own monetization plans and supply their customers service at no cost or not.

Features, not Bugs

Even the EOS system provides a governance model based on cube manufacturers than can vote on which trades are verified, whether an application is operating properly and on modifications to the source code of respective programs also to the machine itself.

The EOS system lowers the latency and optimizes performance by structuring every block (produced each 3 minutes now and being analyzed at 0.5 minutes ) more finely to”cycles,” that are performed. Cycles are subsequently ordered to”threads” that operate in parallel inside cycles. This allows for transactions and messages to be sent and responded to within only cubes and involving cubes, bringing the theoretical base limit to the reaction time down to only message processing time across the internet.

The Technical Whitepaper summarizes a whole lot of the nitty-gritty characteristics and details that we have left here for brevity.

Roadmap, Team, and Community

The EOS project has been developed by a firm called Block.one, headed by Dan Larimer (co-founder of equally Bitshares and Steemit) and Brendan Bloomer. Both offer some critical knowledge in the crypto world and are active in promoting the technology as a whole along with their particular endeavours.

The neighbourhood behind EOS is lively and international, with a great deal of love from subscribers and investors alike.

eos team

What Does EOS Blockchain Bring To The Table?

  • Scalability

The largest problem the blockchain based area is confronting is that the scalability issue.

Visa oversees 1667 trades per minute while Paypal oversees 193 trades per second. In comparison to this, Bitcoin manages only 3-4 trades per second whilst Ethereum fairs slightly better in 20 trades per second.

The main reason blockchain-based software can not calculate that lots of trades per second are since every node of the system has to develop a consensus for whatever to experience.

EOS are asserting that since they utilize DPOS aka the dispersed proof-of-stake consensus mechanics, they are easily able to calculate millions of transactions per second. We’ll explore DPOS at just a little.

  • Flexibility

Ethereum’s whole system came to a standstill due to this DAO attack. Everything ceased and the neighborhood got divided due to the hardfork.

Since EOS utilizes DPOS this is not likely to occur again within their own ecosystem. In case a DAPP is faulty, then the chosen block manufacturers can freeze it before the machine is cared for. This is just an extension of this DPOS system, perhaps not each node must look after chain maintenance.

  • Usability

EOS enables equal levels of consent by integrating features like internet toolkit for port growth, self-describing ports, self-describing database schemas, and a declarative approval strategy.

In EOS that the Governance is preserved by establishing jurisdiction and choice of law alongside other mutually accepted principles This is typically done through the legally binding constitution. Each and every trade in EOS should include the hash of this constitution into the signature. This, basically, binds the consumers into the constitution.

The constitution and protocol can be amended by the following process:

  • The shift is suggested by the block manufacturer who gets a 17/21 approval speed
  • The 17/21 endorsement has to be preserved for 30 straight days.
  • All users need to sign their trade utilizing the hash of their new constitution.
  • Block manufacturers again will need to keep 17/21 acceptance for 30 successive days.
  • Then, complete nodes have been given one entire week to accommodate to the new changes.

What exactly happens if something such as the DAO happens along with the EOS process is made to search for a fast shift and solution into the protocol? In crises like that the cube manufacturers have the capability to accelerate the amending procedure.

  • Parallel Processing

In parallel processing, the application instructions are broken up among multiple chips. As a result, the running time of the program reduces greatly.

Let us check out the significance of all these phrases.

  • Asynchronous communication: Communicating which isn’t synchronized i.e. the parties involved shouldn’t be present in precisely the exact same moment to have a communicating.
  • Interoperability: Capability of a computer system to exchange and use information.
  • Any blockchain dependent on the EOS applications is going to need to generate a 5% organic inflation each year. This will be dispersed to the platform obstruct manufacturers in relationship with their affirmation of trades on the stage and on the top three clever contracts or suggestions that get the maximum amount of votes out of holders of these tokens.
  •  Self-Sufficiency

The main reason this occurs would be to ensure a blockchain isn’t reliant on any single one base, business, or person because of its expansion, growth or maintenance.

  • Decentralized Operating System

Possibly the most vital feature to genuinely know what EOS is about is that this attribute.

Think about a MacOs/Windows using cryptoeconomic incentive.

Picture this: Ethereum is a decentralized supercomputer, whilst EOS places itself as a working system. In itself makes EOS, theoretically , a more concentrated item.

EOS Token Sale

It happened on a complete calendar year, beginning June 26, 2017, together with 350 phases of supply. At the conclusion of every period, the entire amount of EOS tokens designated for this interval were distributed to subscribers dependent on the quantity of ETH they donated divided by the whole contribution amount.

In this time period, EOS tokens were recorded on the majority of the significant exchanges. Thus the cost was mainly dependent on the industry. This opened the sale to anybody interested and gave lots of time to see the development and advancement of their EOS team prior to leading. The end result has been among the greatest funded token sales so far and a great deal of expansion for the token at the meantime.

The EOS token itself does not execute a function. It is only helpful in that programmers developing software on the EOS system are needed to utilize EOS tokens to create their own particular application tokens. And, each program’s approval on the stage relies on voting by EOS nominal holders.

How to Purchase EOS

The easiest way to purchase EOS would be to buy it upon Binance with Tether (USDT), Bitcoin (BTC), or even Ethereum (ETH). You may even purchase it on Bitfinex, Huobi, or OKEx even though the procedure might not be as easy.

If you merely have USD (or some other fiat) now, you have got some extra actions. To begin with, you have to set up an accounts on a stage which supports fiat into crypto exchanges.

When you’re set up, you must join your bank accounts and ship USD into the stage. From that point, purchase Bitcoin.

Now that you have Bitcoin, send it out of your initial swap to Binance, or some other trade of your choice. Trade your own Bitcoin for EOS.

What is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)?

What is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)?

by | Oct 16, 2018 | Bitcoin, Crypto wiki, Cryptocurrency

Based on their site, Bitcoin Cash is defining itself: “Bitcoin Cash is peer-to-peer electronic cash for the Internet. It is fully decentralized, with no central bank and requires no trusted third parties to operate.”

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is comparable to Bitcoin in several ways, beginning with its own name. But let us say the differences out:

  • The blocksize is 8 MB.
  • It will not have segwit.
  • It will not have the “replace by fee” feature.
  • It’s going to have replay and wipeout protection.
  • It features a means to correct the proof-of-work difficulty faster compared to normal 2016 block issue modification period located in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Cash is due to a hardfork, which occurred on August 1, 2017. In 2017, Bitcoin has come under a great deal of criticism because of its scalability problems that has given rise to lots of disagreements that are politically in addition to ideologically motivated.

The end result was this tricky fork that gave birth to Bitcoin Cash.

What’s a hardfork?

The main difference between a gentle fork and hardfork is the fact that it isn’t backward compatible. When it’s used there’s absolutely no going back at all.

If you don’t combine the updated version of this blockchain then you don’t get access to some of those newest updates or socialize with users of this new system at all.

You can not play PS3 games on PS4 and also you can not play PS4 games on PS3.

hardfork bitcoin cash

Andreas Antonopoulos Clarifies the difference between Soft and Hard fork like That:

If a vegetarian restaurant could opt to add pork into their menu it could be regarded as a tricky fork. If they’d opt to add vegetarian meals, everybody who’s vegetarian might still eat vegetarian, you do not need to be vegetarian to eat there, you might continue to be vegetarian to eat meat and there eaters could eat there also so that is a tender fork.

But for any significant modifications to take place in bitcoin, the machine should come to a consensus. So, how can a decentralized market come to an arrangement on anything?

At the moment the two largest ways that are attained are:

  • Miner Activated: Fundamentally changes which are voted by miners.
  • User-Activated.: Changes which are voted on by people with busy nodes.

This is where Segwit arrives to perform a role.

What’s segwit?

To be able to comprehend why bitcoin money is, it’s necessary to get some notion about exactly what segwit is.

Once you closely analyze a cube, this is exactly what it seems like:

blockchain block looks like

Image: Riaz Faride

There is the block header of course which has 6 elements in it, namely:

  • Version.
  • Previous block hash.
  • Transaction Merkle roots.
  • Epoch time stamp.
  • Difficulty target.
  • Nonce.

What does a Bitcoin transaction consist of? 

  • The sender details which is the input.
  • The receiver details i.e. the output.
  • The digital signature.

The digital signature is really important because it is what verifies whether the sender really has the required amount of funds needed to get the trade done or not.

But there is a big issue with it. Space which already is in limited availability as a result of its 1 MB block size. In reality, the signature accounts for nearly 65 percent of the space taken by a transaction!

Dr. Peter Wuille has produced a remedy for this, he predicts it Segregated Witness aka Segwit.

That is what will occur once segwit is activated, all the sender and receiver details will go inside the primary block, however, the signatures will move into a new block known as the “Extended Block”.

what is segwit

Segwit will create more space in the blocks for more transactions.

Pros of segwit:

  • Increases a number of transactions that a block can take.
  • Decreases transaction fees.
  • Reduces the size of each individual transaction.
  • Transactions can now be confirmed faster because the waiting time will decrease.
  • Helps in the scalability of bitcoin.
  • Since the number of transactions in each block will increase, it may increase the total overall fees that a miner may collect.

Cons of segwit:

  • Miners will now get lesser transaction fees for each individual transaction.
  • The implementation is complex and all the wallets will need to implement segwit themselves. There is a big chance that they may not get it right the first time.
  • It will significantly increase the usage of resources since the capacity, transactions, bandwidth everything will increase.

When the programmers built SegWit they included a particular clause for this. It may only be triggered when it’s 95% acceptance in the miners. After all, it’s a massive shift in the machine and they guessed that acquiring a great majority was the best way to go. But this caused a disturbance in the system. Many miners do not desire segwit to be triggered. They’re frightened that because the available block distance increases, it will radically reduce the transaction fees which they can get. Because of this, they stalled segwit that subsequently infuriated the consumers and companies who desperately desire segwit to be triggered.

What’s a BIP?

There are 3 Types of BIPs:

  • Standards Track BIPs: Changes into the system protocol, trade, and cubes.
  • Informational BIPs: Coping with design problems and overall guidelines.
  • Procedure BIPs: Changes into the Procedure.

What’s BIP 148?

The BIP 148 is an individual triggered soft fork i.e. a gentle fork that’s been triggered from the users. What it says is that each one of the full nodes at the bitcoin networks will reject all blocks which are being generated without segwit ingrained inside. The concept is to inspire the miners to place segwit activation from the cubes they mine in order for it to be a part of their machine.

It’s estimated that by encouraging an increasing number of miners to return into the BIP 148 side, finally the 95% threshold limitation is going to be spanned and segwit is going to be triggered. You will find fictitious fears of a series divide occurring but that is easily prevented if only 51% of those miners come around to the BIP 148 side. Have over half of those miners, on the other hand, will significantly lessen the hash speed of this heritage chain i.e. the initial series.

Going from the coordination game-theory, the miners will be forced to return to another side with most. This nevertheless raised a critical concern. Imagine if the shift over does not occur smoothly and suppose that it can cause a valid chain divide? This may spell tragedy and this is the specific difficulty raised by the mining firm Bitmain.

What’s the UAHF?

The User Activated Hard Fork is a proposition by Bitmain that will allow the building of a completely different sort of bitcoin and cubes with bigger dimensions. Because this is a tricky fork, the series won’t be backward compatible with the remainder of the bitcoin blockchain. The largest reason why this seems so attractive is the tricky fork doesn’t expect the vast majority of hashpower to be enforced. All nodes that take such rule set changes will automatically stick to this blockchain irrespective of the service it receives. At precisely the exact same time, a lot of individuals simply were not pleased with the notion of signatures being stored separate from the remainder of the trade information, they believed it to be a hack.

If you do not like it then jump boat and you are able to be part of the new series.

Since Bitcoin money is due to a hardfork, anybody who owned Bitcoin money got the equivalent number of coins at BCH PROVIDED they did not possess their BTC in trades and have been in possession of the private keys in the right time of their hardfork.

Among the greatest characteristics of Bitcoin Cash is the way that it circumnavigates among the largest issues that any cryptocurrency may confront post-forking, the replay attack.

Bitcoin Cash: What’s a replay attack?

A replay attack is information transmission that’s maliciously replicated or postponed. In the circumstance of a blockchain, it’s taking a trade that occurs in 1 blockchain and maliciously replicating it in a different blockchain. Eg. Alice is sending 5 BTC into Bob, below a replay attack she’ll send him BCH also, although she never supposed to do this.

(data are obtained out of Andre Chow’s response in pile exchange)

These transactions are invalid on the non-UAHF string as the various sighashing algorithm will lead to invalid transactions. Any transaction which includes this series will be considered invalid by bitcoin money nodes before the 530,000th block. Fundamentally, before that obstruct you’ll be able to divide your coins by transacting on the non-UAHF series with the OP_RETURN outputsignal, then transacting on the UAHF series next.

How can Bitcoin Cash draw miners?

Any cryptocurrency depends greatly on its own miners to operate easily. Recently, bitcoin money has attracted a great deal of miners that has considerably improved its hash pace. This is how they did this.

Bitcoin money has a set rule regarding when it reduces its own difficulty. It’s the median of the previous 11 blocks which were mined at a blockchain. Fundamentally, line up the previous 11 blocks one after the time where the centre block is mined is that the median time beyond this set. The MTP helps us determine the exact time where future cubes can be mined also. Here’s a graph of the MTP of different blocks:

blockchain mtp

Image: Jimmy Song Medium article.

This is the principle for difficulty alteration in bitcoin money: In the event, the Median Time Past of the present block, as well as the Dominion Time Past of 6 cubes prior to, is higher than 12 hours the problem reduces by 20% i.e. it becomes 20% easier for miners to locate newer blocks. This offers the miners some ability to correct an issue, eg. Check out the 13-hour gap between cubes 478570 and 478571. The miners might have only been doing so to create the cubes easier to mine.

Another interesting point to notice is how and if the problem rate can adjust to a cryptocurrency. This is a chart which monitors the problem rate of BCH:

difficulty rate adjustment in cryptocurrency

Image source: Bitinfocharts.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem rate adjusts based on numerous miners from the computer system. Whether there are fewer miners, then the problem rate goes down since the entire hashing power of this machine goes down. When bitcoin money first began it was fighting a little to get miners, consequently, its issue dropped down radically. This, in turn, attracted many miners who discovered that the chance to be quite lucrative. That triggered an exodus of miners out of BTC so much to ensure that the hashing ability of BTC halved, decreasing the trade time and raising the prices. Reports on social websites said that BTC trade has been taking hours and even days to finish.

Here is the graph that shows the drop in hash rate of BTC:

difficulty rate adjusts

Image source: Investopedia

The value of Bitcoin Cash

At the moment of writing (October 2018), Bitcoin Cash is the second most expensive cryptocurrency, after Bitcoin (BCT), trading at $461.43 for 1 BCH.

chart bitcoin cash bch october 2018

Image: CoinMarketCap

Nobody can forecast what is going to occur to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash or some other token or cryptocurrency. The effect which Bitcoin Money might have on Bitcoin, later on, is unforeseeable.

What we do know is this is actually the first time that anybody has hardforked out of BTC whilst retaining the documents of the present transactions. What we have here is a really interesting experiment that can teach us many lessons moving ahead.

At precisely the exact same period, the 8 mb block dimension is absolutely an extremely sexy facet and it remains to be seen just how this impacts the miners in the long term. Can this address all of the scalability problems? Can BCH ever overtake BTC and eventually become the main string? These queries are only speculations for the time being. What we can say for certain is that we’ve got a rather interesting future ahead.

Top 20 Cryptocurrencies (2019)

Top 20 Cryptocurrencies (2019)

by | Oct 15, 2018 | Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Litecoin

The cryptocurrency market has become crowded, with new cryptocurrencies coming out daily, while old ones disappear faster than ever. Let’s check out the top 20 cryptocurrencies, as they appear on coinmarketcap.com

1. Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is the king of the crypto world. To most, it’s interchangeable with”cryptocurrency.” Its objective is to extend a peer-to-peer digital model of money to permit payments to be routed online with no necessity for a third party (like Mastercard).

The rapid increase in Bitcoin’s cost has caused an explosion of fresh Bitcoin investors. With the massive growth in interest has come an increase in retailers accepting Bitcoin as a valid type of payment. Bitcoin is quickly moving towards its objective of being a currency accepted globally.

Read more on What is Bitcoin?

2. Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum is the revolutionary platform that brought the concept of “smart contracts” into the blockchain. First released in July 2015 by then 21-year-old Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum has quickly risen from obscurity into cryptocurrency celebrity status.

Buterin has a complete team of developers working supporting him to further develop the Ethereum platform.

Ethereum has the power to process transactions quickly and cheaply over the blockchain very similar to Bitcoin but also has the ability to run wise contracts. Think about automated processes which can perform just about anything.

Read more on What is Ethereum?

3. Ripple (XRP)

Ripple aims to improve the speed of monetary transactions, specifically international banking transactions.

Anybody who has ever sent cash globally knows that today it now takes anywhere from 3-5 business days to get a transaction to clear. It is quicker to draw money, get on a plane, and fly to a destination than it would be to ship it! Transaction fees are generally around 6%, but it can vary based upon the financial institution.

Ripple’s objective is to earn these trades fast (it only takes around 4 minutes for a trade to clear) and economical.

The Ripple team now comprises over 150 people, making it among the largest from the cryptocurrency world. They’re headed by CEO Brad Garlinghouse, with an impressive resume which includes high rankings in different organizations such as Yahoo and Hightail.

Read more on What is Ripple?

4. Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash was created on August 1, 2017, after a “hard fork” of the Bitcoin blockchain. For a long time, a debate has been raging in the Bitcoin community on whether to increase the block size in the hope of relieving some of the community bottleneck which has plagued Bitcoin due to its increased popularity.

Because no agreement could be reached, the original Bitcoin blockchain was forked, leaving the Bitcoin series untouched and in effect creating a brand new blockchain which would allow developers to modify a number of Bitcoin’s first programmed features.

Generally, the debate for Bitcoin Cash is that by allowing the block size to increase, more transactions can be processed in precisely the same amount of time. Those opposed to Bitcoin Cash assert that increasing the block size will increase the bandwidth and storage requirement, and in effect will cost out normal users. This could cause increased centralization, the exact matter Bitcoin set out to avoid.

Bitcoin Cash doesn’t have a single development group like Bitcoin. There are currently multiple separate teams of developers.

Read more on What is Bitcoin Cash?

5. EOS (EOS)

Billed as a possible “Ethereum Killer,” EOS suggests improvements which can challenge Ethereum because of the prominent smart contract platform. 1 main issue EOS appears to enhance is the scalability issues that has plagued the Ethereum platform during times of high trade volume, specifically during popular ICOs.

A possibly more profound gap EOS has, compared to Ethereum, is the way in which you use the EOS network. With Ethereum, every single time you make modifications or interact with the network, you have to pay a fee. Together with EOS, the creator of the DAPP (decentralized program ) can foot the bill, while the consumer pays nothing. And if you consider it, this is reasonable. Would you need to pay each time you post something on social media? No, certainly not!

Along with this, EOS includes a few other technical advantages over Ethereum such as delegated proof-of-stake and other routine changes. Just know that EOS has some serious power under the hood to back up the claim of “Ethereum Killer.”

EOS was created by Dan Larrimer who’s no stranger to blockchain or even start-ups. He has been the driving force behind numerous successful projects in the past, for example, BitShares, Graphene and Steem.

Read more on What is EOS?

6. Stellar Lumens (XLM)

In brief, Stellar Lumens attempts to use blockchain to create very fast international payments with little fees. The network can handle tens of thousands of transactions a second with only a 3-5 second confirmation time.

As you may know, Bitcoin can sometimes take 10-15 minutes to get a trade to affirm, can only deal with a few transactions a second and, in turn, has very high transaction fees.

This sounds much like Ripple! Stellar Lumens was founded on the Ripple protocol and is attempting to do similar things. Some of Stellar Lumens’ main uses will be to making small daily payments (micropayments), sending money internationally, and mobile payments.

Stellar Lumens is focusing on the developing world also, more specifically, the dollar industry of researchers who send money back to their own family in impoverished nations.

The Stellar Lumens group is led by Jed McCaleb, who’s worked in a number of successful startups in the past such as eDonkey, Overnet, Ripple, along with the notorious Mt. Gox.

Read more on What is Stellar?

7. Litecoin (LTC)

Very similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin is a peer-to-peer transaction platform designed to be utilized as an electronic currency. Because of some noteworthy technical advancements, Litecoin is able to handle more transactions at lower prices. Litecoin was made to process the tiny transactions we create daily.

Litecoin is referred to “digital silver” while Bitcoin is known as “digital gold” This is because traditionally silver has been used for little daily trades while gold was used as a store of wealth and was not used in regular life.

The Litecoin blockchain is a fork from the Bitcoin series. It was originally established in 2011 when its founder, Charlie Lee, was still working for Google. Well-known as a cryptocurrency expert, Charlie Lee is backed by a solid development team who seem to be achieving what they set out to perform. They have recently attained a very notable accomplishment using the first successful nuclear swap.

Read more on What is Litecoin?

8. Tether (UDST)

Tether is a cryptocurrency token issued on the Bitcoin blockchain. Each Tether coin is allegedly backed by one US Dollar. The target is to facilitate transactions with a rate fixed to the USD.

Amongst other things, Tether looks to resolve a number of the legal issues which could arise when trading cryptocurrencies also it aims to protect people from market volatility.

Tether has faced controversy concerning their business model, and some believe it a scam.

Read more on What is Tether?

9. Cardano (ADA)

Cardano is a smart contract-focused blockchain. It was originally released under the title Input Output Hong Kong by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, Some of the first team members of Ethereum, and afterwards rebranded into Cardano.

Cardano is hoping to correct some of the largest issues the cryptocurrency world which have been causing continuing problems for many years like scalability issues and democratized voting.

They have the potential to challenge Ethereum’s dominance in the smart contract world. Cardano is growing their own programing language similar to Ethereum; however, they’re focusing heavily on being interoperable involving other cryptocurrencies.

While some cryptocurrencies are all bite but no bark, Cardano is quite the opposite. They are quietly focusing on strong software which will be wholly open-source.

Cardano’s team contains some of the greatest minds in the market, and they seek to create a solid foundation which others may build upon for many years to come.

Read more on What is Cardano?

10. IOTA (MIOTA)

IOTA has seen lots of the problems Bitcoin and Ethereum have with the PoW (Proof-of-Work) and PoI (Proof-of-Importance) versions and seems to improve them with their revolutionary transaction validation network only called “Tangle.”

When issuing a transaction in IOTA, you affirm two previous trades. This means that you no longer outsource validation to miners which necessitates wasteful amounts of computing power and also normally a large bet of coins. These necessary resources are, in effect, centralizing the monies which many believe were created to be decentralized in the first place.

With IOTA, the more energetic that a ledger is, the more validation there’s. In other words, the more individuals using it, the quicker it gets. You do not have to subsidize miners, so there are no charges on transactions. That’s right: zero.

The IOTA team was actively growing blockchain technology since 2011, and established the IOTA foundation and company in 2016. Since its emergence, the group has been continuously growing, bringing exceptional talent from around the world.

Read more on What is IOTA?

11. TRON (TRX)

As stated in TRON’s whitepaper, “TRON is an attempt to cure the internet.” The TRON founders think that the world wide web has deviated from its initial intention of enabling people to freely create articles and article as they please; alternatively, the world wide web was taken over by huge corporations like Amazon, Google, Alibaba and many others.

TRON is attempting to take the internet back from these types of companies by building a free content entertainment program. This will make it possible for users to openly store, publish and own information, giving them the capability to determine where and how to talk.

The project is directed by creator Justin Sun, that has been listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 list double (in 2015 and 2017). Additionally, Sun is a protégé of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, China’s former Ripple representative along with the creator of Peiwo APP.

Sun has built a powerful team with heavy hitters including Binshen Tang (creator of Clash of King), Wei Dai (founder of ofo, the biggest shared bicycles provider in China), also Chaoyong Wang (founder of ChinaEquity Group). Sun has also secured the aid of a few notable angel investors such as Xue Manzi.

Read more on What is TRON?

12. Monero (XMR)

Monero is a digital currency made to be used as a totally anonymous payment system.

A common misconception with Bitcoin is the fact that it is completely anonymous. In reality, all payments processed around the Bitcoin network are recorded on a public ledger (blockchain), so Bitcoin is actually only partially anonymous or “pseudonymous.”

This usually means that you can, in theory, trace back every transaction a coin has been involved with out of its creation. Though users are not able to inherently connect the people key on the blockchain together with the private keys used to store the coins themselves, there’ll always exist a correlation between the two.

Monero has solved this issue by implementing cryptonic hashing of receiving addresses, therefore dividing the coin out of the address it is going to. This can be hugely valuable for anybody wanting to hide their buys.

The Monero development group consists of 7 core developers, only two of which are publicly known. There have been over 200 additional contributors to the project and software updates are implemented every six months or so.

Read more about What is Monero?

13. Dash (DASH)

Dash (that comes from “digital cash”) intends to be the most user-friendly and scalable cryptocurrency on the planet. It has the capacity to send money instantly confirmed by “double-send-proof” safety with the extra functionality of erasable trade history and the capacity to send transactions anonymously.

Much like Bitcoin, Dash is supposed to be utilized as electronic money but has some added values such as much faster transaction times and reduced fees. For a slightly higher fee, Dash has the additional role of “minute send” which permits transactions to be verified almost immediately. This is only one of the principal selling points of Dash because most believe this attribute would allow it to be utilised in physical establishments.

The Dash development team is made up of over 50 members and is directed by former financial services specialist Evan Duffield.

Read more on What is Dash?

14. Ethereum Classic (ETC)

Ethereum Classic came after a hard fork of Ethereum in 2016. The fork has been a consequence of the infamous DOA hack where around 50 million bucks worth of Ethereum was stolen due to what was considered an oversight in the code.

The blockchain was forked so as to recover the losses from this attack, but a small portion of the community did not want to go back and alter the initial blockchain. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and subsequently the development team opted to go with the hard fork and operate on what’s now “Ethereum” today.

Read more about What is Ethereum Classic?

15. NEO (NEO)

A top platform for smart contracts and occasionally referred to as “China’s Ethereum.” NEO (officially Antshares) expects to digitize various forms of resources that were formerly kept in more conventional means, and so make it feasible to utilize them in smart contracts.

To envision a potential use case of NEO, consider digitizing the name to a house to a wise advantage, then setting up that asset to automatically transfer to a different person after payment for the home was received. This would be, in effect, a simple smart contract.

NEO founder Da Hongfei is a leading body in the cryptocurrency world, and it has worked on several blockchain jobs previously. The development team is made up of 6 in-house investors and a large community of third-party programmers.

Read more about What is NEO?

16. Binance Coin (BNB)

Binance Coin is the coin used to facilitate operations around the Binance system, a cryptocurrency market that’s capable of processing 1.4 million orders per second. The name “Binance” is derived from the combination of the terms “binary” and “finance,” referring to the integration of digital technology and fund.

The BNB coin is used to cover exchange fees, withdrawal fees, listing fees, and the rest of the possible trade expenses on the Binance platform. To be able to incentivize new customers to perform their cryptocurrency trading on Binance, the group is offering discounts when BNB is used to cover fees. The reduction will be 50% in the first year, 25% in the second, 12.5% at the third, and 6.25% in the fourth year prior to the discount ends.

Binance was mostly marketed to Chinese cryptocurrency investors initially, but they also have English, Korean, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Russian versions of this platform.

Read more on What is Binance Coin?

17. NEM (XEM)

NEM (New Economy Movement) is the world’s first Proof-of-Importance (PoI) enterprise built on the blockchain technology. With a concentration on business use cases, the program was built from the ground up with adaptability in mind. NEM’s aim is for companies to utilize their “smart asset system” to execute customizable blockchains. A wise asset could be almost anything: a cryptocurrency token, a company’s stock or a business’s invoicing and documents.

Some possible use cases for NEM’s technology include voting, crowdfunding, inventory ownership, keeping protected records, loyalty rewards point applications, mobile payments and escrow services.

The Growth of NEM is monitored by the Singapore-based NEM Foundation.

Read more on What is NEM?

18. VeChain (VET)

As described in VeChain’s growth plan, the organization’s purpose is to construct “a trust-free and distributed business ecosystem based on the Blockchain technology self-circulated and expanding.”

They plan to do that by producing an efficient trustless small business ecosystem to greatly reduce the ineffective information transport systems of now.

Some of the places and industries the VeChain platform is focusing on include eliminating counterfeiting in the fashion and luxury industry, food safety tracking systems, digitizing maintenance in the vehicle industry and several other worldwide supply chain processes.

Read more on What is VeChain?

19. Tezos (XTZ)

Tezos is a smart contracts platform hot off their exceptionally successful and contentious ICO. Tezos is currently working to create a cryptocurrency “commonwealth” in which the holders of XTZ tokens have the ability to vote in new protocols, which will effectively give users complete control over the future of the blockchain.

In addition, this permits for Tezos methods to change and improve overtime, instead of requiring the radical changes every now and then that tend to lead to challenging forks.

With Tezos, users can vote for rewards to be allocated to programmers who are making excellent contributions to jobs, and therefore incentivizing the growth of the platform.

Tezos has a few technological differences compared to Ethereum like using dPoS, the exceptional ability to upgrade without needing a fork, and proper confirmation which allows for code to be mathematically proven to be correct. This is very beneficial in the case of sensitive calculations needed in fields like aircraft design and atomic development.

Read more on What is Tezos?

20. Zcash (ZEC)

Zcash is a worth transfer protocol forked off the Bitcoin blockchain. Zcash can be utilized like Bitcoin, with a few additional improvements. With “zero cash technologies,” Zcash protects the amount transferred and the senders, making trades truly anonymous.

Zcash is one of those newest kids on the block from the world of “private trades”

An interesting note is that Ethereum is in the process of implementing some of Zcash’s technologies to allow trades on the Ethereum network to be anonymous too.

Zcash has been developed by the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company. They have had some fantastic successes, most notably JP Morgan’s announcement that they’d apply Zcash’s privacy technology to Quarum, a tech JP constructed on Ethereum.

Read more about What is Zcash?

Bonus coin: DOGECOIN (DOGE)

Dogecoin is a peer-to-peer digital payment system based on the popular 2013 meme of the Shiba Inu dog. It was a branch of Luckycoin, which was a fork of Litecoin. The coin uses a PoW script mining algorithm very similar to Bitcoin; nonetheless, while Bitcoin includes a restricted number of coins, there’s absolutely no limit to the amount of Dogecoins which can be created. The current rate of Dogecoin creation is over 5,000,000,000 coins per year.

Dogecoin is among the oldest altcoins in life, and for that reason, they possess a relatively large community. The Reddit webpage has about 90,000 shibes (the group name to get their community members).

Dogecoin is a great coin to utilize for microtransactions and is commonly used for tipping on articles. The coin is a kind of self-proclaimed “joke coin” that has gained a lot of popularity.

What is Fintech?

What is Fintech?

by | Oct 15, 2018 | Crypto wiki, Cryptocurrency

What’s FinTech?

FinTech is a brand new business which uses technology to enhance activities in a fund. The usage of smartphones for mobile banking, investing services and cryptocurrency are cases of technology intending to make financial services more accessible to the public.

Financial technology businesses include both startups and established fiscal and tech companies hoping to replace or improve the use of financial services supplied by existing financial businesses.

Many present financial institutions are implementing Fintech solutions and technology so as to enhance and develop their solutions, in addition to gaining a better competitive position.

Fintech is a brand new financial sector that uses technology to enhance financial pursuits.

 

What’s FinTech employed for?

Financial technology was utilized to automate trading, insurance, and risk management.

The services can originate from several independent service suppliers such as at least one licensed lender or insurer. The interconnection is allowed through open APIs and open banks and backed by regulations like the European Payment Services Directive.

International investment in fiscal technology increased greater than 2,200% from $930 million in 2008 to over $22 billion in 2015.

The financial technology business in London has witnessed rapid growth during the past couple of decades, according to the office of the Mayor of London. 40% of the Town of London’s workforce is employed in technology and financial solutions.

In Europe, $1.5 billion has been spent in financial technology firms in 2014, with London-based businesses getting $539 million, Amsterdam-based businesses $306 million, and also Stockholm-based companies getting $266 million in investment.

Following London, Stockholm is the 2nd greatest financed city in Europe at the previous ten decades. Europe’s FinTech prices attained a five-quarter large, increasing by 37 from Q4 2015 to 47 at Q1 2016.

Lithuania is beginning to develop into a northern European heart for financial technology firms because of the departure of Britain in the European Union. In accordance with the stats, Lithuania has issued 51 FinTech licenses because of 2016 which comprises 32 in the past calendar year.

From the Asia Pacific area, the expansion will probably see a brand new financial tech hub to be opened from Sydney, in April 2015. Based on KPMG, Sydney’s financial services industry in 2017 generates 9% of national GDP and will be larger than the financial services industry in Hong Kong or Singapore. A financial technology invention laboratory premiered in Hong Kong in 2015.

In 2015, the Monetary Authority of Singapore established an initiative called Fintech and Information Group to draw start-ups from around the globe. It vowed to invest $225 million from the FinTech industry during the next five decades.

what is fintech

Challenges face by FinTech

Finance is seen among the industries most vulnerable to disturbance by applications because fiscal services, similar to publishing, are made from data instead of concrete products.

Specifically, blockchains possess the capacity to decrease the price of transacting in a fiscal system. While fund was protected by law until today and weathered the dot-com flourish without significant upheaval, a fresh wave of startups is “disaggregating” international banks. But, aggressive enforcement of the Bank Secrecy Act and money retention regulations signifies a continuing threat to FinTech businesses.

Read more What is the blockchain technology?

Besides established rivals, FinTech companies frequently face doubts from financial authorities such as issuing banks and the Federal Government.

Data protection is another dilemma regulators are worried about due to the danger of hacking in addition to the need to safeguard sensitive corporate and consumer financial information. Leading international Fintech businesses are proactively turning to cloud computing technologies to meet increasingly strict compliance regulations.

The Federal Trade Commission provides free tools for businesses of all sizes to satisfy their legal duties of protecting sensitive information. Several private initiatives imply that multiple layers of defence might help isolate and secure financial information.

Any information breach, however small, may lead to direct accountability to business (see the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act) and destroy a FinTech firm’s reputation.

The online financial industry is also a growing goal of distributed denial of service extortion attacks.

Marketing is just another challenge for many FinTech businesses since they’re frequently outspent by bigger rivals.

This safety challenges can be confronted by historic bank firms because they do provide Internet-connected client services.

What is an Initial Coin Offering (ICO)?

What is an Initial Coin Offering (ICO)?

by | Oct 12, 2018 | Crypto wiki, Cryptocurrency

Like any startup, new blockchain companies require funding before being able to lunch their product (and some without having anything to show for, except for a whitepaper). What is an Initial Coin Offering(ICO) and how do ICOs work?

What’s an ICO (Initial Coin Offering)?

So, an Initial Coin Offering works like this:

Usually, a startup offers investors a few components of a brand new cryptocurrency or even a digital token in trade against cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Since 2013, ICOs are frequently utilized to finance the growth of new cryptocurrencies. The pre-created token can be readily sold and sold all cryptocurrency exchanges if there’s a demand for them.

With the achievement of Ethereum’s ICO are increasingly more used to finance the growth of a crypto project by releasing a token that is somehow incorporated into that project. With this twist, ICO has turned into a tool that can revolutionize the entire financial system. ICO tokens could develop into the stocks and securities of tomorrow.

Benefits of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)

  • Opens chances to up-and-coming projects
  • Does not need unnecessary paperwork
  • Provides the startup founders with the chance to construct a community around their project
  • Creators possess an excess incentive for invention
  • Investors have the chance to find historical access to potentially valuable tokens.

The History of ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings)

In late 2013, Ripple Labs began to create the Ripple token that is known as a payment method and generated about 100 billion XRP tokens. The business offered these tokens in exchange for financial means used to grow the Ripple platform.

Afterwards, in 2013, Mastercoin promised to make a coating at the top of Bitcoin to perform smart contracts and tokenize Bitcoin trades. The programmer sold a few thousand Mastercoin tokens, in exchange for Bitcoin, and obtained about $1m.

A lot of different cryptocurrencies are financed with ICO, as for instance, Lisk, which offered its own coins for approximately $5 million in 2016.

Most notable yet is Ethereum. In mid-2014, the Ethereum Foundation sold one ETH token for 0.0005 Bitcoin each. For this, they got almost $20 million, which was the most significant crowdfunding ever and was an important milestone for the evolution of Ethereum.

Since Ethereum was the creator of smart contracts, it opened up the door for a new production of Initial Coin Offerings.

Ethereum, the first ICO? The ICO Crowdfunding Machine

One of the simplest use of Ethereum‘s smart contract is to produce a simple token that can be transacted on the Ethereum blockchain, other than Ether. This type of contract has been standardized with the ERC20 type of token.

This transformed the Ethereum platform into the platform with the largest reach during its ICO, for both crowdfunding and fundraising.

The most obvious demonstration of what the Ethereum’s smart contracts can do is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO). The DAO is a self-managed cryptocurrency community, which is fully transparent, immutable and incorruptible.

The first DAO is considered to be the Bitcoin blockchain, considering all its set of rules, autonomous structure and the distributed consensus protocol. But with the creation of smart contracts on Ethereum, DAOs have become what they are today.

The DAO on Ethereum was fuelled with $100 million worth of Ether. The investors obtained the Ether DAO Token, at a special market price, and it allowed the holder to take part in the government of this DAO.

The idea of funding projects using a token on Ethereum became the blueprint for a brand new and extremely successful creation of crowdfunding projects, aka ICOs.

Let’s give an example. Let’s say you want to take part in an ICO Ethereum.

  1. Firstly, you need to purchase ETH, on any available cryptocurrency exchange.
  2. Send the ETH to your wallet (see more about crypto wallets)
  3. You can now use that ETH to trade in an ICO

The possibilities are endless. ICO empowers every person and every business to readily release publicly tradable tokens to increase capital. It might be used to completely rebuild the fiscal system of stocks, securities and so forth. It decentralized not only cash but inventory trade and creation.

If you wish to check Ethereum’s market capitalization you shouldn’t just examine the market cap of Ether itself but also the value of this market, which adds around $300 million to Ethereum’s $19 Billion market cap.

What is an ICO Initial Coin Offering

ICO Legality

Are ICOs legal? The legal condition of ICO is largely undefined. See more about the legality and regulation crypto and ICOs.

The token is marketed not as a monetary advantage but as an electronic asset. That is the reason ICO is frequently called “crowdsale”. In this case, in many jurisdictions, the ICOs aren’t regulated, making it incredibly simple and paperless, and all the startup need is an experienced lawyer.

But some authorities appear to know about ICO and have a tendency to classify them as the selling of stocks and securities.

The spectacular implosion of this DAO did a fantastic job and caught the focus of the government. So while ICOs now largely function in a grey area, in the long run, they probably will be controlled. This may bear some legal and financial risks for investors. Additionally, the price and effort to comply with the law could lessen the benefits of ICO, in comparison with the conventional way of funding.

ICOs Gains and Losses

Many ICOs are a better option than traditional investment for investors.

ETH, by way of instance, was marketed at 0.0005 Bitcoin and is well worth now 0.02 BTC.

The ICO marketplace is presently still completely untrue. Everyone ought to be aware, this does indicate not just massive gains for investors, but also massive losses.

On the opposite side, many ICOs end with losses.

Cryptocurrencies such as Lisk, IOTA-token or Omni didn’t hold the value in Bitcoin the token was evaluated in the ICO (or fight to maintain it).

ICOs are frequently used by scammers. They launch a shiny website, write some bullshit description, guarantees the best project/cryptocurrency ever, and they are pleased if they get only 50 Bitcoin. Aside from the big and productive ICO, such as Lisk, Melonpost, Augur or Iconomi, several small and dishonest ICOs did accumulate funds and delivered nothing.

Not every ICO is worth your money. Some just throw a couple of keywords on their website, something with blockchains, distributed platforms, smart contracts and so on, without having a real business plan or the skills to realize the project. But some are really interesting. Good ICOs are presented months ahead, and the investment community looks forward to participating in it.