Some of the values that the Livepeer project emphasizes revolve around the subject of productive output: keep making progress, putting one foot in front of the other, iterating on a useful platform, and shipping. 2018 was a busy year along these lines, in terms of all that was accomplished in taking the platform from idea and early open development, to a live, functioning network. 2019 will be about taking this functioning network, and making it scalable and cost effective to meet the real world needs of scaled video developers. This post gives a quick look back at the highlights of the past year, and summarizes some of the focus areas we look forward to in the next.Launched Livepeer to MainnetAfter running many internal and public testnets, completing audits on the code, and demonstrating the Livepeer software’s working use in video applications, the Livepeer protocol alpha went live on Ethereum’s mainnet on May 1, 2018. Activity on the staking and node operations side has been very high. Starting from 0% participation in staking, and very few token distributed, the network has quickly risen to over 26% of the outstanding LPT staked on the network. The 15 available transcoder slots have been competitively filled and operated reliably, and there have been a series of low severity issues identified and patched on the production network through iteration and a transparent community process. On the video side, although this has been an intentional alpha, the network has seen early demonstrated usage in non-scaled use cases like streaming events, meetups, and conferences. Livepeer has the ethos of launching early, making it real, and iterating collectively based upon user feedback and requirements. Projects will find, especially in the blockchain space, that when theory hits practice through a launch and live network, it’s far easier to iterate towards something of impactful utility than it is to attempt to design the perfect system pre-launch.Invented, Launched, and Completed a New Form of PoS Token Distribution — The MerkleMineIn a stake based participatory network, like Livepeer, users need to have some token in order to participate in the first place. Livepeer’s goals were to set an initial genesis state for it’s network that allowed a very wide and open access to a large portion of crypto network participants (essentially all Ethereum holders), while also providing incentives and opportunity for those looking to actively run the network from the very early days to compete to generate a larger stake in the network while aiding in the distribution. Through a newly conceptualized mechanism, called the MerkleMine, Livepeer facilitated this over the course of five to six months, building up many hundreds of active participants in the network, and providing access to all who discover the project at a later date. While some have considered the MerkleMine to be one of the greatest form of PoS token distribution yet invented, and others have claimed that it is a total failure due to large gas usage and a plutocracy, the reality of course is that it is somewhere in between. It was an experiment that was open to all, and allowed anyone, on fair and equal terms, to aid in the distribution of LPT and generate a stake in the network to start participating. Livepeer hopes that other projects learn from this method, iterate on it, and consider the best ways to build communities and open access to their networks.One of the highest potential forms of disruption for the video infrastructure market is driven by the notion that there are idle video encoding/decoding chips on GPU cryptocurrency miners, that can be used to create additional revenue streams for miners without disrupting their current crypto mining. Livepeer’s coordinated marketplace can them to put this power to use, and the cost savings can drive down transcoding prices relative to the cloud by over 50x. See this video by Philipp Angele at Streaming Tech Sweden to understand the story as it relates to video, cloud, and mining in detail.Researched and Designed Streamflow Scaling ProposalLivepeer’s alpha network work for simple streaming, and the providers running infrastructure on it may be charging very low rates, but the cost of using the blockchain is high, and the network isn’t yet reliable enough for scaled usage. Much of 2018 was spent on research and early development of the next release, called “Streamflow”, which addresses these issues with the alpha. It’s believed that the Streamflow design will be highly cost effective and scalable, and makes use of some new concepts like Probabilistic Micropayments, offchain job negotiation and failover, and open access to the network for far more than the alpha-capped limit of 15 transcoders. At the conclusion of 2018, a minimum viable version of Streamflow was being tested internally already.Served as Case Study for Generalized MiningAn idea gained popularity in the second half of 2018, to an almost meme-like level of discourse, around the idea that if you actively participate in networks, you can accrue value and economics in that network beyond just the conventional buying and holding of token. Called “Generalized Mining” by some, “Mining 2.0” by others, and “Active Participation” by yet others, Livepeer was often cited as the example or case study of how this approach played out in practice in blockchain based networks. The reason that Livepeer was so predominantly fit the idea of this narrative:A whole cottage industry of staking as a service, validating as a service, staking based funds, etc had been growing in preparation for the launches of large public networks like PoS based Ethereum, Tezos, Polkadot, and Cosmos. But as Livepeer quietly launched ahead of them, with many of the same properties, it became a testing ground for how these ideas would manifest when the rubber hit the road. Analysis pieces like this one from Vision Hill Advisors go into far greater detail than this post can, but in short, unsurprisingly — if you actively add value to a network in alignment with the incentives and economic design, you will be better off than if you sit on the sidelines doing nothing. This is how it should work :)Formed the Beginnings of a Growing and Engaged Developer CommunityAs a project who’s entire marketing budget over the first two years totaled only a couple thousand dollars aimed at supporting a few Ethereum ecosystem and Diversity and Inclusion focused events, Livepeer awareness amongst the general speculative crypto community remains lower than many ICO projects. However, with a strong focus on technical first execution, personal engagement with both the decentralized tech and video communities, and open and transparent communications, Livepeer has grown its developer chat to over 1000 users, gotten about 500 stars on its core Github repositories, had contributions from order 50 developers, and seen early development on top of its platform in a number of verticals. Applications like Scout have built on Livepeer, community miners emerged from projects like Bison Trails, community nodes and a nascent grants program have emerged in the US, in Hong Kong, and in Europe. And while the core team has put zero focus on any sort of trading or exchange while the network is in alpha, community members have put in efforts to ensure the token can be accessed in various platforms. Livepeer hosted the first decentralized video unconference this year, with attendance from many of the leading video platforms in the centralized world that power the majority of the world’s social and entertainment video content.Scaling the Network — Launch StreamflowOn the technical side, the goal is simple: Ensure that the Livepeer network is scalable, reliable, and cost effective for video developers building applications at scale. This is what the Streamflow Proposal is all about, and the goal is to get it launched to mainnet as soon as it’s well tested, audited, and ready. The core team and community have been researching and building Streamflow for almost six months now, and a minimum viable version is being tested on a small private network already. This includes the first implementation of probabilistic micropayments, offchain job negotiation, and a scaling update that separates the role of Orchestrators from Transcoders. Following success of these internal tests, the team will continue implementing the full proposal, run public test networks, and prepare for a mainnet upgrade targeted around mid 2019. This should increase the number of actors who can play the role of Orchestrator/Transcoder from the current low order of magnitude during the alpha, to at least hundreds or more, further decentralizing the network and increasing its resiliency for end users.Drive Adoption of the Livepeer Network at ScaleEarly adoption of the Livepeer network has been meaningfully impactful relative to many other blockchain based projects, with groups using the network to broadcast from events like Devcon 4, ETH Buenos Aires, and numerous meetups and conferences around the world. Still, these are unscaled use cases often with only 1–5 streams at a time. As infrastructure, Livepeer really makes a difference not for one off live streaming, but for transcoding at scale — for applications that have hundreds or thousands of concurrent streams of video, such as large social apps (and hopefully DApps in the future), IoT connected devices like cloud-enabled security monitors, and industrial video use cases. As Streamflow launches and the network is reliable and cost effective enough to service these use cases, the project will shift energy purely from development, to also driving adoption and bringing users online through pilots, trials, and conversion of their infrastructure to the public network on mainnet. While much of the attention around Livepeer has been on the blockchain/crypto side during the bootstrapping phase, it is really in the video world where Livepeer delivers impact and provides utility. Expect this side of the project to shine bright in 2019. As the network achieves delivering over 10x cost savings versus cloud services (initially, and up to 50x over time), in what is an exorbitantly expensive market, the belief is that Livepeer can be the first token coordinated, decentralized resource allocation protocol to deliver scaled value and impact.What Else?There’s a long list of areas that Livepeer will continue to improve upon in the coming year, including growing the developer community, pushing the bounds of decentralized governance and development through community nodes and inflation funding, and continuing research on additional areas that can leverage decentralization to bring disruption to video infrastructure such as content delivery, verification, and stream processing. But as mentioned above, there are really two areas of primary focus that everyone in the community should prioritize and rally around:If we all keep these two things in our sights, then 2019 will be an exciting, challenging, and rewarding year for those choosing to spend their time collaborating around the Livepeer vision.Building live streaming on the blockchain at Livepeer. Previously Founder, VP Eng at Wildcard and Hyperpublic (acquired by Groupon).Decentralized live video streaming platform built on Ethereum - Livepeer.org

Less than a month after institutional crypto fund giant Grayscale first pivoted to decentralized finance (DeFi), it has filed a number of new trust filings, including Yearn Finance and SushiSwap.

The world’s largest crypto asset trust for institutional investors, Grayscale, is diving deeper into the DeFi sector, with more trust flings in addition to Aave and Polkadot which it filed last month.

The Delaware corporate registry, Grayscale’s statutory trustee for the state, received the filings on Feb. 10, following six filings on Jan. 27. In addition to the two above, uniswap (UNI), cosmos (ATOM), monero (XMR), and cardano (ADA) trust filings were added and on Feb. 1 it registered a theta (THETA) trust.

The new filings include DeFi aggregator Yearn Finance, Uniswap clone SushiSwap, Compound Finance, crypto lending stalwart MakerDAO, synthetic asset platform Synthetix, and decentralized storage platform Blockstack.

In late 2020, Grayscale also registered trusts for chainlink (LINK), basic attention token (BAT), decentraland (MANA), tezos (XTZ), filecoin (FIL), and livepeer (LPT).

Grayscale now has 33 registered trusts in the state, however just nine are currently active. In mid-January 2021, the firm dissolved its XRP trust following Ripple’s ongoing legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The filings do not mean that these trusts will definitely be launched, they have just been registered as limited liability companies in preparation.

The firm’s latest assets under management figure is a whopping $36.8 billion, an increase of 47%, since BeInCrypto reported Grayscale’s first DeFi trust filings on Jan. 29.

Grayscale’s current trusts are dominated by bitcoin (BTC), which represents about 82% of the total with $30.2 billion.

The ethereum (ETH) trust has around 15%, with $5.5 billion, and the rest is distributed between a number of smaller crypto trusts including litecoin (LTC), bitcoin cash (BCH), stellar lumens (XLM), ethereum classic (ETC), and zcash (ZEC).

The news appears to have given a boost to these DeFi-related tokens, as YFI has skyrocketed 26% to reach a new all-time high of $47,400, according to CoinGecko. Following somewhat lackluster price action, YFI has finally awoken and is moving upwards again.

SUSHI also hit an ATH a couple of hours ago of $17.30, while COMP is close to its own trading just below $500, at the time of writing. MKR is trading flat on the day just over $2,500, while SNX has also made an all-time high of $27.

DeFiPulse is reporting the total TVL across the DeFi sector at a record $40 billion, but it is likely to be higher since some listings are omitted.

Martin has been writing on cyber security and infotech for two decades. He has previous trading experience and has been actively covering the blockchain and crypto industry since 2017.

In many ways, major mainstream content giants like YouTube are ripe for disruption, so the cryptoeconomys cuing in insurgents. A handful of blockchain projects in Roll, YouNow, and Livepeer are in the headlines this week for advancing their missions to do content differently.Freshest in the news is Roll, a startup focused on social money for the content creation ecosystem. On Thursday, news broke that the up-and-comers had raised $1.7 million USD in investments funds from several sources, the most recognizable among them being BitMEX chief executive officer Arthur Hayes.The startups value proposition is to give content creators whether they be video makers, podcasters, or beyond the ability to easily create Ethereum ERC20 tokens that their fans can use as payments within the creators respective micro-economies.For example, a popular Fortnite streamer on Twitch could use Roll to create a token for their channel that the chat the streamers audience could use for subscriptions, squad-ups, channel perks, store items, and more. Then, if that streamer ever decided to leave Twitch for a different streaming platform, they could readily shift their micro-economy and not have to worry about having their currency stuck in a single, centralized silo.It is a worthy vision and a concept that will prove successful, Hayes told CoinDesk.YouNow Files with the SEC, Though Its Not ICOingIn Americas nook of the cryptoeconomy, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is mentioned, it typically brings to mind the federal watchdogs increasingly tough stance on what it sees as unregistered securities offerings and the exchanges that host the resulting tokens.In that context, token-minded video platform startup YouNow isnt taking any chances.This week, the platforms builders filed an offering circular traditionally done to register a new security with the Commission, even though they plan to freely airdrop their Props ERC20 token for a public offering as opposed to conducting a sale.Its an interesting move, and one the cryptoverse hasnt seen yet. If greenlighted, YouNow will be able to move forward with distributing more than 170 million Props without having to worry about the tokens being securities in the U.S.Notably, the startup has already sold $25 million worth of Props through simple agreements for future tokens (SAFT), so its currently unclear how that dynamic will figure into the SECs forthcoming considerations.YouNow has told the Commission that the platforms validators and users will be rewarded with Props for engaging in the network.Livepeer Hot Off Funding Raise of Its OwnLivepeer billed as a decentralized video platform for open-source video infrastructure services, built on the Ethereum blockchain announced this week it had raised $8 million in its Series A funding round from several firms, including Digital Currency Group.The project works by using LPT tokens to incentivize encoding providers to connect with video streamers who want to stream in decentralized fashion. As the projects landing page explains:Livepeer is creating a scalable Platform as a Service for developers who want to add live or on-demand video to their project. We aim to increase reliability of video workflows while reducing the costs to scale them. To achieve this we are building p2p infrastructure that interacts through a marketplace secured by the Ethereum blockchain.Livepeer co-founder Doug Petkanics recently told TechCrunch that an early-adopter, philosophically-aligned crowd had already tested out the platform and had good results.The system, like YouNow and Roll, is striving to approach content in a unique way.Interestingly, theres another commonality running through the aforementioned plays: all of them leverage the Ethereum blockchain. Its yet another reminder that the reigning smart contracts platform opens up new kinds of commerce.Download our Free Cryptocurrency BooksSignup to download our eBook Collection.We will also send our weekly newsletter on a Friday lunchtime with the latest Crypto News & topics from Blockonomi. No Spam, ever.You will receive 3 books: Bitcoin, Ethereum & Lightning Network + All Future Books.You have Successfully Subscribed!

HomepageAbout membershipSign inGet startedHomepageDoug PetkanicsBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingBuilding live streaming on the blockchain at Livepeer. Previously Founder, VP Eng at Wildcard and Hyperpublic (acquired by Groupon).Mar 8, 2017Introducing Livepeer — A Decentralized Live Video Broadcast Platform and Crypto Token ProtocolToday I am excited to announce the Livepeer Project. We believe that every person should have access to a platform to share their voice, and in today’s day and age, live video is increasingly becoming the truest, most genuine way to communicate with a wide audience. The goal of the Livepeer Project is to deliver a protocol and platform for decentralized live video broadcast over the internet — to provide the open platform that gives broadcasters, developers, and users the easy ability to get their content and message out to the world.Streaming some hoops and some League of Legends.Live VideoLive streaming is rapidly increasing in popularity. People tune into live events like political debates and live sports like the World Cup from their laptops and phones. They join social services like YouNow, Periscope, and Riff to watch streamers entertain and engage with their audience. And they watch eSports on services like Twitch for hours on end. More and more people are canceling their cable subscriptions and turning to the internet for their entertainment, with Youtube viewership set to surpass cable TV viewership shortly.Yet as it stands today, to actually build an application with live video content, or to broadcast a significant event to a large audience, is still very difficult and very expensive. Broadcasters and developers pay the same few centralized companies in order to transcode and distribute their video to all devices and platforms so that it can reach every viewer. And they pay a lot.The Livepeer Protocol — A Decentralized ApproachAs I’ve written about before, there are many benefits of decentralization. Through coordination and economic incentives in a blockchain based protocol, solutions are possible that can result in a platform being:Cheaper to the end userMore scalableMore resilient without any single points of failureOpen, from both a development perspective, and from a censorship free perspectiveThrough the combination of an open source media server, a peer-to-peer network, and a soundly designed blockchain based crypto-economic protocol, the Livepeer Project aims to deliver the network that can accomplish all of the above for live video broadcasting. This means that any user or broadcaster will be able to send a stream into Livepeer, and it will take care of:All of the processing required to convert it into every format and bitrate so it can reach the majority of your audience across all devices and connection speeds.Distribution of the content to anyone who requests it.And it will do it in a way that brings the benefits of decentralization mentioned above. There are currently solutions for payments, computation, and storage in the decentralized stack, but Livepeer is the first solution for live streaming content. Please read the Project Overview for high level technical details on the protocol.Current StatusLivepeer is an open, community driven project. The software is open source on Github and under active development. There is also a nascent forum and chatroom for questions and discussion. Please get involved!Plenty of work has begun on development on the video and p2p side, with a proof of concept developed on top of Ethereum, Swarm, and DEVp2p. Developers can build and run a Livepeer node today, and broadcast video into the Livepeer (toy) network using our simple web client or a broadcasting tool like OBS. Any other node in the network can then request their stream, and the network will route the video to the requesting user and play it.In the future, nodes in the network will earn crypto-token incentives for contributing their processing power and bandwidth in the service of encoding and distributing video through the network, and for participating in the security protocol, much like miners in Bitcoin and Ethereum earn token for mining. At the moment, there is a high level protocol concept, which will need to be refined, researched, and vetted before being submitted for peer review and implementation.We’re excited to bring Livepeer into the public eye, and look forward to all ideas, comments, feedback, and criticisms of the approach we’re taking to make decentralized live video broadcasting a reality.Live StreamingEthereumBlockchainDecentralizationStreamingOne clap, two clap, three clap, forty?By clapping more or less, you can signal to us which stories really stand out.3386BlockedUnblockFollowFollowingDoug PetkanicsBuilding live streaming on the blockchain at Livepeer. Previously Founder, VP Eng at Wildcard and Hyperpublic (acquired by Groupon).338Never miss a story from Doug Petkanics, when you sign up for Medium. Learn moreNever miss a story from Doug PetkanicsBlockedUnblockFollowGet updates

Herbalist Token is a project designed to solve expensive rare herbs problems by building a blockchain integrated marketplace that will bring farmers and buyers together. “On our platform, any farmer is going to be able to list their products and find buyers around the globe easily and quickly,” Anton Lorenz, founder of HERBS announced.The platform is geared towards eliminating intermediaries; cut unnecessary costs; increase the profit of the growers and decrease the price of the product for customers making rare herbs more accessible to everyone. By doing so, the creators also believe it will enhance the Cryptocurrency adoption drive.“As a Herbalist project our token is an ERC20 token for now,” Lorenz said concerning the underlying token. “It is appropriate to be used in our platform once it opens.”The founder is convinced that in half a decade the project will be the Amazon or Alibaba of the Herb and agriculture market. They are working hard to make it a one-stop shop for rare herbs globally.“We have a great community that has supported us since the beginning of our journey. We care about their views and feedback. They help us grow this wonderful project and motivate us to be better than the previous day. We love them all. We just ask them to believe in us and keep supporting us.”BZL is the Brazilian cryptocurrency that seeks to reach where the others have not. It facilitates the purchase of products and services through a new payment method, reaching the final consumer with the lowest market rates.Estevão Bezerra, CEO at BZLCoin pronounced that their aim is not only to be a digital asset, but a currency, where people can use to negotiate in their physical and virtual stores. The platform also allows sellers to advertise their products to sellers.The underlying technology of BZLCoin is a PoW and PoS hybrid using the TRIBUS Algo. The hybrid nature impedes the development of ASICs and ensures its decentralization.On where the project will be in the next five years, Bezerra had this to say:“A lot of work… And with work one gets rewards. Well, for BZL it will not be any different. Our goal is for the Token to be used for shopping all over the world.”The CEO asked the community to continue to support them so that they can reach their goal. “Do not see BZlcoin for the price now, do not just see it as a digital token, see it as an idea. Do not just buy the coin, buy the idea,” he said to the BZL community.Shivers is a hybrid of cryptocurrency and traditional film finance and distribution. Their goal is to join crypto to a commodity instead of another transaction-only base cryptocurrency.“Shivers is meant to be “digital movie tickets” for our in-house produced films and will be used to unlock exclusive horror films and be the currency which we use for all licensing of our films,” Dar Warison, founder of Shivers revealed. “Through our partnerships with Infamous Horrors and Team McAfee, we believe we can create something totally unique to the crypto space.”It is built on the Ethereum network. The team announced in the future they would like to create a more complex system where the tokens would unlock movie files directly.“We see Shivers as an opportunity to combine two very large markets, the crypto market and the horror market, to facilitate the creation of unique and exciting projects,” Warison noted. “In the next five years, we see ourselves having eight to ten films completed with a mixture of traditional distribution and directly through our tokens.”According to the founder, the past year was spent building a solid foundation for Shivers through establishing partnerships for listing on exchanges. With a solid foundation in place, they are very confident that 2019 is going to be a year full of progress. “We are very excited to release details of our first film in January and want to reach out to our holders to join us on this unique ride,” he concluded.Livepeer is a video infrastructure platform with a network that enables video transcoding. Users who run the Livepeer Media Server stake the token in order to provide a security deposit against the work that they perform transcoding video.“If they do the work honestly, they earn the fees paid by the network’s users (fees are in ETH, and the users are video developers, not individual streamers). Token holders who don’t want to run a node can instead delegate their stake towards another node – they provide more security and help route work towards nodes who are performing well for users. The end result is a cheaper, more scalable, decentralized video infrastructure network that leverages idle compute all around the world.”Livepeer is built on Ethereum, IPFS, FFMPEG, and a whole host of web3 technologies that power various aspects of the platform. Petkanics explained that all the code is open source and It’s been live on Ethereum’s mainnet for about eight months in development for about two years.Their focus in the next five years is to enable amazing scaled video applications that couldn’t exist under centralized cost structures. Video applications that can run at scale and enable their users to participate in the world economy, monetize their time, consume amazing user-generated content or bridge communications across the world.“Get involved in the network and participate! Delegate and QA the network, help contribute to the open source video ecosystem, create tools or content for other token holders teaching them how to be a part of the Livepeer project,” was Pet.kanics’ message to the LPT community.COVA is a distinct criterion for data to be used as capital. Though Data is swiftly becoming the most vital asset in the world, yet currently there is no infrastructure to control how it is used. COVA provides a unique solution to this predicament and allows data owners to take advantage of the commodification of data.“With the new COVA internet protocol, the owner of a data package can comprise a data usage policy that specifies the data’s expected behaviour, Wenyi Ji, a team member informed CWS. The COVA internet protocol makes sure that the policy is enforced by code and it is called the machine-enforceable data usage policy – “Smart Policy”.Ji unveiled that powering the COVA network is a substrate of TEE nodes that run COVA software, and provide the horsepower of secured and trusted execution. All data and code that is processed by the COVA network are securely pieced together, hidden and protected inside an enclave. Smart Policies are written in Centrifuge, and provide data owners with a new tool in their arsenal to prevent their precious data from being abused.“We will first target industries that have a high demand for data,” Ji hinted. “Therefore, we are now negotiating with major pharmaceuticals and financial companies in China.”“Thank you so much for supporting COVA. We hope the new listing will be beneficial to our ecosystem, including developers, users and investors.”

Coinbase is considering adding a new range of digital assets, including VeChain, Aragon, Bancor, Siacoin, Origin Protocol, and Ren to its potential listings.     Coinbase has been evaluating potential digital assets under its Digital Asset Framework, to review the project’s security and compliance before completing the listing on the exchange.   Other projects on Coinbase’s list include Arweave, COMP, DigiByte, Horizon, Livepeer, NuCypher, Numeraire, Render Network, SKALE Network, and Synthetix.   “Our decision to support any asset requires significant technical and compliance review and may be subject to regulatory approval in some jurisdictions,” the Coinbase blog read. “As per our listing process, we will add new assets on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis, subject to applicable review and authorizations.”   With the announcement of the potential listing of the cryptocurrencies on the Coinbase exchange has led to a rise in digital asset value before dumping shortly after the listing has been confirmed.   Most assets have seen a jump in price between 8 to 25 percent, with an average of 17 percent, according to data from Messari. Vechain (VET) price has seen an increase of 12.34% after Coinbase’s announcement.    However, the US exchange did not give a timeline for listing the mentioned cryptocurrencies.    Coinbase recently faced outages during Bitcoin price surges which have led to some members of the crypto community refusing to use the exchange. Coinbase users withdrew 22,000 more Bitcoins than they deposited on June 7, which was worth around $214 million.    The US exchange has also faced skepticism when news came out of Coinbase’s intention to sell a blockchain analytics software, named  “Coinbase Analytics” to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). 

Digibyte and Vechain are among several crypto assets that are outperforming Bitcoin and Ethereum in the past 24 hours The past 24 hours have seen a dozen or so altcoins gain more than 10% on news that US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was looking to add support for nearly 18 digital assets. Digibyte, Bancor and Vechain are among several tokens outperforming major altcoins after Coinbase’s announcement. According to Coinbase, its team would use its Digital Asset Framework evaluate and decide on the listing of any of the following crypto assets: Aave, Aragon, Arweave, Bancor, COMP, DigiByte, Horizen, Livepeer, NuCypher, Numeraire, KEEP Network, Origin Protocol, Ren, Render Network, Siacoin, SKALE Network, Synthetix and VeChain. In the past, Coinbase listings have been bullish signals for digital assets. Digibyte has surged over 19.5% on the day, from lows of $0.016 to $0.0197. Digibyte is trading up by more than 24% then on its price a week ago. Vechain’s price has gained more than 18% to see its price rise from $0.0081 to $0.0098 on intraday volumes of more than $101 million. The altcoin is up 38% in the weekly charts. Another top gainer due to the Coinbase announcement is Bancor; spiking by close to 20% in the past 24 hours on rising volumes. The crypto asset is now more than 47% up over the past seven days. Siacoin, ranked 59th on CoinMarketCap, has gained over 13% on the day to see its value increase more than 7% on weekly charts. As altcoins rally, the crypto community has not relented in its call for a mass exodus from Coinbase. This follows the recent outages and reports that the company was likely to offer its intelligence platform to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Bitcoin Price Has ‘Already Bottomed Out’ in Retail-Driven Crypto Market: Research By CCN: In case there was any doubt, the bitcoin price has found a bottom. Binance has released a comprehensive research report on the state of the crypto market, finding that the worst for crypto is… Crypto Markets See Green, US Stock Futures Solid Ahead of Goldman, Citi Earnings Cointelegraph.com News     •     Mon, 15 Apr 2019 13:23:00 +0100 After yesterday’s mixed movements, all of the top twenty cryptocurrencies are seeing solid green on the day to press time, with Bitcoin trading around $5,180 to press time Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, EOS, Binance Coin, Stellar, Cardano, TRON: Price Analysis April 15 Cointelegraph.com News     •     Mon, 15 Apr 2019 19:29:00 +0100 New data shows that bears are opening short positions at higher prices. Where are major coins heading in the short term? Let’s find out Livepeer Delegation Tutorial – Stake Capital – Medium Crypto New Media     •     Tue, 16 Apr 2019 05:12:15 PDT Simple Staking Tutorial by Stake Capital Welcome to this simple Livepeer Delegation Tutorial. You will need: access to your Ethereum address holding your Livepeer token.… Bitcoin - The Currency of the Internet     •     2019-04-16T07:00:05+00:00 Please utilize this sticky thread for all general Bitcoin discussions! If you see posts on the front page or /r/Bitcoin/new which are better suited for this daily discussion thread, please help out…

Kyber Network had recently beefed up its mechanism for staking, voting, and claiming rewards following its Katalyst protocol upgrade. StakeWith.Us provides secure staking services across blockchain projects as well as provide non-custodial white label solutions to institutions. It is backed by SG Innovate, the Singapore Government Deep-tech fund and LuneX Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures blockchain arm. StakeWith.Us is also working on a separate venture this year called Unagii.com. This venture is a multi-chain yield management platform that aggregates different open finance services. One of the products includes the staking of KNC for its users. With this partnership, KNC holders have the option to delegate their tokens and voting power to ATLAS. It is the staking platform by StakeWith.Us. With this, StakeWith.Us will be able to participate in all KyberDAO votes on behalf of the KNC holders. Delegators will be able to withdraw their KNC or re-delegate anytime they want. StakeWith.US promises complete transparency regarding their voting decisions. The third-party staking pool will also provide the delegators the reasoning behind how it has voted. This partnership is also in line with Kyber’s Katalyst upgrade which will go live at the end of Q2 this year. This upgrade includes a new staking mechanism as well as the launch of KyberDAO. As a result, KNC holders will be able to stake KNC to vote and in exchange, receive ETH from network fees. KNC will then formalize itself as the first deflationary staking token where actual network usage and DeFi growth will determine token burn and rewards. Michael Ng, co-founder of StakeWith.Us said pointed out the difference with other Ethereum-based staking protocols including Livepeer and Synthetix. They usually have staking reward payouts in their native tokens. In contrast, Kyber would be the only protocol with a deflationary staking token with network fees paid out in ETH. Speaking on the occasion, CEO of Kyber Network, Loi Luu, highlighted the advantages of Kyber staking that did not require any minimum amount, lockups, or slashing. He stated, “KyberDAO and the governance process were designed to empower our community while ensuring the security and stability of the network. Now with StakeWith.Us, KNC holders will possess even greater flexibility participating in in-network governance.” In other news, Kyber Network recently partnered with HTC Exodus to provide users with crypto-to-crypto trading. Last year, the decentralized crypto exchange had teamed up with Unibright to join Libra Camp, a virtual boot camp for startups to build apps on the Libra blockchain.

Poloniex cryptocurrency exchange has announced the addition of three cryptocurrencies to its platform. Livepeer (LPT), Numerai (NMR) and Polymath (POLY) are the tokens which are added, and the exchange has noted that the Circle Asset Framework was used to vet the projects.Clients can now post limit orders (“Post-only”), to ensure that no dramatic price swings occur when trading commences. All tokens will be available to trade against Bitcoin (BTC).

The exchange has hired an AWS veteran to lead the development of the new functionality.San Francisco-based crypto giant Coinbase is reportedly looking to add staking and governance solutions for its crypto custodial servicesAccording to a recent report by The Block, Coinbase has hired Luke Youngblood, formerly a principal solutions architect at AWS, to head up the development of the new staking and governance products.The report, which cites an internal memo, also states that these products will allow Coinbase Custody clients to interact seamlessly with the crypto-network while maintaining the security of cold storage.This news comes just Coinbase recently participated in the $4.5 million seed round for Staked, a New York-based startup that helps institutional investors stake or lend their holdings in various proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies.Staked currently supports 6 cryptocurrencies including Tezos (XTZ), Dash (DASH), Decred (DCR), Livepeer (LPT), Factom (FCT) and EOS (EOS).Disclaimer: This article’s author has cryptocurrency holdings that can be tracked here. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. Always conduct your own due diligence before making investments.

Blockchain startup Bison Trails has raised $5.25 million in a seed funding round led by Initialized Capital and Accomplice. Notation Capital, Homebrew, Galaxy Digital, Distributed Global, Charge Ventures and a prominent group of angel investors also participated in the round.Bison Trails claims to be the world’s first infrastructure as a service company designed for next-generation blockchain networks. It claims to provide a full stack offering for next-generation infrastructure and its constituents, including staking, validating, voting, transacting, and securing blockchain protocols. Their goal is to make it easy for anyone to launch secure, highly-available, and geographically distributed nodes on a participatory blockchain network with only a few clicks.Accomplice said in a blog post that they invested in Bison Trails because they believe the startup is launching at an opportune time and will mesh nicely with the dozens of proof of stake protocols launching now and in the coming months.“These networks have baked in incentives for token-holders to “stake”, be active network participants, and avoid potential coin deflation,” Accomplice said. “Today, Bison Trails is actively securing protocols Livepeer, Tezos, and Decred and is building for dozens more. Looking forward, we believe cryptonetworks will generate new pockets of value for users, developers, and stakeholders where Bison Trails acts as the trusted staking and infrastructure partner.”Bison Trails said that the infrastructure that they’re building today will pave the way for an entire generation of new decentralized companies, services, and participants to access blockchain economies and networks.“We couldn’t be happier with this group of supportive, well-seasoned company builders and are thrilled to be working with investors that share the same long-term vision as us while we build a category-defining company in this nascent space,” Bison Trails said. “As builders and long-term believers in blockchain technology, we know that transparent, secure, and decentralized infrastructure will have long-lasting benefits for the entire ecosystem. We’re launching our platform to a select group of alpha partners in the coming weeks.”

the ecosystem. Over the past two years Civic has assembled over 90 partnerships, one of which is CardConnect, which partnered with Civic to deliver a mobile-first payment solution. The product offers an innovative security solution to keep your data safe via tokenization, point-to-point encryption, as well additional security features, such as PCI scope reduction. Additionally, in February 2020, Civic launched their wallet to their private list of over 100,000 people worldwide; it also offers insurance for cryptocurrency holdings worth up to $1,000,000. Name: ENJIN ICO: 2017 Token: ENJ Summary: Enjin’s mission is to radically transform gaming by bringing real-life economies to virtual worlds. Enjin offers an ecosystem of integrated blockchain products. This ecosystem is fueled by Enjin Coin (ENJ), an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency used to directly back the value of blockchain assets created with the Enjin blockchain game development platform. Comprising the ENJIN Platform, Explorer & Marketplace, Wallet, Beam (QR asset distribution service), and other tools and services, the Enjin ecosystem provides users and developers with everything they need to easily mint, manage, explore, distribute, and integrate blockchain assets. Over 20,000 individuals are registered as users on the Enjin Platform (Ethereum Mainnet + Kovan Testnet versions) and 3,000projects have been created with the Enjin Platform (Ethereum Mainnet + Kovan Testnet combined) ERC-1155 blockchain assets: · 51,985,678 have been created with the Enjin Platform · 12,550,951 ENJ (1.25% of total supply) has been locked in blockchain assets In late 2019, the Enjin Marketplace, a digital trading hub integrated with EnjinX and the Enjin Wallet, was launched. This allows users to easily buy and sell blockchain assets from their phone. In February 2020, they released the Enjin Platform publicly on Ethereum Mainnet. Developers can now use the blockchain game development platform to create blockchain-based assets backed with ENJ and integrate them with their games, apps, and websites. This launch also included the Mainnet release of the Blockchain SDK for Unity. Upcoming milestones for Q2 2020 include the launch of a Blockchain SDK for Godot Engine, Java SDK, and a blockchain plugin for Minecraft server owners. Name: Golem ICO: 2016 Token: GNT Summary: Golem is a cryptocurrency and P2P application platform that enables users to rent resources in the form of computational power and time. Users are compensated for their resources via their token GNT. Golem’s most illustrative use case is CGI rendering; its software scales with tasks, which is all made possible with Ethereum blockchain. Their next milestone, announced in April 2020, is a completely new architecture known as New Golem. The new architecture will allow for new use-cases to be built on top of it, will see a new ERC-20 Golem token, and will possess greater transaction speeds and avoid network clogging. Name: Gnosis ICO: 2017 Token: GNO Summary: Gnosis originally started as a prediction market that allows for people to create arbitrary events to make predictions on a variety of events. Since its inception it has progressed to a three-product strategy of create, trade, hold and progressed to a dual token model using GNO and OWL, with the former being an ERC-20 token that was sold during their ICO. April 2020 saw the Gnosis team launch Corona Information Markets, a new prediction market for events related to the coronavirus pandemic. Name: Livepeer ICO: 2019* Token: LPT Summary: Livepeer provides scalable, secure video transcoding at a fraction of the cost of typical public cloud infrastructure solutions. The solution is highly reliable and delivers perfect quality with massive scalability while being both environmentally friendly and unmatched in affordability. There is a team of 15 people working at Livepeer and currently there are 44 infrastructure providers, 2569 delegators and approximately 65% of LPT is staked on a node in the network. Livepeer are reportedly close to several major milestones, including: 1. Launching an API service focused on the video community that abstracts the complexity of interacting with the tokens. This is to enable people who want cost effective, reliable, and secure transcoding to easily use Livepeer. The API is in beta now and there are a number of people currently trialing. 2. Launching a website focused on the video community to allow them to sign up for the API service mentioned above. 3. Moving their service out of beta and announcing our first commercial users of the service. The LPT token works via Ethereum and is the exclusive payment method supported by Livepeer. The token can be exchanged into other coins or fiat-based currencies via supporting exchanges. Name: MakerDAO ICO: - Token: MKR & DAI Summary: MakerDAO is an open-source project on the Ethereum blockchain and a Decentralized Autonomous Organization was created in 2014. Its tokens (MKR) holders manage the Maker Protocol, which enables users to create currency. Current elements of the Maker Protocol include the Dai stablecoin, Maker Collateral Vaults, Oracles, and Voting. Through the volatility of 2020 the total value locked in Maker in has increased 14 percent YTD. MakerDAO is the largest DeFi protocol to date and one of the founding blocks of the alternative decentralized finance system. Name: Numerai ICO: 2019 Token: NMR Summary: Numerai was launched in 2015 and is an AI-run and crowd-sourced hedge fund. The core idea of Numerai is to give away all their information for free and let anyone train machine learning algorithms on it, and then to submit financial markets predictions. In 2017, Numerai built their own cryptocurrency Numeraire (NMR). NMR is mined by data mining Numerai’s data, and submitting predictions is the proof of work. The submission point of this data is Numerai’s data science tournament. Following the submission of this data, data scientists are rewarded in NMR based on the accuracy of their data. If the predictions are poor, rather than being rewarded, their NMR is permanently destroyed. Following its release, Numerai has paid out millions of dollars and is one of the best paying data science tournaments in the world. Name: OmiseGO ICO: 2017 Token: OMG Summary: Founded in 2017, OmiseGO is a team of 50+ professionals working across 3 continents. They envision a future where anyone worldwide can transfer, operate, or build on a financial infrastructure that is safe, transparent, and affordable. OmiseGO achieves this mission via the OMG Network: the value transfer network for ETH and ERC-20 tokens. It uses one-of-a-kind, More Viable Plasma technology that individuals and businesses can use to transact and build on an infrastructure that offers comparable speeds, costs, and security to the Ethereum Network — all while retaining full autonomy over their funds and keys. In addition to the OMG Network, OmiseGO offers several products such as the OMG Block Explorer, as well as various libraries and SDKs that reduce the time to integrate with their services. Additionally, individuals can use Web Wallet to test network features. Name: Power Ledger ICO: 2017 Token: POWR Summary: Power Ledger’s technology provides the operating system for new energy markets. The company has developed a world-first blockchain-enabled energy trading platform to make energy markets more efficient. Power Ledger platform helps people transact energy and trade environmental commodities. Their token, POWR, is the bond needed to use the platform. The company is rapidly scaling its business around the world, with partnerships with energy companies to develop distributed, democratized electricity markets. Currently, Power Ledger has more than twenty projects across nine countries and partnerships with large entities such as KEPCO in Japan, the Malaysian Government and NASDAQ-listed Clearway Energy. Power Ledger uses blockchain to provide an immutable audit trail of where and when energy was generated and consumed to ensure that energy sources can be validated efficiently and that electricity, energy services and energy certificates can be traded and settled in a low-cost and transparent way. The company is also using blockchain to enable new commercial and business models in the electricity sector such as cross-retailer and cross-battery trading via its virtual power plant feature, where households and businesses with batteries can derive passive income from stabilizing the energy grid with their batteries. In April 2020 Power Ledger announced the world’s largest ‘choose your own energy source’ project in France with its Vision platform feature connecting to up to 220,000 electricity meters. Name: Steem ICO: 2016 Token: STEEM Summary: Steem is a blockchain-based social media platform where anyone can earn rewards by posting relevant content and curating content by upvoting and holding Steem-based currencies. Steem supports community building and social interaction with cryptocurrency rewards. The STEEM token is a reward tool earned by posting well-liked and valuable content. In March 2020 Steem announced its intention to create a new platform called HIVE, and users will receive their balances in a 1:1 ratio via airdrop. Name: Synthetix ICO: Token: SNX Summary: Synthetix is a blockchain-based payment network powered by a stablecoin aiming to combine all the benefits of a decentralized approach with the stability of traditional finance assets. Synthetix implements a dual token solution that consists of a stabilized Ethereum-based utility token (SNX) and a reserve token (Nomin) to back it. Nomin is pegged to the value of 1 USD and is used to make transactions on the platform. Additionally, Synthetix launched GrantsDAO to fund community projects. Synthetix is the second most utilized DeFi protocol to date. Name: Tether ICO: None Token: USDT Summary: Tether, a stablecoin, was launched in 2014 and is the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capital. Tether offers a method for maintaining a one-to-one reserve ratio between a cryptocurrency token, called tethers, and its associated real-world asset, fiat currency. In 2019 Tether introduced loans to affiliate companies and in 2020 released Tether Gold, which offers a digital token backed by physical gold. Additionally, through April 2020, there was an additional $1 billion that flooded into USDT. USDT is the most popular stablecoin and is often used by cryptocurrency investors and traders. Crosser, N. Initial Coin Offerings as Investments Contracts: Are Blockchain Utility Tokens Securities? (2018). Lyandres, E, Palazzo, D, Rabetti, D. Are Token Securities? An Anatomy of Initial Coin Offerings. (2019). Liebau, D. Cryptocurrencies & Initial Coin Offerings: Are They Scams? — An Empirical Study. (2019). Tiwari, M, Gepp, A, Kumar, K. The Future of Raising Finance — A New Opportunity to Commit Fraud: a Review of Initial Coin Offering (ICOs) Scams. (2019) Liebau, D. Cryptocurrencies & Initial Coin Offerings: Are They Scams? — An Empirical Study. (2019). Financial Post. The Great Crypto Crash of 2018: Cryptocurrency’s 90% plunge is now worse than the dot-com crash. (2018). Michalowski, P. Tokenism. (1993). Casinority. Who Created the First Casino? Were They Gamblers? (2016). Coinbooks. Telephone Token History. (2002). Buterin, V. Ethereum whitepaper. (2019). The Next Web. The ultimate cryptocurrency explainer: Bitcoin, utility tokens, and stablecoins. (2019) Au, S & Power, T. Tokenomics — The Crypto Shift of Blockchains, ICOs, and Tokens (2018). Twitter. Erasure Staked. (2020). Etherscan. (2020). Power Ledger, Our Projects. (2020). ENJIN. (2020). 0x. (2020). Basic Attention Token. (2020). Adindza, g, Astebro, T, Yong, K. Decision biases and entrepreneurial finance. (2016). Cumming, D & Dai, N. Local Bias in Venture Capital Investment. (2010). Twitter. Erasure Staked. (2020). Au, S & Power, T. Tokenomics — The Crypto Shift of Blockchains, ICOs, and Tokens (2018). OmiseGO. OmiseGO Blog. (2020). Hughes, E. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. (1993). Politou, E. Blockchain Mutability: Challenges and Proposed Solutions. (2019). Abbatemarco, N, et. al. The Blockchain Journey: A Guide to Practical Business Applications. (2018). Tapscott, D & Tapscott, A. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World. (2016). MakerDAO. (2020). 0x. (2020). Campbell, R. 0x Launches Instant, Delivers An Easy And Flexible Way To Buy Crypto Tokens. (2018). OmiseGO. OmiseGO Blog. (2020). Pentland, W. Why The Pentagon Should Worry About Lack Of Innovation In Electric Utility Sector. (2017). Power Ledger. Power Ledger reveals world’s biggest ‘choose your own energy source’ project in France. (2020). Economist. The World Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil But Data. (2017). Civic. (2020). Civic. Civic Blog. (2020). Balakrishnan, A. Is It Better to Earn Brave’s BAT Token, or Invest in it? (2020). Augur. (2020). Blockchain WTF. Gnosis: Another Decentralized Prediction Market. (2020). Gnosis. (2020). DutchX. (2020). Venturebeat. (2017). Hay, R. Japan is looking to break into esports competitions by 20025. (2020). ENJIN. (2020). CryptoNinjas. Ethereum-powered Virtue Poker holding final test round; winner gets entry to 2020 WSOP. (2020). Lee, J. A decentralized token economy: How blockchain and cryptocurrency can revolutionize business. (2019). Beck, R. Beyond Bitcoin — The Rise of Blockchain World. (2018). *Disclaimer: This report does not represent any investment advice, promotion of any particular ERC-20 token, nor an affirmation of any specific initiative over any other initiative. The report is published and released publicly for educational purposes, free of charge, as with all GBBC related Open-Source Idea (OSI) Reports. 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Starting today, Poloniex customers can trade and redeem Atoms, the native token of the Cosmos Network. Poloniex is the only exchange where ICO participants can securely redeem their tokens. This comes after Poloniex became the first exchange to allow Cosmos ICO participants to preview their ATOM balance. Atoms can now be traded and redeemed on Poloniex as Cosmos governance has voted to enable those functions. Cosmos was built to create a network of blockchains all capable of interacting with one another through a consensus engine called Tendermint Core. The goal of Cosmos is to solve many of the interoperability and scalability issues needed for blockchain applications to reach mainstream adoption. Anyone with a Poloniex account can sign in to trade and transfer Atoms. For ICO participants who want to redeem their Atoms, please follow these steps: You can start by navigating to the Poloniex deposit and withdrawal page. For your safety, always confirm that you are securely logged into Poloniex by reviewing the URL: Upon arrival, locate Cosmos and click “Redeem.” You will then be prompted to enter your seed phrase. You will then be able to see your total Atom balance from the ICO, the Cosmos network fee, and the total amount you can redeem. Poloniex has taken considerable precaution in helping our customers claim their Atoms in a secure way. Note that your seed phrase will not leave your browser and is not stored with Poloniex. Your browser will use the seed phrase to determine your Cosmos public address and then display the amount of ATOMs you can redeem. When claiming your Atoms, your browser will then digitally sign a transaction that authorizes the movement of funds into your Cosmos deposit address on Poloniex. The only data transmitted to our servers is the public key and the signature required to move the funds. If you have more questions about Cosmos redemptions, please see our detailed Q&A here. The addition of Cosmos Atoms is just one of multiple exciting recent developments at Poloniex. We’ve completely revamped our infrastructure to reduce latency and increase trading speeds by 10X. We were also one of the first exchanges to add support for Grin and the first exchange to support FOAM and Livepeer. We’ve just opened several markets for margin trading for non-US customers with more margin pairs on the way. Stay tuned for more pairs, more improvements and more features!

Blockchain Startup Bison Trails Receives $5.25 Mln Investment Backed by Galaxy Digital New blockchain startup Bison Trails has received an investment of $5.25 million in a seed round backed by Mike Novogratz’s crypto merchant bank Galaxy Digital. The firm announced the fundraising in a Medium post on March 15.Led by two early stage venture capital firms Initialized Capital and Accomplice, the series seed round was also backed by both Galaxy Digital and blockchain-focused asset management firm Distributed Global. Other investors included Notation Capital, Homebrew and Charge Ventures.Related articles US Missoula County Considers Requiring Crypto Miners to Use Renewable Energy March 21, 2019 China’s Alibaba Partners With Chinese Software Giant to Promote Blockchain Development March 21, 2019 var jnews_module_11040_0_5c93e002ee9f1 = {"header_icon":"","first_title":"Related o3","class":"jnews_block_21"}; Bison Trails’ blockchain infrastructure is designed to offer a way to launch secure, available and geographically distributed nodes on a participatory blockchain network, the press release notes. The Bison Trails platform enables a number of blockchain tools including staking, validating, voting, transacting and securing blockchain protocols.Accomplice has confirmed the news of their leading the co-lead investment in New York-based Bison Trails. Founded by Joe Lallouz and Aaron Henshaw, Bison Trails is designed to optimize block production and validation, and is actively securing a number of protocols including Livepeer, Tezos, and Decred, Accomplice wrote on its Medium.Previously, Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital invested in blockchain security company CipherTrace, which reportedly raised $15 million in venture capital. CipherTrace aims to improve tools for crypto intelligence, anti-money laundering solutions, blockchain analytics and forensics and compliance.window.fbAsyncInit =