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Four years on, it's time to reappraise the initial coin offering (ICO) era, and the easiest way to do it is by looking at investors’ portfolios.

There's a certain class of crypto denizen who derides anything that isn't bitcoin as garbage, and the long bear market that started in early 2018 certainly seemed to support that view. We're in a different time now where much of the work funded by the largest ICOs has been deployed. Those products now have at least a base of users and their token prices reflect it.

Most of these projects haven't hit their speculatively driven early 2018 highs, but they are far above their bear market numbers. For a certain class of investor, that means well above their token pre-sale prices.

Just to recap, the ICO was a way to raise a lot of money from the public by selling some kind of blockchain-based token (a secondary cryptocurrency that runs on a distributed ledger that also has its own native coin). ICO tokens didn't carry with them an ownership stake in a company, instead they were meant to provide access to some service later on.

(For example, a Netflix token might be good for one month of Netflix viewing.)

It wouldn't take long before the public started getting shut out of these sales for legal reasons, but the amount of money raised didn't slow down at first as deep-pocketed investors picked up the slack. According to CoinDesk data, projects raised about $5.5 billion through 2017 and $6.8 million through the first part of 2018, when the party came to a screeching halt.

Many of these tokens were released to the public at the end of their sales, even though they couldn't do anything useful yet. That didn't matter. People would still trade them. But when word came out that the regulatory sharks were circling this funding model, prices across the crypto market tanked and didn't recover for a long time. That was the beginning of Crypto Winter.

Nevertheless, startups found other ways to distribute tokens, such as offerings on exchanges or on automated market makers (AMMs) or by using smart contracts.

Quickly checking a few of the biggest early ICOs: Augur's REP (probably the first ICO for a token) is trading at $25.53, though it spent the bear market between $10 and $20 (often below $10). Bancor's BNT is trading at $3.63, this despite failing to trade above $1 from November 2018 to June 2020. 0x's ZRX is trading at $0.86, a price it fell below in August 2018, not to see again until this past February.

Tezos's XTZ is doing well. Brave's basic attention token set a new all time high in this bull market and sits right now in striking distance of its last one.

Of course, everyone's gotten a big bump as the overall market went up, everything is – after all – very correlated, but the difference today is those things were largely just ideas then and they are products now.

A few still seem to be struggling. KIN's price remains something like it's always been and Status's SNT also looks like it can't catch the old spark.

Still, by and large the big projects that raised most of their funds up front by selling off a token for usage before there was anything to use (almost always in lieu of selling equity in the company) don't seem to have cut and run and are starting to find markets.

This goes against the received wisdom in the broader crypto culture, where the term ICO has become a dirty one.

Not everyone sees it that way now, though.

"I think ICOs regardless of their regulatory status just conceptually represent a new technological way of forming capital," Jake Brukhman, founder of CoinFund, said. In particular, he noted, the venture capital world tends to follow certain scripts or heuristics that can make it hard for new ideas to get the resources they need.

"What the ICO boom allowed us to do is allocate some capital to some ideas that seem crazy," Brukhman said.

Keld van Schreven, a cofounder of a European digital asset investment company, KR1, took it a step further. "I think it's the greatest funding mechanism we've ever invented," he said. "It was like a really beautiful house party but it got gatecrashed by people that ruined it."

KR1 has invested in the data product Bluzelle, the blockchain ecosystem Cosmos and, in particular, it went very long on the platform for funds, now known as Enzyme but formerly known as Melonport, among others.

He continued, "The impact of the ICO boom is first of all it created a lot of attention and a lot of marketing around digital assets. One could argue that if you didn't have that cycle we wouldn't be where we are today in terms of mindshare."

Brukhman said, "Our first fund, it definitely operated during the ICO era. That launched in July of 2015. ... [I]t was very small and experimental. It actually did very well." CoinFund bought projects like Augur, Filecoin and NuCypher, as examples.

"It's only this year that some of the assets, like Dfinity for example, came to fruition," Brukhman said. While declining to go into detail, Brukhman made it clear that this first fund has been a success.

Everyone acknowledges that a lot of bad projects and bad actors took advantage of the approach before long, but van Schreven said that from where he sat there were also a lot of well-intentioned projects. To him, it wasn't hard to tell which had potential and which were obviously nonsense.

But people are good at talking themselves into bad decisions when there's a boom. "It's the frailty of the human. People want in on something blowing up," he admitted.

Gregory Di Prisco launched a fund in 2017 called Distributed Capital, which persists to today but in a different form. "We saw the opportunity set as: 'There's this new type of asset on Ethereum, and there's only 5 of them now we think there's going to be a lot more," he said.

The new asset was tokens, most of which would follow the ERC-20 standard. There were hardly any when Distributed started, but Di Prisco and his colleagues knew more would come. Even if Ethereum proved to be hopeless, Di Prisco said, they viewed it this way: "We are almost certainly going to be right about the desire to buy them and trade."

At that time, he said, there were hardly any tokens yet and few other funds participating in them. Very few pools of money funded by limited partners had rules that allowed for anything like cryptocurrency. Di Prisco said the playing field at that time for pre-sales and early ICO bets was limited.

Across the various investors we spoke to, the leaders in token purchases early on seemed to have been Polychain, Pantera, Fenbushi Capital, CoinFund and, to a lesser extent, the Digital Currency Group, because it still preferred equity deals. (DCG owns CoinDesk.)

Pantera Capital launched a fund then known as the Pantera ICO Fund, which has since rebranded to the Early-Stage Token Fund.

Pantera partner Paul Veradittakit said in a phone call, "We felt there was an opportunity to create a fund just to invest in projects that were releasing tokens," but to do so early on, in pre-sales and before the project launched.

"We figured people could access Bitcoin and Ethereum so we figured, just do an exclusively early-stage projects for investors," Veradittakit said.

That fund was easily filled and it remains an open-ended hedge fund, with over $1 billion assets under management. It has continued to make active investments so it's not limited to the ICO era, but it still holds a large quantity of tokens from that time. It has investments in ZRX, FIL, DOT, OGN and other early projects from that era.

The fund has made itself an active participant in the communities it has invested in. "We are staking. We are providing liquidity. We are providing governance and voting, all of that stuff."

On average, Pantera holds for three years, looking at itself as a long term partner (at least on a crypto time scale), but, he said, "There are times when the returns are so high it makes sense to take a little off the table."

So it has exited parts of some positions or even made significant shifts when there are material changes in the company.

The bear market was not easy, however. "Quite a few of the tokens that we invested in 2017, 2018, hit a rough patch during the bear market," Veradittakit said. "We didn't do the flips and the dumps and things like that and therefore we had to ride through it. We actually didn't lose that many investors."

Some left, but many stuck around. The fund posted strong returns through 2020 and so far into 2021. From January 2020 to the present it is up 2,807%, according to Pantera.

The ICO boom days were a very strange time and one in which some of the investors we spoke to took bold moves that don't typically fall within the bounds defined by best practices for investing. For example, both Distributed and KR1 decided to go extremely long on one token (MKR and MLN, respectively).

Van Schreven called the bet on Melonport "fund suicide," though it turned out to be anything but. The MLN token for the project now known as Enzyme trades at $105. It still hasn't cracked its prior all-time high but it's well above what it sold for early on; van Schreven said KR1's investment there is up well over 1,000%. It's also up more than 10,000% on its investment in ATOM, the Cosmos coin.

The time was so buzzy that it started to attract Web 2 professionals who quickly realized how limited was the blockchain space. Brukhman contends that this was good as well. Folks who were used to having lots of developer tooling to work with found Web 3 lacked it. So a lot of that stuff got made.

Not all the investors from that era look back on ICOs favorably, though. Di Prisco's fund did very well in part because it got out of so many positions at the top. He still thinks that by and large the 2017 ICO approach isn't a healthy one.

"I think that fundraising mechanism hamstrung a lot of projects," Di Prisco said, explaining that companies should not raise all their funding up front. It forces them to put too much energy into treasury management and not enough into making something good, and if they get it wrong, they can get largely wiped out.

Case in point, messaging startup Status raised nearly 300,000 ETH in 2017 (over $100 million) but was still forced into laying off 25% of its staff in 2018.

But that doesn't mean that the ICO form wasn't taking investing in a direction that has potential.

Even van Schreven admits things got out of hand. "At the tail end of it, I think probably there was bad money allocated. The vast portion was people with good intentions," van Schreven said.

"Blockchain technology can create hyper-efficient ways of forming capital. Now, secondarily, let's go find legal frameworks for that and make it work," Brukhman said.

Still, van Schreven remembers it fondly. "The ICO should be held up as one of the breakthrough moments for technology on the funding side," he said, lamenting that "it's gone back to more of a venture capital model to put the hand brake on it."

Four years on, it’s time to reappraise the initial coin offering (ICO) era, and the easiest way to do it is by looking at investors’ portfolios.

There’s a certain class of crypto denizen who derides anything that isn’t bitcoin as garbage, and the long bear market that started in early 2018 certainly seemed to support that view. We’re in a different time now where much of the work funded by the largest ICOs has been deployed. Those products now have at least a base of users and their token prices reflect it.

Most of these projects haven’t hit their speculatively driven early 2018 highs, but they are far above their bear market numbers. For a certain class of investor, that means well above their token pre-sale prices.

Related: SEC Chairman Gensler Agrees With Predecessor: ‘Every ICO Is a Security’

Just to recap, the ICO was a way to raise a lot of money from the public by selling some kind of blockchain-based token (a secondary cryptocurrency that runs on a distributed ledger that also has its own native coin). ICO tokens didn’t carry with them an ownership stake in a company, instead they were meant to provide access to some service later on.

(For example, a Netflix token might be good for one month of Netflix viewing.)

It wouldn’t take long before the public started getting shut out of these sales for legal reasons, but the amount of money raised didn’t slow down at first as deep-pocketed investors picked up the slack. According to CoinDesk data, projects raised about $5.5 billion through 2017 and $6.8 million through the first part of 2018, when the party came to a screeching halt.

Many of these tokens were released to the public at the end of their sales, even though they couldn’t do anything useful yet. That didn’t matter. People would still trade them. But when word came out that the regulatory sharks were circling this funding model, prices across the crypto market tanked and didn’t recover for a long time. That was the beginning of Crypto Winter.

Related: The Node: The First Step to Making Sense of the Token Economy

Nevertheless, startups found other ways to distribute tokens, such as offerings on exchanges or on automated market makers (AMMs) or by using smart contracts.

Quickly checking a few of the biggest early ICOs: Augur’s REP (probably the first ICO for a token) is trading at $25.53, though it spent the bear market between $10 and $20 (often below $10). Bancor’s BNT is trading at $3.63, this despite failing to trade above $1 from November 2018 to June 2020. 0x’s ZRX is trading at $0.86, a price it fell below in August 2018, not to see again until this past February.

Tezos’s XTZ is doing well. Brave’s basic attention token set a new all time high in this bull market and sits right now in striking distance of its last one.

Of course, everyone’s gotten a big bump as the overall market went up, everything is – after all – very correlated, but the difference today is those things were largely just ideas then and they are products now.

A few still seem to be struggling. KIN’s price remains something like it’s always been and Status’s SNT also looks like it can’t catch the old spark.

Still, by and large the big projects that raised most of their funds up front by selling off a token for usage before there was anything to use (almost always in lieu of selling equity in the company) don’t seem to have cut and run and are starting to find markets.

This goes against the received wisdom in the broader crypto culture, where the term ICO has become a dirty one.

Not everyone sees it that way now, though.

“I think ICOs regardless of their regulatory status just conceptually represent a new technological way of forming capital,” Jake Brukhman, founder of CoinFund, said. In particular, he noted, the venture capital world tends to follow certain scripts or heuristics that can make it hard for new ideas to get the resources they need.

“What the ICO boom allowed us to do is allocate some capital to some ideas that seem crazy,” Brukhman said.

Keld van Schreven, a cofounder of a European digital asset investment company, KR1, took it a step further. “I think it’s the greatest funding mechanism we’ve ever invented,” he said. “It was like a really beautiful house party but it got gatecrashed by people that ruined it.”

KR1 has invested in the data product Bluzelle, the blockchain ecosystem Cosmos and, in particular, it went very long on the platform for funds, now known as Enzyme but formerly known as Melonport, among others.

He continued, “The impact of the ICO boom is first of all it created a lot of attention and a lot of marketing around digital assets. One could argue that if you didn’t have that cycle we wouldn’t be where we are today in terms of mindshare.”

Brukhman said, “Our first fund, it definitely operated during the ICO era. That launched in July of 2015. … [I]t was very small and experimental. It actually did very well.” CoinFund bought projects like Augur, Filecoin and NuCypher, as examples.

“It’s only this year that some of the assets, like Dfinity for example, came to fruition,” Brukhman said. While declining to go into detail, Brukhman made it clear that this first fund has been a success.

Everyone acknowledges that a lot of bad projects and bad actors took advantage of the approach before long, but van Schreven said that from where he sat there were also a lot of well-intentioned projects. To him, it wasn’t hard to tell which had potential and which were obviously nonsense.

But people are good at talking themselves into bad decisions when there’s a boom. “It’s the frailty of the human. People want in on something blowing up,” he admitted.

Gregory Di Prisco launched a fund in 2017 called Distributed Capital, which persists to today but in a different form. “We saw the opportunity set as: ‘There’s this new type of asset on Ethereum, and there’s only 5 of them now we think there’s going to be a lot more,” he said.

The new asset was tokens, most of which would follow the ERC-20 standard. There were hardly any when Distributed started, but Di Prisco and his colleagues knew more would come. Even if Ethereum proved to be hopeless, Di Prisco said, they viewed it this way: “We are almost certainly going to be right about the desire to buy them and trade.”

At that time, he said, there were hardly any tokens yet and few other funds participating in them. Very few pools of money funded by limited partners had rules that allowed for anything like cryptocurrency. Di Prisco said the playing field at that time for pre-sales and early ICO bets was limited.

Across the various investors we spoke to, the leaders in token purchases early on seemed to have been Polychain, Pantera, Fenbushi Capital, CoinFund and, to a lesser extent, the Digital Currency Group, because it still preferred equity deals. (DCG owns CoinDesk.)

Pantera Capital launched a fund then known as the Pantera ICO Fund, which has since rebranded to the Early-Stage Token Fund.

Pantera partner Paul Veradittakit said in a phone call, “We felt there was an opportunity to create a fund just to invest in projects that were releasing tokens,” but to do so early on, in pre-sales and before the project launched.

“We figured people could access Bitcoin and Ethereum so we figured, just do an exclusively early-stage projects for investors,” Veradittakit said.

That fund was easily filled and it remains an open-ended hedge fund, with over $1 billion assets under management. It has continued to make active investments so it’s not limited to the ICO era, but it still holds a large quantity of tokens from that time. It has investments in ZRX, FIL, DOT, OGN and other early projects from that era.

The fund has made itself an active participant in the communities it has invested in. “We are staking. We are providing liquidity. We are providing governance and voting, all of that stuff.”

On average, Pantera holds for three years, looking at itself as a long term partner (at least on a crypto time scale), but, he said, “There are times when the returns are so high it makes sense to take a little off the table.”

So it has exited parts of some positions or even made significant shifts when there are material changes in the company.

The bear market was not easy, however. “Quite a few of the tokens that we invested in 2017, 2018, hit a rough patch during the bear market,” Veradittakit said. “We didn’t do the flips and the dumps and things like that and therefore we had to ride through it. We actually didn’t lose that many investors.”

Some left, but many stuck around. The fund posted strong returns through 2020 and so far into 2021. From January 2020 to the present it is up 2,807%, according to Pantera.

The ICO boom days were a very strange time and one in which some of the investors we spoke to took bold moves that don’t typically fall within the bounds defined by best practices for investing. For example, both Distributed and KR1 decided to go extremely long on one token (MKR and MLN, respectively).

Van Schreven called the bet on Melonport “fund suicide,” though it turned out to be anything but. The MLN token for the project now known as Enzyme trades at $105. It still hasn’t cracked its prior all-time high but it’s well above what it sold for early on; van Schreven said KR1’s investment there is up well over 1,000%. It’s also up more than 10,000% on its investment in ATOM, the Cosmos coin.

The time was so buzzy that it started to attract Web 2 professionals who quickly realized how limited was the blockchain space. Brukhman contends that this was good as well. Folks who were used to having lots of developer tooling to work with found Web 3 lacked it. So a lot of that stuff got made.

Not all the investors from that era look back on ICOs favorably, though. Di Prisco’s fund did very well in part because it got out of so many positions at the top. He still thinks that by and large the 2017 ICO approach isn’t a healthy one.

“I think that fundraising mechanism hamstrung a lot of projects,” Di Prisco said, explaining that companies should not raise all their funding up front. It forces them to put too much energy into treasury management and not enough into making something good, and if they get it wrong, they can get largely wiped out.

Case in point, messaging startup Status raised nearly 300,000 ETH in 2017 (over $100 million) but was still forced into laying off 25% of its staff in 2018.

But that doesn’t mean that the ICO form wasn’t taking investing in a direction that has potential.

Even van Schreven admits things got out of hand. “At the tail end of it, I think probably there was bad money allocated. The vast portion was people with good intentions,” van Schreven said.

“Blockchain technology can create hyper-efficient ways of forming capital. Now, secondarily, let’s go find legal frameworks for that and make it work,” Brukhman said.

Still, van Schreven remembers it fondly. “The ICO should be held up as one of the breakthrough moments for technology on the funding side,” he said, lamenting that “it’s gone back to more of a venture capital model to put the hand brake on it.”

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Blockchain technology is changing the face of everything from banking, to payments, to security. But it's the way these crypto projects, currencies and companies raise money that's attracting the most attention from startups and established companies alike. The "initial coin offering," or ICO, is rapidly reshaping the conventions, boundaries and timelines for how entrepreneurs, startups and corporations finance their endeavors. 

Let's get into it.

Going public, streamlined 

Like an initial public offering (IPO) of stock, from which its name is derived, an ICO is a way that cryptocurrency startups -- and even established manufacturing companies -- can raise money. With a somewhat circular approach to economics, crypto companies fund their enterprises by selling their own cryptocurrency, often accepting payment in other forms of cryptocurrency (most often bitcoin or Ethereum). 

This is radically different from the highly standardized, lawyer-heavy orchestrations of a traditional corporate IPO. With an IPO of company stock, investors exchange money for equity and voting rights in an established corporation. In the US, the process is underwritten by an investment bank and tightly regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

In the freewheeling world of crypto, however, there's none of this. No investment bank. Rarely equity or voting rights. Very minimal regulatory oversight (though the SEC's new task force will likely change that). And, in many cases, no corporate track record or even product. What's not to like?

Proponents argue that ICOs accelerate and democratize the venture capital process. Skeptics point out that the whole thing is crazy. Depending on your opinion of cryptocurrency, and whether it's a viable form of payment or investment, ICOs may look like an ingenious tool or transparent scam. Either way, they're a thing; according to Forbes, these types of offerings raised more than $4 billion in 2017. 

A novel idea

Mastercoin, now known as Omni Layer, was the first to hold an ICO. In 2012, J.R. Willet, the creator of Mastercoin, published an influential whitepaper suggesting the blockchain could serve as the foundation for other applications, currencies and "smart contracts." (He tells the story well.) To fund the development of his project, Willet promised to give 100 Mastercoins to anyone who sent him a bitcoin during the month of August 2013.

It worked. In the end, Willet received roughly 5,000 bitcoins -- valued at approximately $500,000 at the time and more than $50 million today -- and released about 500,000 Mastercoins. But, more significantly, he validated a new financing template for a succession of coins that would follow.

Read more: How bitcoin finally made me grow up and get my life together

How an ICO works

The typical ICO begins with a statement of some kind, often a white paper, that outlines the technical details, project plan, goals and budget for a project, as well as some discussion of how the coins or tokens will be distributed. (Generally, tokens are issued to represent an ownership stake in a project or decentralized autonomous organization, whereas coins usually represent ownership of a currency.)

Most ICOs fix the number of tokens or coins on offer before the sale. Investors who buy in earlier may be given preferential terms, paying a lower price per coin. But prices can fluctuate, and if more folks buy in, you could end up with fewer tokens. Some offerings have a specific fundraising goal, and may keep the price fixed throughout the offering period. Others may keep the supply fixed and adjust the price based on demand, raising as much as possible. And there are those that allow for a dynamic supply, with a new coin created whenever someone buys one. 

Many ICOs have been executed independently, managed by the issuing entity on its own website or platform. That noted, the more credible offerings are now usually facilitated by an exchange or an escrow service that can afford investors some modicum of security against scammers.

ICO insanity

Speaking of which, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of cryptocurrencies. But you may need to engage in some wholesale suspension of disbelief to participate in an ICO. 

Exhibit A: In 2013, Jackson Palmer created Dogecoin -- the name is a reference to a meme involving an internet-famous Shiba Inu -- in an effort to highlight the excesses of the burgeoning cryptocurrency craze. It didn't work out the way Palmer planned: Today Dogecoin has a market cap of more than half a billion dollars.

Since then, amid the explosion of ICOs -- with more than 100 in 2017 alone -- there has emerged a comical arms race of sorts, featuring increasingly absurd coin offerings with stridently satirical names. There's Useless Ethereum Token -- tagline: "Seriously, don't buy these tokens" -- and the religiously oriented Order of Ethereum, which accepts donations of Ether tokens as atonement for sins or to purchase a station as "saynt," "prophyt," or "savyor." (The group's ICO has raised just shy of $62 to date.)

Going mainstream

Dubious coins and outright scams have fueled widespread distrust of cryptocurrencies and ICOs. And yet, a steady torrent of startups and companies continue to plan and launch their own currencies using the mechanism. 

In September 2017, social network Kik raised nearly $100 million through an ICO on the Ethereum platform. And in January of this year, Kodak -- yes, Kodak -- announced its own cryptocurrency and a blockchain service designed to help compensate photographers for unlicensed uses of their photos. 

Given that the company's stock price doubled after the announcement, we're certain to see more ICOs -- not only from crypto startups but big companies trying to act cool or put a modern veneer on an antiquated brand.

Ethereum: The ICO platform of choice?

Kik's choice to launch an ICO on Ethereum wasn't arbitrary. In addition to serving as a tradable cryptocurrency in its own right, the Ethereum platform has made it relatively simple to create tokens and have an ICO. (Ethereum's own ICO, or "presale," in July 2014, raised more than 31,000 bitcoin, now worth more than $250 million. 

That it's been embraced by a number of large corporations and academic institutions hasn't hurt. But it's the Ethereum platform, with its "smart contract" protocol and extensible blockchain, that has made it the ICO launching pad of choice for dozens of cryptocurrencies, startups and projects.

There have been misfires, however. In 2015, the DAO, a "decentralized autonomous organization," raised $150 million worth of Ether -- a world record for crowdfunding. It was almost immediately hacked, losing control of more than $50 million of the proceeds. Though Ethereum administrators helped recover a portion of the money, the DAO remains a cautionary tale for both investors and startups.

Still, since then, dozens of other coins have launched successfully on Ethereum including Golem, Augur and Iconomi -- each an interesting project on its own merit -- without drama. A TechCrunch analysis shows that the platform is gaining momentum: The majority of ICOs in 2017 were launched on Ethereum, and Ether-based cryptocurrencies accounted for two-thirds of all cryptocurrency assets as of July 2017. (You can see which platforms have spawned which cryptocurrencies at mapofcoins.com.)

As with any investment -- particularly one in a nascent, evolving and unregulated marketplace -- due diligence and extreme caution should be exercised when considering participation in any ICO or purchase of cryptocurrency. Do your research, HODL and caveat emptor.

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Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin: Which is best for you?

This is the first article of a two part series on ICO’s. The second article is a guide on how to run your own ICO.

The digital currency ecosystem has had a crazy year. The Bitcoin market capitalization has grown from $11 billion on June 5, 2016 to almost $47 billion USD on June 5, 2017. 

Negative news during that time included a 120,000 BTC heist from Bitfinex, worth $65m then and $350m now. The Winklevoss twins sought to create an exchange traded fund dealing in Bitcoin, but they were denied. Positive events were much broader, including Japan recognizing the coin as a legal payment method, Russia reversing their prior stand against Bitcoin, and Australia adjusting its policies to remove a double taxation problem for those accepting digital currencies.

Now a new phenomenon is sweeping the market, the Initial Coin Offering.

As of May of this year, over $380M has been invested into ICOs. Many of these companies are raising millions of dollars with nothing more than a white paper and a cryptocoin dependent on a small network of nodes running their blockchain. A year ago Bitcoin was 80% of the entire market capitalization of cryptocurrencies, and now it's less than 50%, despite its meteoric rise in price.

Something is clearly happening here, so I spoke with Michael Terpin, a pioneering investor in the space, James Prestwich of Storj, a company that has offered ICOs on two different blockchain platforms, the co-founder of Ethereum, Anthony Di Iorio, and Ted Livingston, the CEO of KIK, the first $1 billion company to announce an ICO.

But first, what is an Initial Coin Offering? This phrase, like cloud and blockchain before it, is becoming overloaded as the market seeks to explain new concepts.

The idea around an ICO is that you create a digital coin or token and then you offer this coin or token for sale in an initial offering. An ICO is in some ways similar to an initial public offering. Both are done to raise funds, but, instead of stock, your ICO purchase gets you a new type of coin or token, an asset rather than a security.

The token can represent some sort of value or be of value itself. An ICO might involve attributing equity to a token so that ownership gives you voting privileges and access to dividends, which is what the now infamous fund raising effort of The DAO did. Their use case for a token is the most similar to that of an IPO, however, the majority of use cases are for something different. The typical use case of a token issued in an ICO is the creation of an asset that gives you access to the features of a particular project. Instead of having cash or Bitcoin as the way to pay for goods and services from the ICO offerer, you use their token. You can think of these tokens as being similar to a store specific loyalty point, something you purchase with a general purpose digital currency and use at a specific location.

Ok great, now you have digital store specific loyalty point, why are these loyalty points so special? The reasons are tradability and use in decentralized applications.  

Because these tokenized loyalty points are put onto a public blockchain, the points are not limited to being traded in exchange for services within the platform, but instead can be traded anywhere. If there is enough activity within a given ICO's environment, their tokens will become globally traded on the various exchanges that handle cryptocurrencies. Successful ICOs are the product of careful thought on economics and game theory, and as a feature they intend that their tokens will increase in value as the volume of the activity on their platform rises.

As such, these loyalty points now have a variable value, based off of market perception and growing use of the platform. This creates a very interesting incentive mechanism because now the users of the platform who are receiving the tokens have incentives to bring other users to the platform in order to increase the value of their tokens.

I spoke with Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of Ethereum, the most successful ICO to date with over a $35 billion market cap, on the benefits of combining a token with a crowdsale. "Part of the goal of the [Ethereum] crowdsale was to create a community of ambassadors for the Ethereum project. We managed to grow our base of ambassadors by attending meetups around the world, targeting groups and leaders in certain communities. Once they got on board, these communities would become advocates for our project. In addition to being able to conjure up a massive community behind the project, about 9,000 people participated in the crowdsale, we were able to sell across the world.”  

Combining a token with an initial offering through a crowdsale allows you to build an international network of early adopters and investors who will actively work to educate and spread awareness of your project. Unlike a traditional crowdsale on a system like Kickstarter, where the users who invest typically only have an incentive to invite others to enjoy the product with friends and family, the users who participate in a token crowdsale have the additional incentive of a gain on the value of their asset.  

So what about the use case for decentralized applications? This is not as easily applied for typical companies. This assumes that you want to create an application that, instead of being centrally hosted by a company, is hosted in a decentralized manner. The main value of this is that, since there is a reduction in intermediaries, users have more control of the application and it can be faster and cheaper to use the application for certain use cases. A perfect example of a decentralized application is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin represents a decentralized monetary system, whereby users have direct control of their money and can send money to one another in a peer to peer fashion. No one company owns Bitcoin or verifies the legitimacy of transactions, instead, this is done in a decentralized way by stakeholders called miners, and to a lesser extent, user nodes. Everyone is incentivized to maintain the system through transaction fees directly from the users and the creation of new tokens, which in this case is the mining of Bitcoin. This mix of incentives and decentralization make it such that, for the first time, users no longer need to rely on a third party to issue, hold or transact with funds digitally.

But there are additional layers of complexity that a token can add to a decentralized application. I spoke with James Prestwich, co-founder of Storj, a pioneering decentralized storage platform, to learn more.

“Storj is a distributed network where machines can autonomously sell their storage space and bandwidth. Any computer can join the network and they pay each other with Storj. Storj Labs is a company built on top of this infrastructure. No one wants to learn how to use a distributed network and cryptocurrencies to push & pull data, so Storj labs inc builds the tools to make it easy.  

Shawn Wilkinson ran the initial crowd sale in the middle of 2014, selling 500k USD worth of Storj coin in exchange for Bitcoin. Storj executed a second crowdsale ending May 25th, where we raised $30m USD worth of tokens.  The coin is used to buy and sell storage space on the network. Micropayments to the users hosting storage space will be a lot easier than with Bitcoin or Ether itself, since the coin is built with the Storj use case in mind. But the reason for the token goes beyond payments. It is necessary for the system to have everyone on the same token to ensure that people are following the protocol rules and behaving fairly. This will be done through network specific smart contracts that will incentivize people to behave fairly and punish users who try to cheat the system.”

The Storj system is a bit complex, as it handles two commodities – spare storage space and unused bandwidth of those providing that storage. Unlike Uber, where there is a central company organizing everything, Storj is completely decentralized and all the funds go directly to the storage holders. Lacking a centralized service ensuring that everyone is behaving correctly, there has to be some means of enforcing the agreed upon behavior. This is where smart contracts enter the picture.

The easiest way to think about a smart contract is allowing for the movement of money, without a third party involved, based solely on data input that is defined when the contract is made. Since Storj coin is built atop Ethereum they have access to a Turing Complete programming language for smart contracts, which is the computer scientist's way of saying it's a full featured language.

Storj smart contracts require that funds be held in escrow for users to participate in the system, either as storage providers or renters. If a user tries to cheat the system in some way, the smart contract can drain the funds from the escrow account of the cheater and return it to the user affected by the cheating. By leveraging the Storj coin, the value of these smart contracts become more predictable and correlated to the Storj platform, instead of being subject to the volatility of general digital currency markets such as Bitcoin or Ether.

Storj’s approach to building a company working on top of an infrastructure that is built with a team of Storj Labs developers in addition to the open source community is a very common approach for decentralized applications. This is done to create a more transparent environment for the infrastructure and to create an open platform that encourages other companies to build on top of and contribute to the system.

While Storj & Ethereum participated in crowdsales for the initial offerings of their tokens, they are careful to never use the term ICO, fearing that it is too closely associated with an IPO. Alan Cohn, co-char of Steptoe & Johnson LLP’s Blockchain and Digital Currency practice and head council to the Blockchain Alliance, explains that by calling an ICO a token crowdsale, it helps investors understand that they aren’t purchasing equity or a security, but an entirely new asset class. This is important for protecting investors in addition to protecting the startups themselves so that the SEC does not confuse their tokens with an asset that does not pass the Howey test. That being said, there are many ICO that intentionally act as securities, the most popular of which being Blockchain Capital, which raised $10 million in six hours.

So why are investors so excited about the new technology? I asked Michael Terpin, who invested in the original ICO, Mastercoin, and has advised 30+ ICOs, including top ICOs such as Ethereum, Factom, Augur, Golem and Gnosis, either personally or through his company Transform Group.

Terpin explains that “as a angel investor, you can put 25k into company equity, then the company goes through many more rounds of funding, and perhaps sells for $300m, but your stake has been diluted to almost nothing if there's a down round anywhere along the way. With tokens, you can do the same kind of analysis of team and technology, but because it's a trading token and not private equity, you can get out whenever you want. Even though tokens are typically not securities, they act more like gold or public stock from day one in terms of liquidity. This alone, coupled with the current bull market for ICOs, means a lot of investors are saying ‘I’ll take my chances with tokens’. Investors like it. Companies like it. Companies don’t give up any equity, just tokens, which in most cases are their product. Because it's a product, it's more akin to wine futures than stock. It’s a product with a resale value.”

Another unique sign that ICOs are becoming mainstream is Kik’s upcoming Kin coin. Kik is a chat platform popular with U.S. teens with over 300 million users. Ted Livingston, Founder & CEO of KIK, explains, “A cryptocurrency creates a new way to economically align a large group of developers to work together to create a new ecosystem of digital services that are compelling for consumers, and fair and lucrative for developers. Doing an ICO is a new and exciting idea, and it took some time to run experiments like the Kik Points pilot program to prove that we could build an economy inside of Kik…[T]his was a new and viable way to monetize a community – instead of showing ads or selling items to our users, we could grow the value of a cryptocurrency with a larger community.”

Instead of relying on an ICO to raise money in order to build a product, Livingston sees this as a way to reduce friction for goods and services that already change hands via Kik, as well as creating the foundation for exciting new projects. 

However, a token doesn't have to be about raising money. My company, Bitwage, leverages the Bitcoin blockchain to help workers receive their wages faster and cheaper when working across international borders. We are looking at ways to leverage a token to create momentum around a new peer to peer recruitment platform we are launching. There will be no initial offering or selling of the token, we're going to provide a method to earn tokens in a way to incentivize users to refer others and create a community.

If you are thinking of running or investing in an ICO yourself, make sure to check out my next article on the “dos & don’ts” for running your own ICO and how investors should evaluate potential ICOs and tokens to invest in.

…

There are multiple Augur exchanges which allows buying Augur with Credit & debit card directly. Few of the best Exchange are:

One of the trusted and renowned Cryptocurrency exchange to buy coins with Credit & debit card directly (especially for US users). Coinbase exchange currently supports 31 Cryptocurrencies and 18 more coming soon.

It charges a 3.99% fee with a Visa and Mastercard.

You can buy 1000$ worth Bitcoins just by setting up your account.

 SIGNUP TO RECEIVE 10$ BONUS

Cex.io exchange is also a renowned exchange to buy coins with credit & debit card directly.

Cex.io Exchange charges 7% buying fee if you buy using their brokerage service.

Otherwise, Cex.io Exchange only charge 2.9% Fee with Visa and MasterCard

Best Instant cryptocurrency exchange to buy Augur with a credit & debit card instantly. Changelly supports more than 200 coins. Changelly charges a 5% fee.

You can buy Augur directly without submitting your personal information. Just attach your Credit or debit card and receive coins instantly to your wallet

Sign up changelly now

Binance has recently started service to buy Augur with credit & debit card via simplex. Binance is a leading cryptocurrency trading platform in the industry. The exchange supports more than 1300 cryptocurrencies and thousands of trading pairs.

Although there is no KYC required for trading at Binance but to buy Augur with a credit card you have to provide your personal information.

The same is true for the fee. There is a low trading fee on the Exchange.

But to buy Augur with credit & debit card you have to pay a 5% to 10% fee of the total buying amount.

Sign up for Binance now and receive 10% discount in trading fee for lifetime.

Local Bitcoins is the world’s best p2p (peer to peer) exchange.

If You are unable to find Augur in any of the above exchange. Then you can buy Augur at LocalBitcoins Exchange indirectly.

LocalBitcoins Exchange allows to buy bitcoin with every payment method possible, using any Fiat currency, and in any part of the world.

On top of this, You don’t need to provide any personal information to buy bitcoin from the exchange.

Local bitcoins charge a 1% transaction fee with both seller and buyer.

Step -1. First Buy Bitcoin with debit or credit card at LocalBitcoins Exchange.

Visit LocalBitcoins Exchange

The best way to buy Augur with PayPal is to First, buy bitcoin at Localbitcoins Exchange

Then transfer Bitcoin to Binance Exchange. Subsequently, Exchange Bitcoin with Augur.

First, buy Bitcoin with Payza, Neteller or Skrill at Localbitcoins exchange.

Then transfer Bitcoin to Binance Exchange. Then trade Augur with Bitcoin.

Cex.io, Coinbase is the few exchanges which allow buying supported cryptocurrency with Bank transfer and SEPA (European Customers) directly

If you don’t find Augur at Binance Exchange or Changelly Exchange

Then you can check above Augur exchanges section. There you can find the Exchanges the Augur is currently trading

Later transfer your bought bitcoins to any of the Augur Exchange and convert them to Augur

Algorand (CCC:ALGO-USD) is a $9.5 billion market cap cryptocurrency looking to knock Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD) off of its pedestal. The crypto has more than doubled in the last month and a half from 81.41 cents as of July 31 to $1.66 as of Sept. 20. However, from its peak on Sept. 12, ALGO crypto has dropped by 31.9% from $2.4369 to yesterday’s price.

Algorand is a proof-of-stake (POS) blockchain (doesn’t use mining) that wants to compete with Ethereum on a broad scale. The blockchain software is developed by The Algorand Foundation. The Foundation intends to make it a “fast, scalable system for decentralized applications and DeFi protocols,” according to Decrypt online magazine. (Defi stands for decentralized finance).

What’s New With Algorand

One of the recent causes for the dramatic rise in ALGO crypto was the news on Sept. 16 that a hedge fund run by Anthony Scaramucci, Skybridge Capital, was investing in it. His fund presently has $700 million of AlGO crypto tokens. In addition, the fund is raising $100 million for an exchange-traded fund (ETF) related to Algorand.

Part of the effect of this announcement relates to Scaramucci himself. He is a colorful character, always seeming to be skimming on the latest trends in investing. In fact, at one point, in 2017, he was fired as the Trump Administration’s Communications Director, after just 10 days.

He ended up returning to his roots as a hedge fund manager on Wall Street. His fund was one of the first to move into Bitcoin (CCC:BTC-USD), according to CNBC.

Scaramucci told CNBC after making this announcement that “crypto is here to stay.” He indicated that he thought the government would need to act quickly to “stem the snowballing adoption of the technology.”

But his focus on Algorand was very specific. Here is what he told CNBC: “Algorand is going to be the winner in building the backbone for what institutions need and financial services companies need.”

That shows why Scaramucci made such a large investment in Algorand crypto.

Where This Leaves ALGO Crypto

Another reason is that in the past month is the government of El Salvador signed an agreement with a financial services firm concerning Algorand. The firm, Koibanx, is a leading Latin American asset tokenization and blockchain financial infrastructure company.

The firm will help El Salvador build out its blockchain infrastructure using Algorand. El Salvador had already adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. For example, Algorand will be the infrastructure for a tracking system for Covid-19 cases. It will also develop a point-of-sale credit issuance system and various smart contract financing platforms.

This is the first time a major cryptocurrency blockchain software platform has been adopted by a national government anywhere in the world.

What To Do With ALGO Crypto

Other funds have been putting money toward the development of Algorand. For example, the Algorand Foundation recently announced that it will put 150 million Algorand in a fund toward developing the Defi ecosystem for the blockchain. At yesterday’s price of $2.4369 per ALGO token, the dollar value of the fund for this development will be over $365 million.

This is an impressive amount that will help the crypto become embedded in the nation’s financial infrastructure. It augurs well for the ALGO crypto price in the long run.

Investors may want to begin taking a toehold stake in the crypto at this point. This is despite the fact that the ALGO crypto is not at a trough in its price cycle. In effect, following the path of these trailblazing funds could end up making the enterprising investor in ALGO crypto some money. Just keep in mind that Algorand crypto is likely to be quite volatile.

On the date of publication, Mark R. Hake held a long position in Bitcoin and Ethereum but not in any other security (directly or indirectly) mentioned in the article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.

Mark Hake writes about personal finance on mrhake.medium.com and runs the Total Yield Value Guide which you can review here.

Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, ly-give-ethereum-a-run-for-its-money/.

©2021 InvestorPlace Media, LLC

Augur (CURRENCY:REP) traded up 7.9% against the dollar during the 24-hour period ending at 17:00 PM E.T. on March 28th. During the last seven days, Augur has traded up 19.6% against the dollar. One Augur token can currently be bought for approximately $36.51 or 0.00066151 BTC on popular cryptocurrency exchanges. Augur has a total market cap of $401.60 million and $95.30 million worth of Augur was traded on exchanges in the last 24 hours.

Here is how other cryptocurrencies have performed during the last 24 hours:

About Augur

Augur (REP) is a token. It was first traded on November 17th, 2014. Augur’s total supply is 11,000,000 tokens. Augur’s official Twitter account is @AugurProject and its Facebook page is accessible here. The official website for Augur is www.augur.net. The Reddit community for Augur is /r/augur and the currency’s Github account can be viewed here.

Augur Token Trading

It is usually not currently possible to buy alternative cryptocurrencies such as Augur directly using US dollars. Investors seeking to trade Augur should first buy Ethereum or Bitcoin using an exchange that deals in US dollars such as GDAX, Coinbase or Gemini. Investors can then use their newly-acquired Ethereum or Bitcoin to buy Augur using one of the aforementioned exchanges.

We hope everybody had a happy holiday week, and a great new year! We’re excited to bring you the first update of 2018, and look forward to another exciting year. Over the holiday week, our engineering team reviewed and resolved all issues identified in the contract audits. These fixes and changes have been re-delivered to our auditors, and are currently being reviewed. The scope is significantly narrower than the previous audit. We are waiting for updates from our auditors on a timeline of when the review will be complete. We’re approaching the final stages! The UI is now wired up with Augur Node. AirBitz, JSON keystore, uPort and Ledger authentication methods are all supported. We’ve been working heavily on deployment procedures, and reliability within the middleware. We should have no delays or bottlenecks on the UI / Augur Node side. The new whitepaper is also in final stages of revising, currently being content edited and reviewed internally. We are really pushing to have this out as soon as possible for the community to read, and are exploring some academic conferences to present it at. Tom Haile has officially joined us full time, and he recently participated in a great five minute interview with DailyCryptoCast. He gives a detailed overview of Augur, and dives a bit more into our status. Check it out, and say hi to him in our Discord (@tomhaile)! Augur was included in CoinTelegraphs “Top 10 companies of the blockchain industry in 2017”, and the MIT Technology Review published a post about “How the wisdom of the crowd accurately predicts Supreme Court decisions.” We recommend checking both of them out! Our friends at Paradex are also hiring a senior software engineer. If you have any interest, or know someone, please reach out to them or us and we will connect you. Ask us questions on the Augur StackExchange, and come chat with us in the Augur Discord channel. Follow our Twitter for the latest updates. By clapping more or less, you can signal to us which stories really stand out. An open-source, decentralized, peer-to-peer prediction market platform built on Ethereum.

Yes, they call it an ICO, and over the last 14 months, more than 60 startups, open source projects, and ragtag online communities used this method to raise over $250 million for their own business efforts. "The data shows a ton of momentum at the end of the year," says Matt Chwierut, of Smith and Crown, a new research outfit that tracks this new phenomenon, "and that momentum has only continued."

This isn't just more blather about bitcoin as the future of currency. Yes, many of these online operations are merely trying to create digital currencies that serve as an alternative to bitcoin. The Zcash Electric Coin Company, for instance, recently offered up a currency designed to ensure that financial transactions remain private. But many others are using new internet tokens not as digital currencies per se, but as a way of building an entirely new kind of business.

Take The Golem Project, which bills itself as "AirBnb for computers." This rather elaborate effort aims to create a system that allows anyone to buy computing power from anyone else. But the added trick is that this system will operate outside the control of any one central authority, as a kind of online co-op. Golem recently offered up a digital token that provides a share of the fees generated when services are bought and sold on its network. This token is not quite a currency. And it's not quite a stock. It's a third thing when you thought there were only two.

For now, this strange new breed of business operates outside of government oversight, and nobody is really sure how governments will regulate these kinds of sales. That's where Blockchain Capital comes in. Today, the firm announced that in the US, it will only offer its tokens to accredited investors, as the firm seeks to comply with US regulations. Overseas, any investor can buy the token, which will be called BCAP. The firm plans to release a detailed memorandum describing the offering on April 3, and the offering itself will likely follow after a few more weeks, through an organization based in Singapore. In Singapore, regulators do not consider this kind of digital token to be a security.

"Our view is: let's just face regulation head on, and see if this can be done compliantly," says Blockchain Capital managing partner Brock Pierce. "Once we've done this, everyone is going to copy the roadmap we've created."

This method is new to the ICO world, but probably warranted. The structures to help ICOs succeed and thrive in the mainstream are still evolving---like the Argon Group, which longtime Wall Streeter Stan Miroshnik founded to help oversee ICOs. Argon will bookrun the token offering on behalf of Blockchain Capital, meaning, in this case, that it will actually issue the token. "Our mission is to help this new capital market evolve," Miroshnik says.

Certainly, Blockchain Capital's coin offering is far less extravagant than an ICO from a distributed operation like The Golem Project. And it lacks the potential to truly change the nature of business in the way such a project can. But it could at least call greater attention to the complex dynamics that an ICO can bring.

ICOs are a very different animal from IPOs. Operating atop a blockchain---a vast ledger for recording digital transactions, like the one that underpins bitcoin---these coins have value in and of themselves. When you buy a coin, you're not just buying something that represents a piece of an operation. You're buying an actual piece. "It has some resemblance to how equity works," says Peter Van Valkenburgh, a lawyer and the director of research at the Coin Center, a crypto-finance think tank. "But it works in a purer way." Plus, these coins can help drive a truly decentralized operation like the Golem Project. Like many other ICO tokens, the Golem coin sits atop the Ethereum blockchain, which can run automated agreements called smart contracts. That allows the project to operate without a central authority.

The Blockchain Capital token will be somewhat similar, in that it will let individuals buy straight into an operation. The firm invests solely in, yes, companies exploring technologies related to bitcoin and the blockchain. Previously, it raised money for two traditional funds. Now, its ICO will provide part---but not all---of a third.

This ICO also means investors can readily sell their investments on a secondary market. In the US, only accredited investors can buy the coin at the beginning, but after a waiting period, they can offload their investments online, and others can buy in. "We call this liquidity-enhanced venture capital," Pierce says, meaning that people can invest without locking their money up for years on end. In the long run, this kind of setup could attract more investors, and more money. Of course, as Van Valkenburgh points out, the secondary market for these coins may be subject to regulation.

Because only accredited investors can buy the coin in the US---with Blockchain Capital adhering, it says, to regulations that exempt it from registering the coins as securities with the SEC---the initial ICO won't reach as many investors. And the fund certainly isn't decentralized. Pierce and his partners will decide how to invest the money. Across the community that drives bitcoin and various other blockchain projects, the real hope is that ICOs can feed far more ambitious creations. Already ideas like Arcade City, a decentralized version of Uber, and Augur, a decentralized service for prediction markets, have raised money through ICOs. Ethereum itself was originally funded with an ICO, and similar blockchains continue to offer their own coins. The knock-on effect is enormous. A new San Francisco hedge fund called Polychain is investing solely in ICO coins.

That said, there's reason for caution. Blockchain watchers will remember the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a blockchained venture capital fund that got hacked to the tune of $50 million. Today's ICOs have even more potential than the DAO, as long as the people using them take the time to ensure they're on solid ground.

Bitcoin was trading just under the $16,000-level, having not yet offered a significant pullback for traders and investors to buy as it thundered past the $13k and $14k-levels. Tezos formed a bearish pattern that projected a near 10% loss for the coin in the coming days, while Decred made massive gains recently. Augur also formed a bullish pattern on the charts.Tezos [XTZ]Source: XTZ/USD on TradingViewTezos formed a head and shoulders pattern and the price broke under the neckline, and could possibly retest the neckline before another descent.This is a bearish pattern, one that projects a target equal to the height of the head from the neckline, one which projected $1.85 as a downside target for XTZ over the next few days.The MACD also signaled a shift in momentum to bearish since it recently formed a bearish crossover and was heading under zero, at press time.Augur [REP]Source: REP/USDT on TradingViewREP formed an ascending triangle (orange) while its OBV was also forming a series of higher lows (white) to indicate the presence of buyer interest. The OBV had been on a long-term downtrend (pink) recently, one which it broke out of following the recent surge.A close below the triangle pattern would signal an invalidation of the bullish pattern.As long as the pattern is in play over the next few days, it can be expected that REP would continue to register higher lows and break out and flip the resistance at the $14.6-level.Decred [DCR]Source: DCR/USDT on TradingViewDecred shot upwards to register gains worth 56% in 5 days while on its move from $11.6 t0 $18.2, before retracing 61.8% of the move to find support at the $14.16-level again.Using the Fibonacci Retracement tool for this move, possible upside targets were shown for DCR after it rose higher than its previous high at $18.2.While a bearish divergence (orange) was seen and DCR pulled back to its previous support, it could be set for another northbound journey as the RSI was still above 50 and signaled that an uptrend was in progress.Upside targets for DCR would be $20 and $22.23 above it, which are the 27% and 61% extensions of DCR’s rise from $11.6 to $18.2.Source: november/Share pSkypeRelated NewsTags: Analysis, Augur, Decred, November, Price, TezosPost navigationPakistan’s SEC Discusses Cryptocurrency Regulation, Central Bank Confirms No Crypto BanNokia Stock Continues to Struggle to Rise Above $4Copyright © 2020 BitcoinEthereumNews.comTheme by: Theme HorseProudly Powered by: WordPress

Although Tezos is a blockchain network that shares some similarities with Ethereum, the protocol has a more advanced infrastructure. This makes it possible for the network to improve without requiring a hard fork.

The Tezos token also grants its holders the right to vote on important issues concerning any future upgrades. If you want to understand how to invest in Tezos, this guide covers all the important aspects you need – such as the best brokers for the job and the step-by-step process of buying the token.

How to Invest in Tezos – Choose a Broker

The following brokers are the best platforms to use if you want to invest in Tezos in the US. 

We assessed these brokers based on some strict metrics to determine their credibility for investing in Tezos. Some of these parameters include regulation, cost-effectiveness, ease of use, and more. Later in this guide, you’ll find a detailed review of each of these providers. 

How to Invest in Tezos (XTZ) – A Quick Guide For 2021

You might have some experience in the cryptocurrency industry and only need a quick walkthrough to get started with investing in Tezos. Here, we have provided just that, as we simply highlight the key steps to invest in Tezos from the comfort of your home.

There you go! With these steps, you have just invested in Tezos in the US. However, if you’re a beginner, you might need a more extensive guide on this process. Therefore, we’ve prepared a full step-by-step walkthrough on how to invest in Tezos later in this guide. 

Where to Buy Tezos – Full Broker Reviews

When you look to choose a broker for investing in Tezos, you must consider some important factors such as supported markets, payment methods, fee structure, and of course – regulation.

This is because there are numerous platforms in the cryptocurrency market where you can invest in Tezos, making it important to understand how to choose the right one. 

To make this a seamless process for you, we have assessed the market for the best brokers that allow you to invest in Tezos

1. eToro – Overall Best Broker to Invest in Tezos in the US

Of all the brokers we reviewed, eToro stands out significantly for its impressive features that make investing in Tezos easy and safe. The first point here is that the broker is heavily regulated. Approved by both FINRA and the SEC, the broker is regularly audited and expected to operate a fair trading system. Outside the US, the broker is also regulated by the FCA in the UK, ASIC in Australia, and CySEC in Cyprus. Essentially, this indicates the broker’s credibility as a reputable place to invest in Tezos.

By implication, the broker allows you to make deposits through debit/credit cards, alongside other supported payment methods such as e-wallets and ACH. Using any of these methods, you simply need to add a minimum of $50 to your account to get started with an investment in Tezos. What’s interesting here is that you don’t pay any fees when you make a deposit, which is a rare perk in the cryptocurrency industry. For instance, Coinbase will charge you nearly 4% for rendering this same service that eToro offers for free.

Another thing we find impressive about this broker is that you can invest in Tezos from as little as $25. This makes it a suitable platform if you’re looking to start investing with small amounts until you become more familiar with the markets. This investment minimum also extends to the 30+ other cryptocurrencies listed on the broker. Therefore, if you want to diversify your Tezos investment, you can buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Stellar, Litecoin, and more. Suppose you also want to invest in Defi tokens, numerous options are listed on the broker as well including MANA and AAVE.

Furthermore, eToro allows you to leverage the experience of other traders to invest in Tezos by simply copying their positions. This is referred to as the copy trading tool, which is a means to passively invest in cryptocurrency. Additionally, the broker provides you with charting options and tools for research through which you can know more about the Tezos market and gain insights into when to buy the token and sell accordingly. There’s also a social platform where you can interact with other investors.

Lastly, eToro shines bright in terms of its fee structure. When you invest in Tezos using eToro, you’ll be doing so on a spread-only basis, meaning you only need to make enough profit to cover the gap between the ‘ask’ and ‘bid‘ price. While on other platforms, you may find the spread starting from 1% or even over 2%, this starts at just 0.75% on eToro. When you consider this alongside the other features we have discussed, you’ll realize while eToro ranks high on the list of best places to invest in Tezos. 

Pros

Cons

2. Coinbase – User-friendly Broker to Invest in Tezos

From our research, we realized that investors who go for Coinbase often choose the platform because of its simple user interface and friendly design. Therefore, despite the fact that the broker has a high fee structure, it has been able to attract tens of millions of users. Thus, if you have no experience in the cryptocurrency market and you want to invest in Tezos, you might want to consider Coinbase.

Furthermore, asides from Tezos, Coinbase supports numerous other markets in which you can invest. This includes Bitcoin, Augur, Algorand, Cosmos, Golem, Kyber Network, and more. Therefore, if you want to diversify your portfolio, you have a long list of tokens to choose from. For this purpose, you can use your debit/credit card to purchase the tokens in no time. However, you must note that Coinbase charges 3.99% of the transaction amount, which is quite substantial. 

To avoid paying this fee, you can elect to use the wire transfer option where Coinbase won’t charge you for making a deposit. However, this payment method is slow and your funds may take days before reflecting in your account. Therefore, if you’re looking to invest in Tezos immediately, this is not your best option. Nonetheless, another impressive thing we found with Coinbase is the platform’s regard for security, as users are required to complete a two-factor authentication process to access their accounts.

Pros

Cons

3. Binance – Largest Exchange to Invest in Tezos

Asides from being the largest cryptocurrency exchange (based on trading volume), Binance is also one of the few providers with a US-dedicated version of its platform. The Binance US platform offers you access to over 50 markets in which you can invest. This includes Tezos, Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, Cardano, and more. This is why we argue that the exchange is the best place to invest in Tezos if you want asset diversity. 

Binance has established its position in the market as an exchange with high execution speeds. Meaning, if you want to invest in Tezos, you can do that in a seamless and swift manner. You can get started on the platform by opening your account, validating your identity, and proceeding to invest in Tezos. Although using a debit/credit card is the fastest means to add funds to your account, you’ll be charged a fee of 0.5%. 

Notably, when it comes to ease of use, Binance is not the best. Even for the basic platform, a beginner might find it challenging to navigate their way when buying Tezos. Nonetheless, If you’re not bothered about the user-friendliness of a platform, Binance is a great option for you to invest in Tezos, not least because the platform allows you to stake your tokens and earn interest on them accordingly.

Pros

Cons

4. Coinmama – Great Place to Invest in Tezos

Another broker we assessed based on our metrics is Coinmama. One of the significant perks of the platform is its ease of use. If you’re just getting started in the cryptocurrency space and need a simple broker to invest in Tezos, Coinmama will be on this list based on its user-friendliness. However, upon further evaluation, things get a bit murky with this broker.

The first thing we realized is that the broker doesn’t have an in-built wallet for you to store your tokens. This means you have to input a wallet address where the broker will transfer your tokens after making a purchase. This process can be a bit challenging for first-timers who want to invest in Tezos in the simplest way possible. Additionally, if you’re not trading large volumes, you’ll be paying an average commission of 5% when you buy Tezos.

In addition to this, there’s a 5% fee on debit/credit card payments and you’re charged 3.90% when selling your tokens. When you consider all these fees and commissions, it becomes clear that Coinmama is an expensive broker. This is a feature that will affect the returns you get to make from your Tezos investment since you’ll be paying a lot in fees. Therefore, although the broker is a popular option for investing in Tezos, its high fee structure can be discouraging. 

Pros

Cons

5. Kraken – Credible Exchange for Investing in Tezos

If you want to take your investment experience a step further, Kraken is one of the brokers to consider for that purpose. Specifically for investors in the US, Kraken offers you access to margin trading, which is a form of investment where you fund your purchases by borrowing money using your existing asset as collateral. Although American investors use this feature to target larger gains in the cryptocurrency market, it can also lead to huge losses.  

Additionally, another reason that makes Kraken stand out is the broker’s commitment to security. Since its launch, Kraken has not recorded any hacking encounters, a feat which even Binance cannot lay claims to. Asides from keeping 95% of tokens in cold wallets, the broker’s servers are also constantly under surveillance and all sensitive user information is securely stored. Moreover, the broker regularly conducts vulnerability testing to assess its system.

However, the first major drawback with this platform is the absence of an in-built wallet. This means that when you buy Tezos, you’d have to move your tokens to an external wallet. This transfer process makes your tokens susceptible to remote attacks. Additionally, if your 30-day trading volume is above $50,000, you’ll be paying a commission of 0.26% per slide. Nonetheless, the broker supports a wide range of markets in which you can invest.

Pros

Cons

How to Invest in Tezos – Detailed & Explained in Full

Earlier on, we provided you with a quick walkthrough on how to invest in Tezos in the US. Now, we will explain the steps in detail.

When you’re investing in Tezos using a cost-effective broker like eToro, you can start buying the token from just $25. If you follow the steps provided below, you can complete the process in under ten minutes.

Step 1: Create an Investment Account

The first step is to visit eToro’s website and create an account to invest in Tezos. You can get this done by providing some personal details such as your full name, social security number, home address, and more. 

During this process, eToro will also ask you questions about your investment experience to understand the right trading services you need. You’ll also be sent a PIN via the phone number you provide. Enter this pin into the relevant box on your screen to complete the registration process. 

Step 2: Upload a Valid ID

You won’t be able to access all the features on eToro until you verify your identity. Therefore, to remove the restrictions on your account, you’ll have to provide a valid ID such as a passport or a driver’s license. 

Additionally, you’ll also need to upload a document that contains your home address. This can be a bank statement or utility bill. Once you complete this process, you’ll be able to use your debit/credit card, meaning you can make payments in US dollars.

Step 3: Make a Deposit into Your Account

No Tezos investment can be completed if you haven’t funded your account. As a US investor, you simply need to make the minimum deposit of $50, which can be done through your debit/credit card. Alternatively, you can use ACH or online banking.

Once you decide on the payment method to use, you can proceed to add funds to your account without incurring any deposit fees. This is a feature that makes eToro stand out among other brokers. For instance, Coinbase will charge you nearly 4% for adding funds through your debit/credit card.

Step 4: Search for Tezos

Now that your account is funded, enter ‘Tezos’ into the search box to locate the token. The system will display different results. Since your goal is to invest in the token, the right option for you will be ‘XTZ’.

Once you see that option, click to trade it and that will take you to the final step of the investment process.

Step 5: Invest in Tezos

As we have stated earlier, eToro has a friendly user interface, so you have nothing to worry about as a beginner. Once you get to the order page, you simply need to enter the amount you wish to invest into the relevant box.

Although the minimum you can enter is $25, you can easily adjust the amount if you wish to invest more.

Once you enter your stake, the next thing is to open your trade. Then, you’d have successfully invested in Tezos in the US using eToro!

How to Sell Tezos

You can choose to invest as much as you desire in Tezos. For instance, instead of the $25 minimum on eToro, you can choose to invest hundreds of dollars.

Thus, if the market moves in your favor, you’d have made some decent returns on your investment. Suppose you invested $1,000 in Tezos and the token’s price increased by 20%, your portfolio would now be worth $1,200. 

However, if you want to secure your profit after this price increase, you have to understand how to sell the tokens. Interestingly, you can do this in a few seconds when using eToro:

Once your money is available in your account, you can withdraw the funds to your preferred payment method.

Ways to Invest in Tezos

As you can imagine, it is not enough to know how to invest in Tezos in the US, as you must also understand the ways to go about it. Here, you have different options from which you can choose the one you find most suitable.

However, one essential feature you should always consider when choosing a platform is security. Therefore, whether you choose a broker or a cryptocurrency exchange should be based on how safe the platform makes it to invest in Tezos.

Invest in Tezos Using an Online Broker

An easy pick in this regard is eToro, not least because the platform is regulated by the SEC and appropriately registered with FINRA. 

Investing with a regulated broker like eToro means you can also sell your tokens directly since the platform offers you an in-built wallet for storing your coins. Essentially, it’s not only secure to invest in Tezos using such a broker, but also safe.

Invest in Tezos Using a Cryptocurrency Exchange

On the other hand, some investors are a fan of cryptocurrency exchanges. In most cases, this is because some of these exchanges offer significantly low commissions. Additionally, these platforms allow you to invest in Tezos without revealing your identity, which some investors consider a perk. 

However, the anonymity status offered by cryptocurrency exchanges comes at the expense of regulatory compliance. An unregulated exchange is unpredictable and users cannot fully understand the platform’s scope of operations.

This means that there’s nothing stopping the exchange from engaging in activities that might compromise your funds. More importantly, as a beginner, your fastest and easiest option to add funds to your account is a debit/credit card.

But with an unregulated cryptocurrency exchange, you’ll not have access to this payment option since the platform isn’t licensed to do so. 

Should I Invest in Tezos?

When you’re yet to enter the cryptocurrency industry, you might assume that the space allows you to make money easily.

But when you start investing in digital tokens, you will realize that’s not the case. In most instances, you’d find yourself contemplating whether to buy a token or not since you’re unsure of how it will perform in the market.

Therefore, if you’re looking to invest in Tezos and you find yourself in this situation, the next thing to do is to perform research. We intend to make this phase convenient for you, so we’ll discuss some features you might want to consider before investing in Tezos. 

Tezos Uses a Bilingual Approach

Tezos leverages both functional and imperative languages. Concerning functional languages, they are designed for mathematical reasoning. Imperative languages, on the other hand, are fundamental to smart contract programming and enhanced flexibility. 

Combining the two languages, Tezos is able to ensure the security of its smart contracts. The protocol also uses Michelson to solidify its smart contracts coding, improving the network’s transaction speeds. 

Consequently, Tezos can execute nearly 1,000 transactions within a second. Subject to voting, this number can increase in the future. Essentially, this is an impressive feature that might create more attention around the token.

Liquid Proof-of-Stake (LPoS)

This is an updated version of the Delegated Proof-of-Stake system. Here, the community holds the right to determine the delegated node.

These nodes are responsible for validating transactions on the blockchain.LPoS has recorded significant success with Tezos, as the network has over 13,000 delegators and 450 validators. What this means is that Tezos ranks high among the most decentralized blockchains in the industry. 

Therefore, if you’re passionate about a protocol’s commitment to decentralization, you might want to consider Tezos, as the network appears to be well-established in this regard.

Community Governance

Another perk of Tezos is the network’s regard for the community. Token holders can become more involved in the network by staking their coins.

When you stake up to 8,000 XTZ, you can contribute toward deciding on the protocol’s future.Bakers get to vote on proposed changes to the network. This voting process takes place in four steps and lasts for about 23 days, during which the proposals that get the majority of support are chosen to be implemented. Community governance is a significant feature when considering whether to invest in a token.

Therefore, if you find Tezos’s community approach impressive, you might want to consider reading more about the token in this regard.

Notable Announcements

The media attention a token enjoys in the market might be an important factor to consider when contemplating whether to invest in the project. In 2020, Societe Generale, a large French bank, announced its plan to experiment with its digital currency using the Tezos blockchain. 

Additionally, Tezos has received support concerning its staking feature from leading exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance. This form of support also has the potential to impact the coin’s value in the market.

Low Entry Point

As of the time of writing in September 2021, the price of Tezos is at just over $6. Unlike leading tokens such as Bitcoin, Tezos has a relatively low price.

Meaning, even if you only invest a couple of hundred dollars, you’ll get many tokens. In fact, even if you invest eToro’s minimum of $25, you’d still get about 4 Tezos tokens. 

What are the Risks of Investing in Tezos?

A fundamental feature of the cryptocurrency industry is the risk that comes with investing in tokens. When you’re investing in Tezos in the US, you must consider some risks before going ahead with your purchase.

This will inform your decision and ensure you look for ways to invest in Tezos safely. Here are some of the risks to consider.

Stiff Competition

The cryptocurrency market in which Tezos operates is huge. With over 11,000 cryptocurrencies, the competition is stiff and if Tezos doesn’t create projects that can impact the token’s value, it might not witness significant growth.

Therefore, you might want to consider how much is being done by the network to grow the token.

Volatility

An inherent risk in the cryptocurrency market is volatility. This means that Tezos might witness a price increase or decrease at any point in time.

Therefore, if you invest in the token and the price drops a few days after, you must understand that this is the nature of the market. Essentially, it’s important to prepare for wild market movements.

Unregulated Exchanges

As we have emphasized in this How to Invest in Tezos Guide, a regulated broker is your best option to buy the token. If you use an unregulated exchange, you enjoy no protection over your funds. 

Additionally, the problem compounds if the platform doesn’t have an in-built wallet and you have to transfer your tokens to an external storage option.

This might lead to a compromise of your tokens. Therefore, choosing a regulated and trusted broker like eToro helps you avoid these challenges.

How to Manage Your Risks

Concerning the risks discussed above, there are some strategies you can leverage to hedge them.

You can also diversify your Tezos investment to manage your risks. With a broker like eToro, you have over 30 other crypto markets in which you can invest. By choosing a regulated broker, you’ll enjoy protection over your funds.

How Much Does it Cost to Invest in Tezos?

There is no standard cost to be incurred when buying crypto. Meaning, the total cost you’ll incur depends on the broker or exchange you choose for investing in Tezos in the US.

Ultimately, always carefully evaluate your broker’s fee structure before investing in Tezos, as that will determine the cost you’ll incur. 

How to Invest in Tezos – Conclusion

We prepared this guide to answer all your questions concerning how to invest in Tezos in the US. We explained the steps you need to follow and the right broker for investing in Tezos in a cost-effective manner.

For all your needs during the investment process, a regulated and low-cost broker like eToro fits the bill. The broker allows you to add funds to your account for free and offers you dozens of other tokens you can buy to diversify your Tezos investment.

FAQs

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The recent rise of Litecoin appeared not to have the backing of buyers, with LTC expected to head lower on the charts once more. This was interesting since it came amidst reports that institutional investors could be turning to Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, with the world’s biggest cryptocurrency moving past $11,200 recently following a quick burst.

It remained to be seen if this move would precipitate a bigger rise toward $12k or if it was presaging a plunge. While DASH highlighted a bearish divergence, Augur was noting the beginning of a strong uptrend.

Litecoin was moving within an ascending channel (yellow). While LTC moved past the mid-point of the channel, it was rebuffed by the upper trendline resistance, just beneath the $50-level.

Further, the OBV highlighted that the buying volume backing the recent uptrend was weak. Highlighted in white, the OBV fell while the price rose. This bearish divergence might play out, with LTC seeking the $45-support over the next few trading sessions.

The recent surge in Augur’s price has been on the back of excellent trading volume. However, the fact still remains that REP dropped from $29 to $12.8 in the space of a month. In fact, subsequent attempts at recovery from REP have amounted to naught.

At press time, however, the Directional Movement Index was on the verge of signalling a strong trend. The ADX (yellow) was on the cusp of crossing over above 20, while +DMI (blue) soared on the indicator to show bullish bias for the trend.

In conclusion, the next few trading sessions can give more insights into REP’s market over the next few weeks, a cryptocurrency that was observed to likely be at the beginning of an uptrend. However, it still had levels of resistance at $14.6 and $15.8 to reclaim.

DASH was another asset to show a bearish divergence. The hidden bearish divergence occurred when DASH set lower highs, but the momentum indicator (RSI) made higher highs (white).

It was possible for DASH to post minor losses on the back of this divergence. The zone at $67 could see some demand for the crypto-asset, likewise, the level of support at $65.

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TRX moved within a fixed channel as momentum rested with neither the market’s bulls nor the bears. Augur looked to claw back to the $21.6-mark, but a boost from market leaders BTC and ETH might be required to make the ascension possible on the charts. Finally, MKR looked to break above $1,563 and targeted a move closer to its record high levels.

Tron revisited the $0.029-level after bouncing back from $0.027. However, the crypto’s price failed to break above its immediate resistance and traded between $0.029 and $0.031 over the past couple of days. The next few trading sessions could see the price trade back and forth between the aforementioned channel, since the indicators remained neutral and did not specify a breakout in either direction.

The Awesome Oscillator was bullish-neutral and showed a balance between the buying and selling pressure. A bullish outcome could see the index rise above the equilibrium-mark, while the price could look to target the $0.032-resistance level.

The Bollinger Bands were converging at press time and highlighted low volatility in the crypto’s price. This hinted at the possibility of TRX trading between its present channel moving forward.

Augur looked to climb back towards the $20-mark at press time as the price rose by over 3% in 24 hours. A rise above the press time resistance could confirm a bullish trend, while the price could look to target the $21.6-mark after doing so. However, a broader market rally might be required to push REP towards the aforementioned levels as the indicators were bullish-neutral on the crypto-asset moving forward.

The MACD was on the verge of a bullish crossover, but the momentum could shift either way as the bars on the histogram seesawed at the equilibrium mark.

The Chaikin Money Flow stabilized above zero and hinted that capital inflows could prevent the price from moving lower on the charts. However, it also suggested that an external impetus would be needed to boost the price beyond its upper ceiling.

After scaling to a record high of $1,999, Maker cooled down and fell below several key levels till it found support at $1,153. The price rose once again from this level, but the gains were capped at the resistance level of $1,563. However, sellers might struggle to keep the price below its current resistance as the indicators were largely bullish for MKR.

If the Stochastic RSI continues its upward trajectory into the overbought zone, the price could break above its immediate barrier and head close to record levels once again.

The Chaikin Money also confirmed the possibility of a bullish outcome as more capital was moving into the cryptocurrency.

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Augur (REP) is a cryptocurrency token generated on the Ethereum blockchain.

Current Augur price is $ 15.96 moved down to -3.68% for the last 24 hours.

All time high (ATH) price of Augur reached $ 145 on 19 Dec 2017 and fallen -89.0% from it.

Augur's share of the entire cryptocurrency market is 0.01% with the market capitalization of $ 90.09 Millions.

Augur’s 24 trading volume is $ 6.70 Millions. It is trading on 56 markets and 27 Exchanges the most active of them is Upbit.

Find more details about Augur cryptocurrency at the official website and on the block explorer.

Augur is a Decentralized Prediction Market Platform, built on Blockchain technology. Prediction markets allow users to buy and sell shares in the outcome of an event. The current market price of a share is an estimate of the probability of an event occurring. To gain this large audience, Augur is built on Ethereum, a decentralized blockchain network similar to the Bitcoin network. Utilizing this technology, our markets can effectively eliminate counterparty risk and centralized servers while creating a global market by employing cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

Turn political knowledge into predictive power by trading on the outcome of upcoming elections, potential policy decisions, and other political events.

Hedge against catastrophic events like natural disasters, market crashes, and geopolitical upheaval by betting that the event will occur.

Harness the power of crowds to create a more accurate weather prediction tool for events like hurricane landfalls, heat waves, and daily temperature averages.

Companies can use Augur to guide decision making by forecasting vital information such as total product sales and project completion times.

Many of the market’s large-cap altcoins followed Ethereum’s lead as they posted gains on their own price charts. In fact, ETH’s breach of $500 could catalyze a quick surge for the alts strongly correlated with the world’s largest altcoin. Augur, on the contrary, was trading underneath an important level of resistance, one it has tried to flip for almost two months now. Finally, Zcash formed a series of higher lows but saw no extraordinary interest from buyers.

Ethereum climbed past $500, a level it last noted back in July 2018. If the market bulls can defend this psychological level of support over the next few days, ETH could surge to as high as $550 and $580 accompanied by strong investor confidence.

Further, the RSI was in overbought territory, but ETH could continue making gains over the next few trading sessions, before seeing a pullback towards $500.

While a close below $500 could take the price to the support at $480, a Bitcoin correction could wipe out a significant chunk of ETH’s recent gains.

In other news, Grayscale Ethereum Trust became the first publicly quoted ETH investment product.

The resistance level at $14.6 has held strong since late October, and REP has not been able to rise past it despite multiple opportunities.

However, this attempt could turn out differently. REP has posted steady gains since touching a low of $12 in recent weeks and it could be set to continue the uptrend.

It formed an ascending triangle, a pattern that generally sees a bullish breakout. Many altcoins have stopped bleeding and have been trading sideways or posting gains, and Augur could see further gains alongside a shift in sentiment in the bulls’ favor.

The Fixed Range Volume Profile showed that the price had climbed above $14.25, the Point of Control over the last two months. A close above the $14.6 resistance level could spark additional bullish momentum,

Zcash was trading within an ascending channel, but the OBV continued to note an overall bias towards the selling side over the past month. Movement past the $71-resistance level did not seem impossible, but there was no evidence yet to indicate it was on the cards.

The MACD showed neutral momentum at the time of writing, while the OBV saw increased buying volume over the past few days.

$71 was a level that ZEC was unable to flip to support a few weeks ago, and it might struggle to approach it once more. A close below the channel could take the price down to the $56-level.

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On June 29, Augur whose decentralized prediction market platform was developed on the Ethereum blockchain and whose decentralized application which runs on Ethereum was the first to make headlines?noted?its plan to launch a second version (called Augur v2) of its platform starting on July 28.

According to the blockchain-powered event betting firm, migration of its REP cryptocurrency tokens to a new version will be necessary for its users from July 28. That is, those who hold REP token will need to do a manual migration of their coins to a new version called REPv2.

We will rename the current tokens REPv1 to lessen any confusion, said the firm. Augur said it will launch Augur v2 on the Ethereum (ETH) mainnet and provide a migration tool within the Augur UI, as well as a full tutorial on how to migrate.

A requirement for those who hold REP tokens after the release of Augur v2 is participation in any forking, if it happens. However, failure to participate in it within 60 days will disqualify their holdings from participation in any of the forked and future universes of Augur. 

REP token holders do not need to take any immediate action for now. The firm also noted that forking is meant to be an exceptionally rare event which would cost over $9 million at the time it announced Augur v2, thereby making REPv2 presumably worthless.

When it comes to ranking cryptocurrency tokens by market capitalization, Augur?s?native REP token (REPv1) occupies the 44th position and is trading at $16.77.

At the time of this writing, Augur has a price of $7.486 USD, which puts it up by approximately 0.89% from yesterday. Yesterday’s up day is a reversal of the day before it; in terms of trend, though, note that the current price is now 32.36% below its 20 day moving average, and is currently in a down trend over the past 14 days. Another data point we may find worthy of observation is that price for Augur has increased 2 of the previous 5 days. Another data point we may find worthy of observation is that price for Augur has increased 2 of the previous 5 days.

In terms of an expected trading range, the Bollinger bands on Augur suggest price may bounce between $6.498532 and $15.63467 based on its momentum and volatility over the past 14 days. Given its boundaries, rangebound traders may find it compelling to entertain buying, as we are nearer to the bottom of the range.

The market capitalization of Augur, or the amount of US dollars it would take to buy up all the circulating coins, is currently estimated to be $83 million.

Over the past 24 hours, NA transfers have been added to the blockchain recording transactions amongst holders of Augur. Regarding a tally of holders, Yesterday saw Augur’s wallet count NA by NA. To further our understanding of engagement we can observe the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users; that ratio now stands at NA, with NA wallets making a transfer this past day and NA wallets having made a transfer in the past month.

As for wealth distribution, the richest 1,000 wallets currently own 62.7% of the money supply. Drilling down to just exchanges, the top 1,000 wallets that are exchanges control 1.36% of the currency’s money supply. Exchange ownership grew by -1.53% over the past week, while the overall ownership percentage of the top 1,000 richest wallets grew by 0.13% over that time period.

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Augur (CURRENCY:REP) traded up 1.3% against the US dollar during the one day period ending at 21:00 PM E.T. on March 26th. In the last week, Augur has traded up 0.5% against the US dollar. Augur has a market capitalization of $370.09 million and approximately $39.88 million worth of Augur was traded on exchanges in the last 24 hours. One Augur token can currently be purchased for about $33.64 or 0.00061212 BTC on popular cryptocurrency exchanges.

Here’s how similar cryptocurrencies have performed in the last 24 hours:

About Augur

Augur is a token. Its launch date was November 17th, 2014. Augur’s total supply is 11,000,000 tokens. The official website for Augur is www.augur.net. The Reddit community for Augur is /r/augur and the currency’s Github account can be viewed here. Augur’s official Twitter account is @AugurProject and its Facebook page is accessible here.

Augur Token Trading

It is usually not presently possible to buy alternative cryptocurrencies such as Augur directly using U.S. dollars. Investors seeking to acquire Augur should first buy Bitcoin or Ethereum using an exchange that deals in U.S. dollars such as Changelly, Gemini or GDAX. Investors can then use their newly-acquired Bitcoin or Ethereum to buy Augur using one of the aforementioned exchanges.