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Genesis Vision (CURRENCY:GVT) traded 8.1% higher against the U.S. dollar during the one day period ending at 22:00 PM ET on January 5th. One Genesis Vision token can currently be bought for approximately $1.83 or 0.00005410 BTC on popular cryptocurrency exchanges. Genesis Vision has a market cap of $8.12 million and approximately $513,768.00 worth of Genesis Vision was traded on exchanges in the last 24 hours. During the last seven days, Genesis Vision has traded up 29.2% against the U.S. dollar.

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

Genesis Vision Profile

Buying and Selling Genesis Vision

Genesis Vision can be purchased on these cryptocurrency exchanges:. It is usually not possible to purchase alternative cryptocurrencies such as Genesis Vision directly using U.S. dollars. Investors seeking to acquire Genesis Vision should first purchase Bitcoin or Ethereum using an exchange that deals in U.S. dollars such as Gemini, GDAX or Coinbase. Investors can then use their newly-acquired Bitcoin or Ethereum to purchase Genesis Vision using one of the exchanges listed above.

May 15, 2021 — Blockchain startup Revuto has concluded a $1.7-million private round to support its development of a crypto-subscription payment solution. Its app has also recorded more than 1 million sign-ups in 14 days through a referral program. Starting tomorrow at 8 am UTC, the team behind Revuto will do a live event on YouTube, where it’ll announce the opening of the first public token sale on Cardano. 

A number of leading blockchain investors participated in the private round on May 18, which preceded the public sale for Revuto’s native token, REVU. BlackDragon VC led the round, which also attracted several angel investors. Due to increasing demand for allocation, Revuto was able to close its private round in the space of a week.

“We’re grateful for our private investors, including BlackDragon, for believing in Revuto’s team and tech and for sharing our vision of making crypto spendable in everyday life. Having the right funding and investors that back our long-term vision is crucial, and thus, we are delighted to achieve this milestone and are excited for what lies ahead,” said Revuto CEO Josipa Majic.

“With a large community having assembled around Revuto already and registered their interest in participating in the REVU token sale, the stage is set for a successful launch of the Revuto app. This will bring crypto-powered subscription payments to a global audience, giving digital assets the same utility as fiat currency.”

In a statement, BlackDragon said:

“Revuto has shown unparalleled growth in a very short space of time, and we’re excited to join its team in this journey and support Revuto and its native REVU token.”

Revuto, the first decentralized application to launch on the Cardano blockchain, will demonstrate the network’s ability to support high transaction volume at a low cost. Designed for the on-demand economy, Revuto supports recurring payments for movie and music subscriptions, household goods, cosmetics, food and other types of subscription-based billing.

The REVU token will be used to align incentives between participants in the Revuto ecosystem, as well as unlocking additional features and benefits. It will also provide staking rewards and be used for microlending within the Revuto DApp. The REVU public sale will take place on Revuto’s token selling platform on May 18.

About Revuto

By leveraging Cardano native tokens and decentralized finance to pay for subscriptions, Revuto’s ecosystem is designed to save people money regardless of crypto market conditions. Revuto users can subscribe to services using the Revuto debit card, the built-in wallet that supports Cardano-native tokens, and the accompanying app can be used to block, snooze or approve subscription charges as they occur.

To become part of history and save your spot in the first token sale on Cardano, please visit https://crypto.revuto.com/. The public token sale round will start on May 18 at 8 am UTC. The first investors in REVU tokens will get a special surprise from the Revuto team.

Joe Lubin is the co-founder of Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) and the CEO of ConsenSys.

In a Financial Times interview, Lubin said that cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are now entering the pop culture.

Furthermore, he says the convergence between the public mainnet and corporate versions of the technology is now closer than ever. Read on to know more about Joseph Lubin. 

What You Need To Know: Lubin is a Canadian entrepreneur and software engineer. 

He is best known for co-founding Ethereum and being the founder of ConsenSys. 

Lubin’s career has involved working in various fields of technology and finance. 

After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton, Rubin worked for Princeton Robotics Lab and Vision Applications, Inc. in New York before getting a job at Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE:GS). 

His core competency was in autonomous mobile robotics, machine vision and artificial neural networks.

Lubin was a roommate of Michael Novogratz, who is a billionaire hedge-funder at Princeton.

In 2012, Lubin started investing in Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC). 

To pursue his dream, Lubin launched his platform ConsenSys In 2015.  

In the same year, a hacker tried to steal about $60 million worth of Ethereum’s digital currency, Ether.

Lubin saw the downgrade in 2017 and 2018 with the fundraising controversies at ventures launched using Ethereum, which put Ether’s value at stake. 

In 2018, a Forbes article declared that “Lubin’s Ethereum experiment is a mess.”

However, in the same year, Forbes named him the second-richest person in crypto, worth an estimated $1 billion-$5 billion.

About ConsenSys: ConsenSys develops Ethereum-based products and tools to drive adoption of the network.

ConsenSys is one of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the blockchain technology space, building developer tools, decentralized applications and solutions for enterprises and governments that harness the power of Ethereum.

In April, ConsenSys raised $65 million from investors, including JPMorgan Chase & Co.(NYSE:JPM), UBS Group AG (SWX: UBSG), and Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA).

In 2020, ConsenSys acquired JPMorgan’s private enterprise version of Ethereum, Quorum, for an undisclosed amount.

When J.R. Willett unveiled ‘The Second Bitcoin White Paper’ – the first whitepaper that introduced the concept of initial coin offering (ICO) in January 2012, no one really paid any attention.

It wasn’t until 2017, where the little crazy idea of a Seattle-based software developer gave birth to the ICO craze that took the world by surprise with its outstanding crowdfunding performance.

However, the ICO trend had spiralled out of control by hype and became a speculative bubble that popped in mid-December 2017. While the marvellous achievement of ICO was short-lived, its fundamental concept has become the backbone of the crypto financing environment. From the genius of ICO, three prominent crypto fundraising mechanisms were born: STO, IEO and IDO.

The SEC-approved benefit of Security Token Offering (STO) makes it attractive for projects to launch an ICO without legal ramification. By having a cryptocurrency exchange to research the projects, Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) gained traction and interest of retail investors as a safer alternative. Meanwhile, Initial DEX Offering (IDO) is a new concept born out of the recent DeFi craze where anyone can launch a token through a decentralized exchange with the advantages of instant liquidity, instant trading and cheaper listing cost. 

Recently, a new type of offering called Initial NFT Offering (INO) is gathering more interest among crypto retailers. This comes after the innovation of non-fungible tokens (NFT) that received support from big companies like NBA and Capcom as well as well-known entrepreneurs like Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Gary Vaynerchuk of VaynerX. 

However, the innovation of crypto crowdfunding does not stop here. A crypto project called Torum has created a modified version of INO with DeFi-infused elements for its upcoming public sale and named it Initial Staking NFT Offering (ISNO).

Initial Staking NFT Offering or ISNO is a new crypto funding innovation that involves offering a set of limited edition stake-able NFTs for sale. 

Unique from the other conventional INOs, the digital artworks received from ISNO can be staked to unlock a set of rewards or benefits in a project ecosystem. Aside from the inherent supply scarcity, the perks of holding the stake-able NFT can take place in many forms, including an autographed physical artwork from the original creator, integrated equipment in a gaming platform or even the farming reward multiplier that is proposed by Torum.

In the era of utility innovation, the crypto industry is constantly looking for meaningful use cases to speed up the crypto adoption pace, including NFT.

ISNO might just be the answer to that.

Torum is a social media platform that is specially designed for worldwide cryptocurrency users. Using social media as a foundation, the project is now expanding its ecosystem to the DeFi and NFT spaces. 

The new ecosystem will include Torum NFT Marketplace that integrates XTM, the native token of Torum and Torum Finance, a DeFi platform that will be used to organize the ISNO event.

Yi Feng Go, CEO of Torum says: “As I was researching DeFi and NFT, I couldn’t help but think that there must be some creative ways to incorporate the both of them. Then, the public sale idea hit me like a truck.”

The Torum’s ISNO event will start on May 10, 2021 with a total of 363 limited edition NFTs up for sale.

Organized on Torum Finance, there will be 5 different NFT tiers available for purchase, starting from $200 to $16,200. The digital artwork of each tier represents the 5 ecosystem eras of Torum, namely Genesis, Exorsus, Crescentia, Maturitas, and Concordia.

Released at 5 different prices, the NFTs issued under ISNO can each be burned to unlock a specific amount of XTM locked in the token and comes with a permanent staking multiplier ranging from 1.05x to 1.25x. With only 363 digital artworks up for grabs, the success of Torum’s ISNO event will once again spur a new wave of blockchain innovations.

For more information, visit torum.com

ICOs? He held the first one. Stablecoins? He dreamed of them by accident. Vitalik Buterin tried to get him on board to help launch Ethereum, but he was too busy. He is J. R. Willett, one of the most fascinating men in the industry.

Back in 2012, Willett, now 41, felt he could improve Bitcoin by making it possible for anyone to create interoperable tokens backed by the protocol. He released a white paper that described the new model and invented a way to fund the project with a token sale. He procrastinated for the next 18 months, hoping someone else would take the bait. Eventually, he gave in and announced the Mastercoin initial coin offering, which went on to inspire Ethereum and every subsequent ICO.

“It felt like I was just putting into words what was obviously going to happen — people were already talking about it, and I thought, ‘Why hasn’t someone formalized this at least a little bit?’ I just got tired of waiting for someone else.”

In the early days, he was worried that cryptocurrency would bring about a dystopia where either the late adopters became penniless or a one-world government would form to regulate everyone’s transactions. He’s still worried, but things are going better than he’d feared.

In the sea of exceptional and charismatic people who rise to the top of the cryptocurrency world, Willett stands out. Not in his absolutist conviction to a set of principles, not in his journey from rags to riches, not in his “maniac drive“ to stick with a project, not in his outsized charitable pursuits, and not even in his artistic endeavors or grand visions for the future. No. Willett stands out because despite the incredible things he has set in motion, he remains a humble family man who never forgot what was most important.

The first ICO

When the world rang in the year 2012, Bitcoin was pretty much the only game in town. Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency were one and the same, save for the newly birthed Litecoin fork that was not yet three months old (LTC was created via mining, just like Bitcoin). It’s here that Willett arrived to stir the pot, publishing what he called “The Second Bitcoin Whitepaper.”

— nic carter (@nic__carter) December 8, 2020

“We claim that the existing Bitcoin network can be used as a protocol layer, on top of which new currency layers with new rules can be built without changing the foundation,” he wrote. The idea was to make it possible to create new, functional tokens on top of Bitcoin in such a way that smart contracts could regulate their interactions. “Mastercoin supports creating property tokens to be used for titles, deeds, user- backed currencies and even shares in a company,” the white paper explained.

This sounds much like Ethereum today, complete with interoperable ERC-20 tokens and smart contracts. That is no coincidence, considering that Ethereum was partly inspired by Willett’s ideas.

“Vitalik came to us initially with his ideas, and we told him, ‘We’ve got some other things we want to do first.’ He didn’t want to wait, and it’s good for him that he didn’t. Ethereum was the result of that.”

Willett even brought up the idea of stablecoins, writing that “If you think Bitcoin has a reputation problem for money laundering now, just wait until you can store ‘USDCoins’ in the block chain!” This was a new idea — he invented the concept.

Mastercoin’s launch — and token sale — was announced in July 2013. It was the first-ever ICO, and coins could be purchased at an exchange rate of 100 MSC per 1 BTC. These first coins were received from the “Exodus Address,” which served as Mastercoin’s equivalent to the genesis block — while Bitcoin was the beginning, Mastercoin was imagined as the next era.

When Willett announced Mastercoin on the Bitcointalk forum, he thought of it as a one-time shortcut to get around the “proper way” of raising money. “It didn’t feel like an innovation at the time,” he says.

“I thought I had found a bit of a shortcut — I just didn’t have time to go flying to California, putting together a pitch deck and talking to venture capitalists, most of whom hadn’t heard of Bitcoin.”

Eventually, Mastercoin evolved into the Mastercoin Foundation, itself evolving into the Omni Foundation, which Willett founded and where he still serves as chief architect. Willett says that transparency was very important to him while creating the nonprofit, and explains how he used a public spreadsheet to record all expenses.

“The problem with that was that as we started running out of money, everybody knew we were running out of money, and that took some of the wind from our sails,” he recalls with a laugh. Today, Omni Layer is an “open source, fully decentralized asset platform” that allows for “creating and trading custom digital assets and currencies.”

When asked if he harbors any regrets in not becoming a billionaire CEO, he lets out a hearty guffaw. “I’m sure there would have been things that were fun about it,” he says giddily, but goes on to explain that he is a minimalist who barely owns anything that his kids do not need. “What do you get from being super-wealthy, if you kind of have a minimalist state of mind? You just get a bunch of problems,” he contemplates. Is there perhaps a tinge of regret there?

“Maybe the regret there is that I could have done a lot of good — but hopefully, those people that do become billionaires will do a lot of good.”

The inventor

Willett led what he calls an idyllic childhood with a father who “always had a knack for money and investments” and began teaching him coding on the family’s Apple II-GS computer when Willett was only 10 years old.

While still in high school in Oregon, Willett spent summers working as a shop assistant doing unglamorous work like sweeping and cleaning toilets. One time, he wrote a mock virus and made his employers believe that they had been hacked. “They had an old IBM computer — I think I wrote it at home and then brought it in on a floppy disk,” he recounts with laughter.

When Willett later learned that he could make a living doing “this thing I’d been doing for fun,” a degree in computer science at Seattle Pacific University was a “no-brainer.” He graduated in 2002.

After two years as a software developer at “dot-com startup” Alerio in Oregon, he joined Dynon Avionics, where he was promoted to a senior role. Over his 11-year career there, he created flight planning software and calibrated instruments that went on to be used in applications as exotic as the SpaceShipOne spaceplane, which completed the first crewed private spaceflight in 2004.

In 2012, he joined his present employer, Cozi, as software developer lead, where he designs mobile calendar apps that help families stay organized. It seems a good fit. He says, “I’ve always considered myself a family man — even before I had kids.”

That’s right — Willett, the inventor of both the ICO and algorithmic stablecoin, still works a day job. “You can’t have all of your money tied up in cryptocurrencies,” he said, referring to the responsibilities of parenthood.

Concerning crypto

It was around 2010 while working at Dynon Avionics that Willett “kind of fell in that [cryptocurrency] hole and never got out.” He watched the Bitcoin price rise up to $0.25, and remembers setting up a beige computer tower, which successfully mined a block of 50 BTC on its own over a few weeks with only a central processing unit, or CPU.

CPU mining soon became impossible, as GPUs (graphic processing units) and later ASIC miners (specialized software chips for mining) connected to mining pools came to dominate the landscape. “Even then, it was unusual to get a block from a CPU, but it wasn’t unheard of,” Willett recalls.

Unlike some others from his time, Willett did not come to view cryptocurrencies as a universal savior or liberator of humanity. Instead, he foresaw a dystopian future, which worried him deeply. He never wanted to metaphorically burn the banks or upend the system, because that sort of thing is bound to hurt many, many people who rely on the existing structures.

“It looked to me like something that could, if it got big enough, damage the entire world’s financial systems. I thought, this is the sort of thing you better own just defensively, as an insurance policy.”

Willett admits that the idea of Bitcoin damaging the global financial infrastructure “sounded pretty crazy back in 2010–2011, when very few people had heard of Bitcoin, but I have always taken the opinion that the government-issued monies are much more fragile than they appear.” He adds that a bank run could happen if people lose confidence in fiat, and now, there is a valid alternative for it.

For Willett, money is a “shared hallucination” that works well if everyone plays along, but can fall apart quickly if people choose to “opt out.”

This is not necessarily what Willett desires, as such a situation would leave those without cryptocurrency in a desperate situation. Not everyone knows about cryptocurrency, and not everyone has the money to invest or the confidence to risk their capital. It would be a tragedy for them to be left behind. But, “Thinking about that potential possible outcome, it would be foolish not to own at least some cryptocurrency,” he reasons.

“If there comes a tipping point where everyone tries to get out of government money and into cryptocurrencies… it’d be on the scale of global war in the amount of human suffering.”

Willett admits that back in 2012, he “vastly overestimated” the speed at which cryptocurrency adoption would happen. Some of his writings from the time came with a particularly dystopian bent, such as predicting governments “attempting to destroy all decentralized computer networks (including the internet)” in order to bring about a “strong, centralized, [blockchain powered] one-world government which gets its revenues by tightly reigning in freedom of commerce in order to collect taxes.”

“When I wrote that, I expected it could be a year or two away,” he thinks back. He does not come across as much of a doomsayer anymore. “The longer it takes to get there, the less disruptive it’ll be,” he says referring to the view that a larger base of cryptocurrency owners will result in a less turbulent transition toward cryptocurrency.

Willett is confident that there will only be more crypto billionaires, as he expects the bull market to continue for some time. “Usually, there’s a roughly hundredfold run-up, followed by a roughly tenfold drop. It happens over the course of months or even years, and then it happens again.” He considers Ether the best bet today, and recently predicted an ETH top of around $9,500 for this cycle.

“I’m optimistic that our crypto billionaires, whoever they are, will eventually become crypto philanthropists, especially if this world that we’re building ends up causing a lot of pain and suffering for people that are late adopters.”

CropBytes has been part of the crypto gaming revolution since early 2018. The game has been through an entire market cycle, refining the economy and the gaming experience. This exposure gives the game an edge over others now that players can consistently grow their crypto portfolio despite fluctuations in the market.

CropBytes sets out to create a virtual world where anyone can buy, sell and own assets — a game of farming, business and strategy in a world that runs on crypto. Gamers love it and have built elaborate strategies and plans to gain maximum output from their investment. 

What gives CropBytes players an advantage over others?

Most crypto games are struggling to compete with traditional titles on consoles and smartphones. CropBytes is built on the Unity game engine, a popular platform for building games, which is supported by multiple platforms like Android, iOS and web.

Players can download the app, start farming and producing goods, and then visit the game marketplace to sell their produce to other players or make a lucrative purchase. Once you have enough produce from your assets, you can also convert these to game coins (GC), which can be used to purchase exclusive GC assets, such as Superhero nonfungible tokens and more.

CryptoBytes chief of marketing Sheryl Varghese commented:

“Today, some players own assets worth millions and have a huge collection of pro assets — they are already major industrialists in the game. Making it big in the crypto world can’t get any easier!”

CropBytes assets and future nonfungible tokens are unique and play an important role in the game economy and hold huge utility value. For example, Superheroes are rare, breedable and have special abilities that can be used to increase a player’s potential in the game. They can boost farm produce, thereby giving a player an advantage in the game in the long run. Soon, we will have a new generation of Superheroes, which will also be used in our upcoming player-versus-player battle game. Check out CropBytes.com for the launch of these Superhero pro assets.

Want more? You can meet other co-player farms and check out the fishing mini-game. The team has recently released a single-player fishing mini-game and will soon release a multiplayer version. Get ready for some skill-based crypto earnings.

Currently, the game uses Tron (TRX) as the in-game currency and will soon use Tether (USDT), while working to support others in the near future. CropBytes is also expanding the ecosystem by working with more games and marketplaces to ensure tokens and collectibles can be traded with ease across multiple games.

What sets CropBytes apart?

Not only is CropBytes the first crypto game to launch on Android, iOS and web, but the team also has a reputation of riding the bull run with new exciting game features and steady growth for the players.

Our vision is to build an evolving game that lasts forever and grows with time. We have carefully crafted the game’s economics, assets and tokens to make them future-proof. 

We are also focused on growing the ecosystem with a variety of in-app games so players won’t be inclined to switch to a different game. Players can sell their assets after completing a title or use the assets in the next game. With that, we are also bringing in support for regional languages so gamers all over the world can join in.

In the last six months, CropBytes has gained tremendous attraction from players worldwide. The number of players has doubled, while deposits have grown 5x. The overall market capitalization of CropBytes is only going up. 

CropBytes founder Sandeep Kumar said:

“Our players have always asked for the CropBytes token, but we were keen on building a well-rounded product before we launched. After developing and refining CropBytes for nearly three years, we are glad to announce we’re finally launching our CBX token.”

CropBytes is now backed by a few top entrepreneurs in crypto and will soon be launching its token in a public sale. The blockchain industry has continued to evolve over the past decade, with more products being developed daily.

The team is gearing up to launch the much-awaited CBX token sale soon, get ready.

Links

Website: om/exchange

Telegram (Channel): https://t.me/ccropbytes

Telegram (Community): p>

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cropbytes

London, Aug. 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Cardano blockchain ecosystem and its associated Utility token $ADA has gained so much popularity in the past few months, breaking it’s ATH in the past few days. This comes after successful rollout of Alonzo Purple and the upcoming Alonzo hard fork which will usher in the arrival of smart contracts for Cardano in September.

What is Cardaswap?

Cardaswap DEX will be an automated market maker on the Cardano Network. Its transaction and monetization features are based on the AMM protocol. The protocol allows blockchain participants to provide liquidity and Cardano Blockchain Assets in the Liquidity pool for others to exchange their native tokens. In return, subscribers pay a small fee for liquidity, and the vendors earn their deposit back.

Native Token Of Cardaswap

Cardaswap utility token $CADA is a native token that will be built initially on the Ethereum blockchain but will later get bridged to the Cardano Blockchain after the successful completion of the Alonzo Hard Fork.

Holders of $CADA can save money & pay less fees, stake their LP tokens to farm $CADA and also Stake $CADA for exclusive Airdrops while also being a native token that enables users to transact in multi-assets like ADA & other custom tokens.

It also gives the incentive of yield-farming of the Cardaswap governance token $CADA.

Yield Farming Program

"Yield farming" is a reward program introduced during the last year in the DeFi crypto world.

At its core, yield-farming is a new way of distributing tokens that have been minted for a DEFI project, even though all tokens are minted to the market, the distribution of the token is done through yield-farming which is more similar to “mining”, meaning that he output of tokens is regulated by smart contracts to gradually increase the circulating supply with time.

The vision and goals ahead

Cardaswap plans to launch their AMM exchange by the end of Q3 2021, making them the first Decentralized Exchange on the Cardano Blockchain after which it will start its listing process on exchanges like MXC, GATE, and Huobi.

Cardaswap is also working on their NFT Marketplace of which by December, users will be able to mint and trade NFTs on Cardaswap NFT marketplace. Users who would want to test Cardaswap Exchange before its launch can visit their website cardaswap.finance and enroll for the TGE.

When launched, Cardaswap will allow users to trade tokens on the Cardano blockchain, earn swap fees, stake LP tokens to farm and earn $CADA, as well as access to the world’s first public NFT marketplace on Cardano Blockchain and Cardapad the first IDO launchpad on Cardano blockchain.

As the Cardano network continues to add functionalities to its blockchain, users can expect more innovative features on the Cardaswap protocol in addition to the fluidity in operation. This is something the average user will find quite helpful as they move away from the obsolete order-book arrangement that has kept centralized exchanges in the backseat.

About Cardaswap

CardaSwap is a decentralized exchange that is similar to Ethereum’s Uniswap, but the difference is that it will run on Cardano BlockChain instead. The cardaswap.finance ecosystem is managed and maintained by the Cardaswap Association, a Cayman Island-based entity.

When the cardaswap ecosystem grows sufficiently, the protocol will be governed and steered by a carefully designed decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Cardaswap is one of the first decentralized Launchpad designed for the Cardano ecosystem.

Social links

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cardaswap

Medium: https://cardaswap.medium.com/

Telegram: https://cardaswap.finance/

Media contact

Company: Cardaswap Contact Name: Cardaswap E-mail: hello@cardaswap.finance Website: https://cardaswap.finance/

London, UK, Aug. 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cardaswap, a blockchain-powered market maker on the Cardano protocol is proud to announce its platform offering variety of advantages. Since the inception of Cardano and its token $ADA, the project has gained massive traction; thus, attracting the attention of crypto investors within the past few days.

This popularity may not be unconnected with the upcoming Alonzo hard fork and the successful launching of Alonzo Purple. This development will usher in Cardano's smart contracts in September.

What is Cardaswap?

Cardaswap is a blockchain-powered market maker on the Cardano protocol. Cardaswap's monetization and transaction features are developed on the AMM protocol, which allows liquidity providers to pool in their funds and Cardano Blockchain Assets to the pool, so that others can easily exchange their tokens. Subscribers will in turn pay a fee to enjoy the liquidity. Also, the vendors will earn their initial capital back.

Native Token Of Cardaswap

Cardaswap has a native utility currency with the symbol “$CADA."

Token holders will be able to purchase goods and services on the Cardaswap protocol, pay less fees, and save money. $CADA holders will also be able to stake LP tokens to farm $CADA. That's not all; token holders can stake their $CADA tokens to participate in exclusive airdrops and carry out transactions in a wide range of multi-assets, including ADA and other custom tokens.

Yield Farming Program

Yield Farming was introduced as a reward program in the decentralized finance space. Yield Farming is a token distribution method for a DeFi project after tokens have been minted. Yield Farming is also similar to crypto mining, meaning that the distribution process is regulated by smart contracts. Smart contracts guarantee an increase in the circulating supply with time.

The Vision and Goals Ahead

The team at Cardaswap intends to launch the Automated Market Maker (AMM) at the end of the third quarter of 2021. Once they successfully launch the AMM, Cardaswap will become the first DEX on the Cardano blockchain. The team will then list the token on big exchanges like Huobi, GATE, and MXC.

Plans are also in place for the team to launch the Cardaswap NFT marketplace in December. The Cardaswap NFT marketplace will enable digital content creators to mint and trade their collectibles to make passive income. You can visit the Cardaswap official website and enrol for the TGE to test the functionality of Cardaswap Exchange before the scheduled launch.

Cardaswap will enable users to stake LP tokens and earn $CADA, earn swap fees, and trade tokens on the Cardano blockchain. The project will also grant you access to a public NFT marketplace on Cardano blockchain, as well as access to Cardapad, the world's first IDO launchpad on Cardano blockchain.

Users can expect more features on the Cardaswap protocol as the network continues to grow and gain traction. Users will find the new features helpful, as it will be a shift from the traditional order-book arrangement that has bedeviled centralized exchanges.

About Cardaswap

Cardaswap is similar to Ethereum's Uniswap, in that it is also a decentralized exchange. However, unlike Uniswap, Cardaswap runs on Cardano Blockchain. The cardaswap.finance ecosystem is managed by a Cayman Island-based association. The association is a team of experienced and knowledgeable blockchain experts with vast years of experience in the Fintech industry.

When the ecosystem gains traction, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) will then steer and govern the protocol. Cardaswap is a first-of-its-kind decentralized project that's designed for the Cardano protocol. Users can earn, swap, and build on the Cardano blockchain. Cardaswap allows crypto enthusiasts to trade any native token for ADA on the Cardano blockchain.

Social links

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cardaswap

Medium: https://cardaswap.medium.com/

Telegram: https://cardaswap.finance/

Media contact

Company: Cardaswap Contact Name: Cardaswap E-mail: hello@cardaswap.finance Website: https://cardaswap.finance/

In this episode of the BeInCrypto video news show, host Jessica Walker digs into four low cap altcoin gems that might explode soon!

Enjin has a winning concept and a top-notch team, while OGN gets a shoutout from Paris Hilton.

MTV could retest an all-time high, while COCOS could be reaching a breakout point.

In this episode of the BeInCrypto video news show, host Jessica Walker digs into four low cap altcoin gems that might explode soon! We have gaming and NFT coins, as well as Origin Protocol’s OGN. So stick around and take your pick. 

Enjin (ENJ)

First up is Enjin. The Enjin Coin is a project of Enjin, a company that provides an ecosystem of interconnected, blockchain-based gaming products. Enjin’s flagship offering is the Enjin Network, a social gaming platform through which users can create websites and clans, chat, and host virtual item stores and most importantly – NFTs.

Enjin allows game developers to tokenize in-game items on the Ethereum blockchain. It then uses Enjin Coin, an ERC-20 token, to back the digital assets issued using its platform. This means that items can be bought, sold and traded with real-world value.

Given the rate of transformation in which digitalization is increasing, we can expect NFTs to become a more easily held asset in years to come. Now since Enjin has some application in the digital and real worlds, one can expect the value of the Enjin Coin to rise in the years to come. So far, we witnessed it deliver a 100x return when it crossed $3 in April 2021.

The all-time high of $3.99 is close to being retested given the consistent volumes and increasing price action over the last month. We’d classify this one as a bit of a sleeper right now. But with a winning concept and top-notch team, we think it could be set for a sharp rise in the near future of altcoin trading.

OGN

OGN is next on our low cap gems list. This is Origin Protocol’s coin and the goal of this project is to disrupt the sharing economy. It hopes to do this by setting up a decentralized, P2P network between merchants and cutting out traditional intermediaries. The vision of Origin Protocol is to create distributed systems where users can promote their products. The protocol focuses on the free trading of all goods and services at their actual market prices without third-party interference.

Paris Hilton announced in June that she invested in Origin and there was some increased media exposure in the weeks after that. The OGN price has been increasing alongside an ascending support line since July 20. So far, it has twice reached a high near $1.20, on Aug. 16 and Aug. 23. However, it was rejected by the $1.20 horizontal resistance area.

On Aug. 27, it validated the $0.85 area as support while bouncing at the ascending support line for the fourth time. Currently, it’s making another attempt at breaking out above the $1.20 resistance area, so a fresh breakout is likely. If it does happen, the next closest resistance area would be at $1.92.

MTV

At number three we have MultiVAC and its MTV token. MultiVAC is a flexible blockchain built around all-dimensional sharding. It’s a public protocol that seeks recognition for integrating large-scale decentralized applications and enhanced transaction speeds.

The project launched its mainnet recently with two very important updates: compressed data transportation and native cross-chain features. The cross-chain component of MultiVAC will seamlessly allow those with ETH and BSC addresses to migrate over to MTV. It also offers permissionless DeFi and low gas costs. This combination of features highlights MultiVAC’s mission in the DeFi space, which is flexibility.

The chart confirms that the mainnets launch and all the features it provides have been welcomed by the market. A new uptrend is clearly visible and it has been quite sharp. We could see a new all-time high here quite soon.

COCOS

Our fourth and final pick for September is Cocos. This is an open source game engine for instant games with 1.3 million developers worldwide. Cocos is expanding its product spectrum into blockchain by building the full stack development platform Cocos Blockchain Expedition.

COCOS has been moving upwards since breaking out from a descending resistance line on July 14. However, it has failed to initiate a significant upward movement, since it is facing strong resistance at $0.90. So far, it has been rejected three times by the area. But if a breakout occurs, the token could increase all the way to $1.35 which is almost 100% higher than its current price.

Bitcoin, the world’s No. 1 crypto and the genesis of the current revolution in digital assets may one day bow down to a new king of the sector, speculates a researcher.

“Ethereum will continue to outperform Bitcoin in 2021 and will, ultimately, exceed its rival’s value,” wrote Nigel Green, chief executive and founder of deVere Group, a large financial advisory firm and asset manager, in a Wednesday note.

Green makes the case that bitcoin BTCUSD, -0.75% which was launched in a white paper in 2008 may cede its dominance to Ethereum’s Ether ETHUSD, +1.69%, which is viewed by some as boasting a clearer use case than bitcoin which is considered by some as digital gold.

Bitcoin’s value in 2021 is up 57%, while Ether’s has risen 318%, at last check on CoinDesk.

By comparison, traditional assets have seen far more mundane returns. The S&P 500 index SPX has gained more than 18% in the year to date, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA is up 15% thus far in 2021, the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP has risen almost 14% and gold futuresGC00 are down almost 6%, FactSet data show.

Bitcoin’s major marketing point has been its claim by enthusiasts to be a store of value and as a currency to a lesser extent, but Ethereum’s network is viewed by many as a powerful, open-source, decentralized backbone off which a number of applications can be based.

Ether, launched in 2015 by a team including Vitarik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, and Gavin Wood, allows software developers to write bespoke programs atop its network. Sometimes these applications are referred to as smart contracts.

Ether bulls make the case that the world’s No. 2 crypto by market cap is the most in-demand development platform, thereby highlighting the Ethereum network’s “value not only as a platform for developers but as a worldwide financial utility,” wrote Green.

Ethereum also serves as the backbone of a number of popular and groundbreaking platforms, including decentralized finance networks, or DeFi, nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, and DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations.

Those growing uses have gummed up Ether’s works but that is seen changing in coming months.

A key upgrade to the Ether network, which includes a phased shift from a proof-of-work protocol to a proof-of-stake and increased storage capacity and processing power for smart contracts, is under way.

Put simply, a proof-of-work network requires tremendous amounts of computing power to verify the distributed-ledger network, which is the foundation of traditional crypto, while a proof-of-stake requires proof of ownership and is considered more environmentally friendly because it reduces the carbon footprint of verifying transactions on the blockchain and paying out rewards to those “miners” who underpin the network.

The process of investors staking their Ether in preparation for the upgrade to Ethereum also has been credited in buoying prices of the digital asset.

“These upgrades represent a major boost not just for Ethereum but for blockchain technology itself,” writes Green. “Ultimately, this will mean that its value will exceed that of Bitcoin—probably within five years,” he predicts.

Green is hardly the first to speculate that Ether will supplant Ether one day. Industry enthusiasts even have a name for it: the flippening. The flippening is the day that Ethereum overtakes bitcoin in market value.

Still, bitcoin remains the dominant player, representing 44% of the nearly $1.96 trillion in crypto market value compared with Ether’s nearly 19%, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

To be sure, it is impossible to know which, if any, crypto will survive much less become the most dominant. Scrutiny of the sector is intensifying as regulators look to put up guardrails to protect would-be investors and central banks contemplate the use of central bank digital currencies and stablecoins, which could also pose existential threats to the extant array of crypto assets.

Almost a year and a half after its mainnet beta launch in March 2020, Solana — perhaps the hottest blockchain of the moment — is soaring. It is one of the world’s first web-scale blockchains and fastest networks, thanks to its speed and claimed throughput of 50,000 TPS (transactions per second).

Its native token, SOL, experienced a 72% price surge over the past week and is now a top-10 cryptocurrency, with a market cap of US$18.3 billion and an annual growth rate of over 1,900%. 

The Solana network is known as a fourth-generation blockchain that aims to solve the blockchain trilemma — creating a fast and scalable network, without compromising on its security or decentralization. The protocol introduces eight core technologies that enable transactions to scale proportionally with the bandwidth, resulting in industry-leading transaction speed and enterprise-level security.

Thanks to its robust protocol, Solana can offer a decentralized platform for DApps with global scaling potential, without the network congestion and high gas fees of the Ethereum network. Is its latest growth in investor confidence a sign that Solana is on its way toward mass adoption? 

This Forkast.News explainer will explore:

What is Solana?Solana’s rootsSolana’s core featuresHow does Solana work?Solana’s native token – $SOLWhat makes Solana stand out?Solana’s visionWhat does the future hold for Solana?1. What is Solana?

Solana is a web-scale, open-source blockchain protocol that supports developers and institutions around the world to build decentralized applications (DApps) and marketplaces. Solana’s protocol is fast, secure, and censorship-resistant, which provides the flexibility of an open infrastructure required to build applications for mass adoption.

This high-performance blockchain provides the fully decentralized, secure, and highly scalable infrastructure necessary for tomorrow’s DApps and decentralized marketplaces. It leverages a set of breakthrough computational technologies that can support thousands of nodes, allowing for transaction throughput to proportionally scale with network bandwidth.

Solana uses a combination of proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof of history (PoH) consensus mechanisms to improve throughput and scalability. Consequently, the network claims to support 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), making it the fastest blockchain in the world.

2. Solana’s roots

Solana’s white paper was published in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, who previously worked at Qualcomm and Dropbox, where he specialized in designing distributed systems and compression algorithms. The paper was the first description of proof of history — a new timekeeping method for distributed systems that could automate the transaction ordering process for blockchain networks.

Yakovenko teamed up with his former colleague at Qualcomm, Greg Fitzgerald, now Solana’s chief technology officer, to build a blockchain testnet based on proof of history, which was first released in February 2018.

The company behind Solana, initially called Loom, was founded by Yakovenko, Fitzgerald, and Stephen Akridge soon after. They rebranded the company to Solana Labs, to avoid being confused with Loom Network, the popular multichain interoperability solution. 

Solana Labs completed a $20 million series A funding round led by Multicoin Capital in July 2019. After raising another $1.76 million from its launch auction on Coinlist, Solana’s beta mainnet launched in March 2020, with basic transaction capabilities and smart contract features.

Presently, Solana Labs remains the core contributor to the network, while the Solana Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Zug, Switzerland, is dedicated to funding and developing the blockchain’s community-building initiatives.

3. Solana’s core features

To understand how Solana works, we first need to take a look at its architecture. Below are 8 core innovations that make Solana the first web-scale blockchain.

Despite its name, PoH is not a consensus mechanism, but a cryptographic clock that enables nodes to agree on the time order of the events on the chain, without having to talk to each other — since each node has its own clock.

PoH helps create more efficiency and higher throughput within the network by storing historical records of transactions and allowing the system to keep track of the order of events more easily.

2. Tower BFT (Byzantine fault tolerance)

Tower BFT is Solana’s implementation of pBFT (practical Byzantine fault tolerance), optimized for PoH. In essence, this is a consensus algorithm that takes advantage of the cryptographic clock, reaching consensus without having to go through a multitude of messages among nodes — consequently improving the transaction speed.

3. Gulf Stream — mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol

Gulf Stream is what enables Solana to reach 50,000 TPS. This is the protocol responsible for transaction caching and for forwarding them to the edge of the network. This allows network validators to execute transactions ahead of time, drastically reducing confirmation time and the memory requirements on validators from unconfirmed transaction pools. 

4. Turbine — a block propagation protocol

Turbine is a block propagation protocol that breaks data down into smaller increments — making data transfer easier among the nodes. Turbine helps Solana address bandwidth-related issues and increase the network’s overall transaction processing speed.

5. Sealevel — parallel smart contracts run-time

This is a parallelized transaction processing engine that enables Solana to scale horizontally across GPUs and SSDs. In a nutshell, Sealevel allows for concurrent transactions on the same chain, resulting in a better runtime for the network.

6. Pipelining — a transaction processing unit for validation optimization

Pipelining is a common procedure used in CPU design. It refers to the process of assigning a stream of input data to different hardware for processing. This enables quick transaction information to be replicated and validated faster across the nodes of the network.

7. Cloudbreak — horizontally-scaled accounts database

Cloudbreak is a data structure required for the network’s scalability and throughput. It organizes the database of accounts, making concurrent reads and writes between the network’s 32 threads possible.

8. Archivers — distributed ledger storage

Solana’s validators offload the data to a network of nodes known as Archivers. Archiver nodes can be basic laptops or PCs that the network leverages for data storage.

4. How does Solana work?

Solana is considered one of the most high-performance permissionless blockchain on the market, with a network of 200 distinct nodes that generate a throughput of 50,000 TPS when running with GPUs. The network achieves this due to its unique consensus architecture.

Solana uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus model, like Cardano and Tron, except it is reinforced by Tower BFT consensus. Tower consensus enables the network to reach consensus, despite potential attacks from malicious nodes.

Tower BFT enforces a universal source of time across the network through proof of history. This creates a common record of all the events and transactions on the blockchains, as a permanent reference for the nodes running the network.

People often mistake PoH, one of Solana’s core innovations, for a consensus protocol; however, this is a permissionless, globally available source of time on the blockchain that works before the network reaches consensus. Proof of history is not a consensus protocol or anti-Sybil mechanism. Rather, it is a decentralized clock that helps secure the blockchain.

Tower BFT leverages this permissionless clock to reduce the processing power necessary for transactions — since the timestamps of the previous transactions don’t need to be processed anymore. This is one of the features that make Solana’s leading throughput possible.

Sealevel, Solana’s transaction parallelization system, also plays a fundamental role, by enabling parallel smart contract runtime. This optimizes the network’s resource usage and enables its horizontal scaling across GPUs and SSDs.

Solana’s mempool system (contraction of memory and pool), Gulf Stream, is also different from other popular blockchains, as it forwards the transactions to validators before the previous set of transactions was even finalized. This mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol helps maximize transaction confirmation speed, as well as the concurrent and parallel transaction capacity of the network.

5. Solana’s native token – $SOL

Solana’s native token, SOL, is trading at US$65.06 at publishing time, with a maximum supply of 489 million coins and a circulating supply of 286 million tokens.

As with most smart contract platforms, SOL is used as Solana’s gas token, used to pay for all on-chain transactions and smart contracts. Investors can also use SOL to perform micropayments, also referred to as lamports within the ecosystem.

SOL token holders can also earn rewards by supporting the network with a process called staking. This involves staking a minimum of 0.01 SOL to become a node that helps validate transactions on the blockchain, in exchange for more SOL coins.

6. What makes Solana stand out?

Solana is often referred to as the most scalable and first truly web-scale blockchain in the world, as it’s among the few protocols achieving over 1,000 TPS.

Moreover, Solana claims to support over 50,000 TPS, with over 200 nodes on the current testnet — making it by far the most performant blockchain network. In comparison, proof of work-based systems like Bitcoin support approximately 5 transactions per second, while Ethereum currently averages around 13 TPS. This makes Solana around 10,000 times faster than Bitcoin and 3,800 times faster than Ethereum.

Another unique aspect about the network’s performance is that it is achieved without using off-chain or layer 2 solutions, whereas Ethereum is reliant on Polygon’s Plasma Chains and similar scaling solutions. Thus, Solana remains one of the few layer-1 blockchain protocols that isn’t exposed to the mass exit problem and other risks associated with layer-2 networks.

Solana has an average block time of 600 milliseconds, which is the time it takes to create a new block on the blockchain. As for fees, the network averages US$0.00025 per transaction, which is a fraction of a cent. To put this in perspective, a US$1 million transaction would cost about US$10 on Solana, whereas the same transaction on Ethereum would cost approximately US$300,000, as Ethereum currently averages US$6.86 per transaction.

To demonstrate how fast the network is, the team behind Solana created a break test, which enables participants to send as many transactions as possible to test the robustness of the network.

7. Solana’s vision

Solana is a web-scale, censorship-resistant blockchain, working on solving some of the most pressing issues in the industry — speed and scalability for global adoption, without sacrificing any of the inherent properties of a robust layer-1 protocol.

Solana aims to solve the scalability issue with its high-performance protocol, which implements a revolutionary time architecture, transaction processing mechanism, and more efficient consensus model compared to other blockchains, making it the world’s fastest layer-1 network.

Solana’s open infrastructure empowers developers to easily deploy scalable DApps with composable building blocks without dealing with additional friction caused by sharding and other layer-2 solutions.

Solana’s ultimate goal is solving the blockchain trilemma, which hypothesizes that a decentralized network can only satisfy two out of the three main properties — decentralization, security, and scalability. Solana claims to have solved the trilemma with its eight core innovations, but whether this is enough to inspire mass blockchain adoption remains to be seen.

8. What does the future hold for Solana?

Solana is still a relatively new project, having only launched its mainnet beta in March 2020. Yet, Solana’s native coin, SOL, has already climbed among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Despite offering complete functionality to its users, the mainnet is officially still in beta, to mark that the team is still working on improving the network’s features and stability.

The network already hosts several great projects, with partners like USDC, Chainlink, Kin, BSN, Exodus, and Serum, a decentralized exchange that surged 1,500% only 12 hours after its launch. With over 250 projects in the ecosystem, increasingly more developers are choosing to build on Solana, as its blockchain offers some of the lowest latency and gas costs on the market — two of the most important considerations for decentralized applications.

The biggest Solana Season Hackathon yet was also concluded on June 7, with 13,000 registrants and more than 300 projects submitted.

“Solana is build-ready today. After seeing explosive growth in global developer uptake, we are convinced that scalability and throughput in blockchain are now a solved problem. This is an inflection point akin to the moment that PCs became widely accessible in the 1970s,” said Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, in a press release.

In June, the bullish news surrounding the network contributed to a positive market sentiment among investors, as Solana Labs completed a US$314.15 million private token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

“The next phase is onboarding a billion users. Solana was built from the ground up to accommodate this scale. With this funding, Solana Labs is now positioned to bring in the right partners and capital to build products and tooling to get there,” added Yakovenko, on the future direction of the network.

With the network’s speed, low-cost transactions and industry-leading throughput, it would not be surprising if the Solana ecosystem attracts increasingly more projects in the future, fostering global blockchain adoption. The current market certainly thinks so. 

Cardano has announced the completion of its Alonzo hard fork, ushering in its long-awaited smart contract functionality.

On Monday, IOHK tweeted that the upgrade had been completed successfully at epoch 290, facilitating the creation and execution of smart contracts on the public blockchain for the first time.

Despite celebrating the milestone, Cardano notes that it is still in the “early days for the project,” asserting that now is when “the mission truly begins” in a blog post published on the same day:

“This is where the mission truly begins as we – the whole community – start delivering on the vision we have all been working towards for so long. Building a decentralized system that extends economic identity and opportunity to everyone, everywhere.”

The Alonzo fork enables smart contracts to be written for Cardano using Plutus scripts, which the team describes as “a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell.”

However, the team has encouraged its community to maintain sensible expectations for Alonzo, stating:

“There are high expectations resting on this upgrade. Some unreasonably so. Cardano watchers may be expecting a sophisticated ecosystem of consumer-ready DApps available immediately after the upgrade. Expectations need to be managed here.”

Cardano is a public blockchain that was founded by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson and developed by his research firm, IOHK. 

While Cardano pledged to rival Ethereum’s dominance in hosting decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web 3.0 applications, the project has garnered criticism for failing to deliver smart contract functionality until now despite launching in September 2017.

Dominic Williams, founder of rival platform Internet Computer, slammed Cardano for the amount of time taken for the protocol to launch smart contracts, stating, “It amazes me that this chain had been in the market for 2 years, and is only just adding support for smart contracts, and people are happy with this progress.”

Cardano also copped flak in early September after the first decentralized application (DApp) to launch on its testnet encountered issues relating to failed concurrent transaction processing.

Outspoken Ethereum maximalist Anthony Sassano tweeted, “Seriously 6 years of ‘peer-reviewed’ research and a $90bil+ market cap later and the first dapp on Cardano can’t even do concurrent transaction processing (aka the very thing you need for DeFi).”

Cardano has since sought to address the criticism, asserting that DApps built on the protocol “are not limited to one transaction per block.”

Related: Altcoin Roundup: High Ethereum fees kick-start a liquidity migration to layer-1 platforms

Despite its detractors, the hype for Candano’s upgrades recently drove its native token, ADA, into record highs, with ADA rallying 192% from a local low of $1.06 in late July to tag $3.10 on Sept. 3, according to CoinGecko. ADA is also up more than 1,600% since the start of 2021.

However, ADA has since dipped and spent the past week oscillating between roughly $2.30 and $2.80, suggesting many speculators may have bought the rumor and sold the news.

It will take 21 years for the rest of the world to mine as much of the Chia (XCH) cryptocurrency as the company behind it will have on the day its mainnet launches next month.

"We believe that chia, a new digital currency built on our new blockchain with radically different features and security than other digital currencies, will ultimately deliver on the promises of 'magic internet money,'" the company argues in its first version of a new business white paper released on Wednesday.

The size of the pre-mine is one notable revelation from the paper, in which Chia also announced its mainnet will launch on March 17 or earlier. Farmers (the network's equivalent of bitcoin miners) will be able to begin farming immediately. The network's cache of pre-mined XCH, however, will be governed using a traditional format: Chia plans to take its company public.

Chia was founded by Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, one of the most influential protocols on the internet. The company he founded was later sold to the Tron Foundation in 2018.

Chia first announced its intention to go public via the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's so-called mini-IPO in 2018, but the decentralized web startup Blockstack won out as the pioneer there, raising $23 million under Regulation A+ in 2019. Last year, Chia raised a fresh round of $5 million in funding led by Slow Ventures.

Plans have shifted slightly since then, with the company now planning to, one way or another, take its offering to a national stock exchange where it can be traded by the public and the company will be subject to the same transparency as any publicly traded company.

One of Chia's early backers was AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, who told CoinDesk in an email, "I backed Chia because I've known Bram for a long time and he is one of the greatest living protocol designers (BitTorrent), right up there with Satoshi and Vitalik."

Chia has previously articulated its technical vision, a consensus model called Proof of Space and Time (PoST). This new paper articulates Chia's vision for sustainability.

Chia's president and COO, Gene Hoffman, told CoinDesk that the public should control more XCH than the company much earlier than 21 years and that the token is not the critical component of the consensus model anyway. 

"Unlike most projects, coin ownership has nothing to do with the protocol – this is not Proof of Stake," Hoffman explained via email. "The chart of ownership percentages of coins in the Whitepaper is a worst case as we expect to use shareholder distribution to migrate XCH out to a broad public shareholder base."

CoinDesk went through the new Chia white paper with a fine-tooth comb.

Here are five key takeaways from Chia's new roadmap.

PoST relies on loading up unused computer storage space with strings of digits that farmers (what Chia calls blockchain validators) allow to be loaded on their computers. The more space, the more strings, the greater their chance of winning a block.

"It is super simple. Just download the Mac or Windows version and double click," Hoffman told CoinDesk. "I’m pretty sure this will be the easiest cryptocurrency to validate for normal people ever."

Other blockchains take a similar approach, such as Spacemesh. And Filecoin also seeks to capitalize on unused storage space.

In its testnet phases, Chia has reached as many as 1,700 nodes already, which is very likely to indicate something about interest in running a node when mainnet launches next month. Its public chat channel on Keybase has almost 4,000 people in it.

Bitcoin maxis fixate on the hard cap, but Chia argues that it's not a fixed amount that matters so much as a predictable amount. Chia has no cap, but it's also not going to surprise holders with unanticipated emissions.

"Being able to directly calculate a shared expectation of the total supply at any given time gives much the same financial and peace of mind benefit," the white paper argues.

As noted, the company will start the mainnet with 21 million XCH, a nod to bitcoin, and farmers can start earning it right away. While it will take 21 years for the supply to double via farming, Hoffman knows that it will be very close in only six years. Then emissions will slow down considerably under the halving schedule.

By then, it's likely that the company will have sold or airdropped a considerable amount of XCH.

"We have seen the scams and farces that have come before our project in this space and we will instead embrace the regulators," the white paper states. "It should not be controversial that investors deserve protection through public disclosure and certainly the public shouldn’t be sold investments without that legally required transparency."

By going with a public listing, Chia will essentially allow backers to treat its equity as an exchange-traded fund (ETF) for the XCH cryptocurrency. That's because the company's chief asset will be a considerable pre-mine (or pre-farm, in Chia lingo) of 21 million XCH that will be held for the company and is slated to be used for advancing the network.

"It’s owned by the company and subject to significant corporate controls that will only get more teeth as and when we go public," Hoffman said. The provisions the company is committed to require it to only use its stash of XCH in ways that benefit XCH holders.

"We can use the pre-farm to raise capital that only dilutes the shareholders and not the farmers," Hoffman noted.

Chia comes with a number of features built in from the get-go that may increase trust and safety for users.

Here are a few described in the white paper that jumped out.

Flash loans have been the key to attacks on decentralized finance projects such as bZx, Harvest and Yearn Finance.

"Their assumptions are inferior as they tend to cause centralization and are not as robust as Nakamoto consensus under international geopolitical pressure," the white paper says of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains (after dismissing private, permissioned blockchains out of hand).

The problem with proof-of-work (PoW), Chia contends, is that it burns too much energy. Nevertheless, Chia also writes in the new white paper that its technology complements bitcoin, the largest PoW network.

But PoS, which Ethereum is moving toward, is another matter. Chia does not think the safety of this model is adequate. The white paper contends, "A considerable amount of effort is being expended attempting to solve what we believe are intractable problems with Proof of Stake as an alternate strategy to use less electricity securing public blockchains."

It cites three key issues: centralization, where tokens tend to concentrate among a few giant holders; long-range attacks, where the history of the chain can be revised more easily than in PoW because there is no, well, work (to speak of) in PoS; and the inability of PoS networks to recover from a 51% attack.

It remains to be seen until there is real value on the line, but the hope is that PoST can lower the energy footprint of "magic internet money" without sacrificing the censorship resistance and decentralization that makes cryptocurrency so appealing to the cypherpunk-inclined and those dealing with unreliable nation-state currencies.

That's the long term.

In the immediate term, Chia aims to scale what's worked about crypto so far and build on it in a way that's accessible for everyone. The white paper states:

Am I the only person who sees cryptocurrency charts when I shut my eyes, hovering just beyond the limits of my focus like an old TV set that’s been permanently burned in by a paused video game?

Am I alone in spotting elements of token names, logos and symbols in food packaging at the supermarket? 

Or are you also catching fleeting glimpses of crypto candlesticks hidden among the everyday objects before you or just beyond the edge of your vision?

These neon mirages scorched into my retina, the byproducts of squinting endlessly at jagged crypto charts during long COVID-19 lockdowns, inspired my NFT series “The Crypto Effect.”

These blockchain-inspired works of visual art are my homage to the mental health rollercoaster on which decentralized finance took many of us during the coronavirus crisis and accompanying cryptocurrency bull run.

Our inability to leave our homes this past year, as if trapped in Edward Hopper paintings, was diametrically contrasted with crypto and decentralized finance’s explosive charge into the public consciousness.

As a visual journalist, I have recently been capturing the trickle-down effects of this Herculean revolution, using a projector to superimpose what I was seeing in my head last spring onto the world around me.

This ongoing photo-projection series, which currently incorporates charts and data from around a dozen different tokens, has so far taken me across two continents. I’ve projected Polkadot candles onto 300-year-old buildings in Barcelona; I’ve cast Litecoin prices onto the torsos of blockchain enthusiasts in small New York City walk-ups; I’ve covered coworking spaces near Boston with Aave data; and I’ve even lit up a forest near Canada with Stellar Lumen charts.

And now by taking direct requests on social media, I aim to craft more images around tokens that have been stirring in the minds of others.

But creating this first iteration of the series has also been an odd, unexpected form of personal therapy, having lost a rather hefty sum earlier this year due to my own shaky inexperience. And though my funds may have tanked, my enthusiasm for the larger decentralized finance movement has not.

Having spoken to many other investors glued to their screens during the past year, I know I’m not alone in seeing these phantom charts. So, why are some of us seeing crypto in the world around us when we step away from our computers? And why are we being haunted by these faint, floating lines and numbers?

Is this addiction? Is it infatuation? Insanity?

The answers to these questions actually have more to do with that paused video game I mentioned earlier than I would have ever imagined.

Like many others in the media industry, I was grounded during the height of the pandemic, banished to tapping away on my laptop at home.

But instead of spending my free time doomscrolling or chatting with long-lost colleagues on Zoom, I was swept up by an international event of a different sort: a blockchain boom.

Having missed most of the 2017 surge, I traded crypto endlessly early this year, discussed the technology ferociously and lapped up every ounce of information I could find. I was green and going through the motions of my newest obsession.

Often exhausted by the day’s mental gymnastics, I’d go to bed buzzing, my brain full of numbers and frying like an egg in a pan freshly off the stove.

For years, immersion was a big part of my work — relocating to Asia, Africa or Eastern Europe for weeks or months at a time. But my infatuation with crypto quickly snowballed and became worrisome to those around me. The isolation of the pandemic was exacerbating my tendency toward tunnel vision, which is beneficial in the world of photography and filmmaking but problematic when trading one’s own cash.

And during some of those darker winter evenings under our brick Catalan ceilings at home in Spain, the charts and volume data from my last trades would visit me like phantoms in the room, fluttering and stinging the back of my mind’s eye, while my body thrashed anxiously around under the sheets next to my wife.

“Wedge. That’s a falling wedge,” I’d mouth into the night. Was I whispering aloud? Was I dreaming, or was I awake?

Whether I made or lost hundreds that day — or even thousands — anxiety and excitement feel the same when you haven’t slept in days and a pandemic is snatching up friends just beyond your front door.

I still feel a debilitating sense of naivety when I think about all those I believed online who recited the crypto anthem: “We’re all going to make it.”

By late May, I was left with excuses to formulate, an empty wallet to consider and a new raging obsession that seemed to be spawning low-grade hallucinations.

Now safely on the other side and with my tunnel vision cast back upon my career, I’m excited to ask: What the hell was going on during those tumultuous months indoors?

Like some of you in parts of Europe and America, I was shot back out into the streets rather abruptly in late spring, lucky enough to be flanked by vaccine tents, first responders and reopening restaurants. But the moody, dramatic lights of Catalonia flipped back on just as Ether and Bitcoin flipped out, their value plunging even as humans emerged from our enforced social hibernation.

During the height of the pandemic, the total value of cryptocurrencies saw a spiked increase from roughly $242 billion to about $2.43 trillion. And only shortly after, the market tanked by $1.3 trillion.

That’s a lot of money, yes. But more worrying to me was the number of real people behind those figures — families and bank accounts shaken by the volatility of the market.

One of the first meals outside our home was spent eating tapas and observing a friend and her mother peering anxiously at Binance charts on their respective phones.

Early this summer, Crypto.com estimated the number of crypto traders to be above 220 million, having doubled in a matter of six months. Looked at another way, one in every 35 people on planet Earth was trading cryptocurrency at one point this year. And many of us have begun seeing that figure play out on a local level.

This winter, from my studio in Barcelona’s Gracia neighborhood, I could hear the hoots, boos and caws normally reserved for FC Barcelona football being belted from a neighbor’s open balcony each time Ether jumped sharply.

But it wasn’t until the big dip on Tuesday, May 18 of this year, that the localism of these stats sunk in. That evening, I witnessed a group of well-dressed Spanish 30-somethings stumbling down Carrer de Francisco Giner, nursing their phones against their chests and bellowing over crypto’s swift plunge.

Though no significant statistics have been compiled on cryptocurrency addiction, a small study in Turkey recently found that out of 300 crypto investors polled, 2% displayed signs of gambling addiction.

If the figures from that humble study were extrapolated to represent the world’s 221 million traders, that would imply roughly 4.5 million crypto investors could be showing signs of gambling addiction.

That number needs to be taken with an enormous grain of salt, considering the poll’s size and geographic concentration. But for perspective, 4.5 million people is roughly a third of those who die each year around the globe from drugs and alcohol.

And why not use the analogy? The 24-hour market, the ease of accessibility, the never-ending rushes of adrenaline each time the market spikes — this all has an effect on our behavior and opportunities for addiction.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, where one in three people are now showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression, near-universal access to such addictive technologies has the potential to become seriously problematic.

Crypto addictions are becoming so rampant that a commercial industry is forming around them. The treatment for cryptocurrency addiction is often similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, where patients are encouraged to begin a 12-step program, while in-patient treatment can cost into the tens of thousands.

“Crypto trading is very similar to day trading or gambling,” says Dylan Kerr, a private clinical addiction counselor.

And a 2019 report from the National Institutes of Health agrees, saying “Trading cryptocurrencies is strongly associated with problem gambling severity.”

Kerr, who is currently serving at a clinic in Thailand and often works on the frontiers of new addictions, warns that ever since 2018, he’s seen a tremendous spike in those seeking counseling for their crypto addictions.

But unlike more traditional counselors, Kerr takes Bitcoin as payment.

You might think that ironic, but I believe it speaks to his understanding of the permanence of the issue he’s addressing. After all, which currency do you think those trading the U.S. dollar on Wall Street use to pay their therapists and counselors?

“I see it as a valuable asset,” he adds, noting that “Cryptocurrencies are very necessary economic items for the redistribution of wealth, especially for millennials.”

“These [his clients] are often novices who got lucky and hit it big quickly,” Kerr specifies.

And as for my chart-infused dreams, he agrees — from his desk in Thailand — that my seeing these crypto mirages may have been a sign of an approaching addiction.

“I’ve heard about these dreams before. It’s the product of obsessional thinking,” he says.

This is not new information, however. In fact, even the cryptocurrency rehabilitation program that opened at Castle Craig Hospital in Scotland in 2018 is becoming a fixture in the blockchain community. The hospital now sports its own YouTube channel alongside crypto influencers.

Treatment centers in America are also beginning to think about cryptocurrency. The Maryland Addiction Recovery Center is seeing a wave of investor inquiries.

Zach Snitzer, co-founder of the recovery center in Maryland, explains that:

“It is now becoming part of the lifestyle of abuse. There is drug abuse, gambling abuse and issues around trading cryptocurrency. They are now a part of the larger tapestry of behavioral health.”

“It snowballs. It becomes less about the money they are making than the rush of emotions they are feeling from that behavior,” he adds.

Questions around crypto addiction and the habit of near-constant checking of prices are also mooning this year on Reddit.

A quick search will reveal a thread emblazoned with the question: “Is anyone else dreaming about the charts and checking their crypto portfolios when they first wake up?”

Another post, which received over 800 comments, was prompted by the query: “Anyone else got majorly addicted to checking your phone every 10 minutes when they just started with crypto?”

One Redditor replied: “I dream of checking the phone just to wake up and go check the phone.”

Another simply posted: “Ur new?”

Nailed it.

Whether working in visual innovation or merely acting as a reporter, I’ve made a career out of diving headfirst into ideas that I know nothing about.

The fresher, more complex the puzzle to be solved, the more I dig into it, going from unknown to known. And if I’m lucky, I’m gifted a day-long adrenaline rush and some unusual dreams in return for my services.

When I was starting out, I worked as a breaking news journalist — a job that had me writing up to six news stories a day. On top of that, the pressure to catch every word in a presidential press briefing, for example, can be mind-bendingly intense and require such inconceivable attention. The only comparison I could draw would be day trading cryptocurrencies.

And like crypto, my work would often visit me late into the night. Once in bed, I’d feel a cursor blinking just beyond my peripheral vision, or I’d see foggy headlines being written and rewritten so that they didn’t bust through their character limits.

“U.S. president seeks deal with Iran on….” Delete, delete, delete. “President calls for trust with Iran on…” Was I asleep? Was I whispering to myself? The questions were the same then as they are now.

Even picking up a box of cereal at the grocery store during that time could trigger feelings of computer keys being smooshed between my fingers.

As I learned back then, what I was experiencing had ties to the so-called “Tetris effect.”

You see, when Tetris was released in the 1980s, people were so hooked on Russian-American engineer Alexey Pajitnov’s video game that they’d see and hear it in everything they did.

One writer for Wired in the early 1990s even called the game a “pharmatronic” in reference to its addictive powers.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldsmith wrote of playing the game: “Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together.”

Sound familiar? Seeing crypto candlesticks, anyone?

Pajitnov told Wired: “You can’t imagine. I couldn’t finish the prototype! I started to play and never had time to finish the code. People kept playing, playing, playing. My best friend said, ‘I can’t live with your Tetris anymore.’”

Tetris dreams became widespread fodder for conversation among gamers and psychologists alike. In fact, psychiatry professor Robert Stickgold and colleagues of his at Harvard Medical School found that of those they trained to play the game, more than 60% reported dreaming of images associated with it.

Stickgold argued that these Tetris dreams were simply part of how human beings process information from our waking hours.

Tetris has also been linked to the “flow state,” the name given to the groove you achieve when you focus so heavily on a goal that the world around you melts away.

Kerr agrees that the crypto visions I had, mostly late at night, sound like the Tetris effect. But he’s quick to point out that our brains will gravitate toward puzzles, no matter what they are.

“We are natural problem solvers. And crypto is like a big puzzle in some ways. Dreaming has been linked to problem-solving abilities. And crypto is a problem we want to solve and get right and make money from,” Kerr says.

The promise of cryptocurrency is a more decentralized distribution of wealth, where power isn’t held by a select few. We know this. But I think about these implications often and elsewhere, even in journalism itself.

Advertising fills executive pockets at news institutions, in America especially. And if there was a more decentralized funding model, might there be less pandering to a political base on cable news? Might there be more information and less sensationalism? Might the result ultimately look more like the nonpartisan institutions gracing the airwaves across the pond? I believe so and am encouraged by blockchain to help find solutions to these broader systemic problems.

So, in the same way that melding journalism with my new cryptocurrency passion through this photo series has offered me a new way to humbly contribute to the blockchain movement, I see blockchain contributing to my journalism career through these crucial ideas.

And these reassurances have allowed me to begin trading again — more thoughtfully and carefully, paying far less attention to crypto and limiting it only to my free time. And thankfully, the charts are not visiting me in the same way they once were.

Free of lockdowns for the moment and once again navigating the outside world, there are more interesting puzzles to be solved.

My photo series was the culmination of my months-long infatuation with crypto. But my addiction, if you can call it that, was also partly the result of seemingly unending bouts of isolation.

Hallucinations notwithstanding, the loneliness many of us felt during the past year, closed off from society, left alone with charts and pixels, peering at TradingView, often utterly alone — that wasn’t, and isn’t, healthy.

But in some way, it gave us focus. Our flow states saw some of us through a worldwide crisis that claimed millions of lives.

And if you’re reading this today, I’m happy to report that the so-called Crypto Twitter influencers were right when they said: “We’re all going to make it.”

We all did in fact make it — just maybe not in the way that you or I were expecting.

Some made it by trading altcoins and earning significant returns during the past year. Others made it by simply coming out of the other side of this global crisis with their physical and mental health in tow.

And as for me, I’m just so appreciative to represent the latter of those two camps.

Before a company makes an initial public offering, it has to release a certain amount of information. It has to tell potential shareholders the current value of its assets, what it does, how much it earns and how much it spends. It has to give investors enough knowledge to make an intelligent decision about whether to invest. That information is regulated by law.

Companies that make initial coin offerings (ICOs) are also governed by regulations, but those regulations and their jurisdictions remain unclear. Cryptocurrencies are still new, and rulings can be inconsistent. In 2015, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission defined Bitcoin as a security. In July 2017, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission defined the DAO token as a commodity. Add in the international nature of cryptocurrencies that allow companies to launch coins and tokens in places with lighter regulations, such as Singapore, and it’s no wonder that investors looking to put their money into ICOs might struggle to make their assessments.

Forget the regulations and forget the numbers. There are four things that you need to look at when you’re assessing an ICO, and they should be available for every coin.

First, look past the coin towards the product.

A cryptocurrency isn’t meant to operate in a vacuum. It’s supposed to support a product. There’s no point in buying casino chips at a discount if no one is going to build the casino that uses them or if the casino that was built was so run-down and poorly managed that no one would want to gamble in it.

The same principle applies to a cryptocurrency. All cryptocurrencies are similar. They’re all built on the blockchain. Some, like Ripple, might be pre-mined while others, like Bitcoin, will have a set release. Some, like Tether, might be linked to a fiat currency, while most others will be allowed to float freely. But each of those coins has their own use, and it’s much easier to assess that use than it is to assess the characteristics of the coin itself.

Ask yourself if you think there’s a real need for the product the coin is supporting. Ask yourself if you would use the product the coin is supporting. Assess the product in the same way that you’d assess a company looking for investment — and avoid any coins that aren’t funding a viable project.

You’ll find information about the product in the whitepaper, which is the second thing you should examine. In an area with as much regulatory mess as ICOs, the whitepaper is the closest you’re likely to get to a proper financial report. Because companies are using ICOs at an earlier stage of funding than traditional businesses use IPOs, the whitepaper is unlikely to contain much in the way of numbers and statistics. What you will get is a description of the vision behind the venture. You’ll get an explanation of why the company needs a cryptocurrency and what it’s trying to do with it.

You’ll also get a sense of how professional the company is. Whitepapers take effort to write properly. The founding team needs to be able to explain its ideas clearly to a writer who has to express those ideas in language that can be understood. A white paper is a professional product, and a pretty low bar to meet for a company that wants to raise millions. And yet, many businesses fail to meet it. At the start of the year, TRON, one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, was accused of plagiarising its whitepaper. It’s a poor sign if the company has to copy another business’s ideas to justify its own existence.

While you’re looking at the whitepaper, you should also pay close attention to the bios of the team members involved in the project. When venture capitalists listen to pitches from startup founders, the page that always interests them the most is the page about the team. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen, but the people who can make those ideas happen are much harder to find. Investors want to see that the people they’re giving money to have shown that they’re capable of building something, even if they haven’t yet had a great success. They want to see that they can get things done.

Cryptocurrencies haven’t been around long enough for team members to have the same kind of long experience with the blockchain that founders might have with businesses, but they do need to meet some criteria. They should have experience in the field in which they’re operating. They should have members who have worked with blockchain technology. They should have some experience that shows they’re capable of making things happen.

Finally, one way to more accurately assess the team is to join its Telegram group. A rival to WhatsApp, Telegram is the app of choice for cryptocurrency businesses. Many of them will invite potential investors to join their group on Telegram where they’ll take questions and talk about the product. You might not be able to sit in a pitch room with the company’s founders and check out their PowerPoint, but you can sit in a digital room with them and make your own judgments.

Assessing an ICO isn’t easy. There’s a reason that Google and Facebook are both banning their advertising. But with some care, some thought and plenty of caution, it is possible to dive into an ICO and make some smart decisions.

Earlier this summer, Damien Hirst announced his latest project: a showy NFT initiative called “The Currency.” It involved selling 10,000 unique hand-painted dot-covered works on paper, each one corresponding to a nonfungible token. But wait, there’s more.

Each of the hybrid painting-NFTs, available to collectors at the low, low price of $2,000, has a very particular stipulation. Buyers would have one year to decide if they wanted to keep the NFT, in which case the physical artwork would be ceremonially burned. Or they could keep the physical work, and relinquish rights to the blockchain-based artwork.

In essence, “The Currency” pitted Hirst’s foray into the new world of digital art against his old-school practice, asking the art market to decide which was more valuable. (At the height of Hirst’s market heat in 2007, a work on paper by the artist sold for more than $393,065.)

At the time, it sure sounded like Hirst was, ahem, jumping the shark, with a philosophical gimmick. But just about two months into the project’s debut, the artist took to social media to announce that sales generated by “The Currency” have reached $25 million already.

A statement posted today to the Discord server of HENI Analytics, an arm of the company that partnered with Hirst on the project, broke down the sales for the past six, 12, and 24 hours for the NFT works. In the last 24 hours, 14 sales totaling almost $400,000 were recorded, with a maximum price of $43,204 and minimum price of $3,694.

Since the project launched in July, there have been a total of 1,571 sales on secondary market NFT platforms adding up to just a bit more than even the whopping eight-figure Hirst boasted about, at $26,345,475.

The maximum price paid so far sits at $120,614 for a work titled Yes, which is considered one of the rarer of the pieces in the series because it has a single word title. HENI ranks each of the works in “The Currency” for its rarity based on algorithms that analyze density of the spots, colors used, and what kind of words are in each title, which all come from Hirst’s favorite songs.

OpenSea’s public data on the project confirm the basic trends suggested by HENI and Hirst. It shows that the floor price (or lowest available price) for an NFT from “The Currency” sits at 8.8 ETH, or $28,500, more than 10 times its original price. (The OpenSea floor price is updated hourly.)

According to OpenSea snapshot of the project, by far the most active day in the trading history of “The Currency” was August 14, when 249 of the NFTs changed hands. In recent days things have settled down considerably, with anywhere between 10 and 20 sales per day.

One recent sale, for the work A Way of Life, was originally listed 10 days ago on the secondary market by its owner, who goes by @Quality, for 18.88 Ethereum (over $60,800). Finding no takers, it was re-listed a day later for 8.8 Ethereum (or $28,500). At that price it was sold 8 days ago for 8.49 Ethereum ($27,200) to @syzygyfinance, which re-listed A Way of Life just two days later for 14.8 Ethereum (or $47,800).

Today @syzygyfinance adjusted its asking price down to 9.75 Ethereum ($31,300). It sold at that price to @liquiddyor, meaning @syzygyfinance realized about $4,000 in profit on the flip.

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Safcoin, Africa’s first proof-of-work coin that launched exclusively to SA buyers in 2018, is going global with its listing on HotBit, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency trading platforms.

The list date is scheduled for mid-September 2021. As the first local cryptocurrency to be offered to the global market — and with only 10-million coins available and 8.7-million already circulating — the HotBit listing gives international investors the opportunity to own a native African cryptocurrency that’s driven by making investing in crypto easy, accessible and understandable for everyone in Africa.

Safcoin CEO Neil Ferreira says: “Safcoin really is Africa’s pride. It’s been amazing to watch our vision come to life, and it keeps growing from strength to strength, connecting and empowering more Africans across the continent every day.”

He says they never intended Safcoin to be “just another cryptocurrency” but wanted to demystify crypto for the man on the street and provide him with tools and resources to participate in the digital currency revolution. The ultimate goal was to see Safcoin become a widely and globally accepted form of payment that boosts African trade and simplifies cross-border payment processes. With the HotBit listing, it seems nothing can stop Safcoin’s growth and impact.

“There’s a lot more to cryptocurrencies than just profiting from it,” says Ferreira. “People can be empowered, marketplaces opened, cross-border trade supported, and social and economic growth stimulated. Safcoin was created to help people, while also empowering them to help themselves.”

Safcoin has achieved many firsts for the SA crypto market in three years.

Highlights include:

2018:

Blockchain company FHM issues an initial coin offering (ICO) for 500,000 Safcoin tokens exclusive to South Africans, giving them an opportunity to invest in a start-up currency after missing out on numerous ICOs when the electronic money rush started in 2010.Launches bespoke, decentralised blockchain mainnet, built using a Scrypt algorithm; the centralised Safcoin Exchange; and Safcoin Wallets on Android and iOS.On December 12, the Safcoin blockchain went live.

2019:

Launches SA’s first plug-and-play Safcoin mining opportunity, allowing new, small, and start-up miners to earn a passive monthly income by mining Safcoin. The initiative empowers anyone to start a mining business — without previous experience or expensive hardware.Launches SAFPay, a secure payment gateway that facilitates transactions with low — or no — transaction fees and no middleman.Western Cape government invites Safcoin to discuss regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and exchanges in SA.

2020:

Expands into Nigeria and Uganda.Launches MobiJobs, Africa’s first blockchain-powered micro-jobs platform that connects businesses and gig economy workers across Africa.Launches Safcoin pool mining programme.

2021:

Launches Cryptovalley, an e-commerce platform powered by Safcoin and Safpay that allows small businesses to sell and pay for products with crypto.First locally founded digital currency to list internationally with HotBit debut.Where to buy Safcoin:Safcoin ExchangeHotBitCatex and P2Pb2B

To learn more about Safcoin or to create an account, visit the Safcoin website or download the Safcoin app for Android or iOS.

This article was paid for by Safcoin.

Yoni Mazor, CGO of Getida, explains why the use of cryptocurrency for one of the world’s biggest online marketplaces is seen as a win-win for consumers and sellers.

Photo by istock.com

Sept. 14, 2021 | by Yoni Mazor

E-commerce voyeurs and consumers had a jaw-dropping shock recently summer as bitcoin surged with the revelation that Amazon, the mega e-commerce giant, opened job slots for product lead developers in cryptocurrency.

The revelation comes as cryptocurrency continues to make waves in the mainstream markets as one of the fastest-growing payment types independent from government and financial institutions.

Amazon's growing attraction to cryptocurrency is creating conjecture that the giant is attempting to make a significant imprint in the resolution of online fraud, fostering more security in purchase decisions for their customers.

With billions of transactions processed each day, Amazon's job posting has e-commerce heads buzzing about whether this new move will push forward or fall to the wayside.

In the job posting, Amazon states that applicants must "own the vision and strategy for Amazon's Digital Currency and Blockchain strategy and product roadmap" while also having a "deep understanding of the digital/cryptocurrency ecosystem and related technologies."

In spite of its volatility, crypto's rise in popularity is mainly attributed to the fact it offers quick, easy, and relatively cheap transactions. And the move towards crypto has increased steadily as the digital payment type has become more accessible and more popular.

Amid wildly circulating theories, Amazon stepped in to deny claims of timely acceptance of cryptocurrencies and released a statement stating that "notwithstanding our interest in the space, the speculation that has ensued around our specific plans for cryptocurrencies is not true."

The online giant's statement comes after a London paper cited an internal source claiming the move to crypto was imminent. According to the City AM article, Amazon is ready to accept bitcoin payments and tokens as early as this year, and possibly roll out its own "native token" as well.

Amazon's job posting could be revolutionary for e-commerce but it is not the first large conglomerate open to the possibility of cryptocurrency, and speculation is that this move will ensure it won't be the last.

With emissions running high in crypto, Tesla backed out of accepting the digital payment earlier this year, but then two months later, changed its tune (BBC) noticing Amazon's move, and admitted acceptance of the digital currency is, once again, "likely."

Despite crypto's many possibilities, any negative impact on the environment generated through the large-scale coal emissions an industry like this creates could force an adverse reaction from consumers. But even that doesn't seem to be stopping the online marketplace from diving into the possibility of using cryptocurrencies.

The use of cryptocurrency for one of the world's biggest online marketplaces is also seen as a win-win for consumers and sellers. Third-party Amazon sellers are reeling with anticipation over news of the job posting. Not only could the use of cryptocurrencies offer more security and ease of transactions to consumers, but sellers are intrigued by the possibility of crypto to fend off hackers and offer more security in their Amazon payment deposits and account level oversight.

Consumers are also intrigued about Amazon's move to crypto as this could potentially mean a reduction in costs since third-party sellers often mark-up product pricing to factor Amazon's selling fees into their margins. Amazon sellers are hopeful about the possibility of lower Amazon selling fees as the transactional costs towards using crypto are expected to be lower.

Another benefit of cryptocurrency is the blockchain technology that enables its existence, a technology that can also aid in storing product warranties. Consumers would no longer have the frustration of lost paper receipts and being unable to prove warranty coverage as the blockchain would solve this problem. Sellers and customers would all be able to access the data, allowing proof of ownership to be easily validated.

Alongside secure, easy, and cost-effective fee structures, the global economy could benefit from reducing inflationary pressures. Introducing the use of crypto in payment options worldwide could eventually result in widespread change from moving assets to cash, thus avoiding inflationary trends. This is a change that many say is long overdue, while others speculate crypto is still too volatile to affect this type of sweeping economic shift.

If Amazon decides to tackle the world of cryptocurrency, it will be interesting to see whether their "native token" is eventually traded on the crypto exchanges. This will only strengthen the online powerhouse stronghold in e-commerce and cryptocurrency trading.

In addition, if Amazon adopts crypto and speculation that currency will forever be changed is correct, how will brick and mortar retail be affected by this new wave of self-checkouts? As the e-commerce shopping experience becomes smoother and more secure with crypto, will self-checkout retail also embrace this trend and offer its customers lower costs and added security?

If Amazon paves the way for online marketplaces and retail adapts, will this mean Amazon fosters stronger relationships in the retail sector, or will it mean retail giants must now depend on the online powerhouse to facilitate crypto payment processing structures?

Amazon's potential move to crypto is already impactful, but the widespread influence of cryptocurrency in and of itself leaves lingering doubts as to how retail will adapt in such a fast-paced environment. If retail can't catch up with the times, then can it be said that "retail is dead"?

The question then remains of whether this type of outcome will get Amazon to reinvent the use of the world's greatest commodity: money. Only time will tell. For now, the global e-commerce world is waiting for Amazon's next move.

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ICO ICO Analysis: Genesis Vision Published 6 months ago on October 17, 2017 By Aakash Kawale Genesis Vision is creating a platform for a private trust management market based on blockchain and smart contracts which will serve as an ecosystem for traders, investors and brokers. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. Gensis is proposing a system which will enable investors to passively invest in BOTH cryptocurrencies and traditional assets. Trust management in this reference is a system where investors transfer their funds to wealth management companies/fiduciaries/experts who manage and invest these funds in assets which match the investors risk profile. The total amount of funds under management globally were at $70 trillion in 2016, and are expected to reach $100 trilllion in 2020. Having personally worked in this industry for a few years, the author has seen some of its grey areas very closely. Wealth management companies measure their success by the amount of funds they are managing, which incentivizes them to attract as much capital as they can. While investors select fund managers based on their past performance, these numbers can be easily overstated by creating personalized statistics for performance measurement and working in tandem with brokers. Even the fee structure is kept opaque in many instances, with many types of hidden fees being charged to the customers. Many fund managers receive bonuses which are 15-20 times of their base salaries, which incentivizes them to keep the fee structure high and opaque. While investors have kept investing money with wealth managers, numbers show that only 17% of them have managed to beat their respective benchmarks in the past 10 years. Genesis Value Proposition Genesis Vision is a decentralized trust management platform built on blockchain technology and smart contracts. Blockchain technology provides indispensable advantages, such as openness, immutability, and censorship-resistance of all stored information, whereas smart contracts, which will be carrying out investment and profit distribution, make these processes completely transparent and open. Each manager in the Genesis Vision network has his own cryptocurrency. The size of the issue depends on successful trade statistics. The process of transferring funds to the manager is carried out by buying a managers cryptocurrency on the internal exchange. There will be 3 core elements of the Genesis ecosystem: investment managers, investors and the brokers. Investors and the investment managers will interact with the platform using the mobile app or the web based application. Each manager will have his own Ethereum based token. Investors will contribute the funds that they want invested and will get the managers tokens in return. A managers tokens gain their value from the performance of his portfolio and will trade on Genesiss internal exchange. The manager shares the profits from the portfolio after fixed intervals, which are shared with his token holders. Smart contracts facilitate all the transactions. Every trade that a manager makes is stored in the decentralized IFPS which is visible to all and makes the system transparent. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // The part of the ecosystem discussed above is enough for cryptocurrency based asset management, however when dealing with traditional assets, the brokers come into play. As of now and maybe for a foreseeable future, Genesis will only facilitate cryptocurrency and Forex based asset management. When an asset manager includes Forex in his portfolio, the investors funds will be routed through a broker who will buy the required fiat currency and supply it to the asset manager. The proposed business model has benefits for all participants which includes investors, managers and the brokers. The investors benefit from the transparency while the investors and brokers get to access a larger demographic. If you remove the Forex part of the project, the idea is similar to what Melonport and CoinDashare doing. All three of them facilitate any trader to create and manage crypto based portfolios. Genesis differentiates itself by including the traditional asset part as well as creating individual tokens for each asset manager. Token and Crowdraise Genesis Vision has its own token: GVT ( Genesis Vision Token). GVT is based on ERC20 Ethereum token standard.GVT will be used for all investment operations, profit distributions, and managers token trading on the internal Exchange. Along with GVT, each manager will have his own token. The managers tokens will only trade on the internal exchanges where users can buy them in exchange of GVT. The GVT are limited in number and as demand for the platform grows, so does the value of GVTs. The ICO started on 15th October 2017 and is open till 15th November. 75% of the 44 million tokens are available for the ICO and 1 GVT is valued at 1 USD (hardcap $33 million). A 20% bonus is available for the next 2 days. 40% of the funds raised will be used for product development while 30% are dedicated to marketing. Genesis will be marketing the product heavily amongst users and brokers, hence the higher allocation. The team will keep 11% of the tokens. Team The Genesis Vision team ranks highly on credibility. With transparency at the core of the Genesis Vision project, the team had their Initial Coin Offering certified by The Financial Commission successfully. The Financial Commission is an independent self-regulatory organization and external dispute resolution body, primarily dedicated to Forex. Genesis is the first ICO to be certified by the Financial Commission. One of the 3 cofounders Alexey Kutsenko is the CEO of Tools For Brokers. Tools For Brokers (TFB)is a fintech company working exclusively with brokers and has around 300 brokers as clients. The close relations of TFB will facilitate broker participation in Genesis Vision. The other two cofounders Ruslan Kamenskiy and Dmitry Nazarov started working on the project in 2016 and won the HackRussia all-Russian hackathon in the nomination Finance and Blockchain with the Genesis Vision project. There are 10 members in the team and 13 prolific advisors, many of them being CEOs and founders of Russia based wealth management companies. Verdict Credibility is always a top priority when looking at ICOs and Genesis has plenty of it. Genesis builds up on the existing blockchain based asset management firms by enabling a window for traditional assets. Although the initial product focuses only on cryptocurrencies and Forex, many investors will find value in holding multiple fiat and cryptocurrencies together. The concept of each asset manager having his own currency seems really cool and will help attracting many potential traders/analysts. However, there is intense competition in blockchain based asset management space with companies like Melonport already working on betas with a thousand users. We hope Genesis does not lose a significant market when it rolls out its first version in 2019. Risks The gateway to traditional assets will not be easy. Genesis will face many regulatory headwinds when it eventually expands in traditional assets beyond Forex. -2 As mentioned above, Genesis faces intense competition in cryptocurrency asset management space. -3 Although the concept of asset managers having their own currencies sounds interesting, it makes the project much more complicated. -0.25 The first version of the product will be released in 2019, which seems a bit stretched. -1 Growth Potential Although the shareForex asset management is lower than other forms of asset management, it still is humongous considering the total market size of $70 trillion. +4 Credible management and the advisory team is a big positive. +3 Genesis already has a solution for trust management market used by 80 financial companies. The working solution is based on a b2b model and is centralized. +3 Genesis has good relations with around 400 brokers and 50+ wealth management companies. This will help them scale very quickly. +2 Disposition We arrive at a score of +5.75 out of 10 for Genesis Vision. There is no softcap and unsold tokens during the ICO will be burned which might result in potential upside in case the hardcap is not reached. Overall we have a positive view of Genesis. Investment Details The ICO is live. You can buy the tokens here. Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. Rate this post: Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (0 votes, average: 0.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this. Loading... Aakash Kawale 4.5 stars on average, based on 15 rated postsAakash Kawale is a financial analyst based out of Mumbai, India. He is the lead analyst at a Singapore based organization and has extensive experience of analyzing US and Indian equities. Aakash is a strong advocate of the Blockchain technology and has been analyzing cryptocurrencies since 2015. Follow @HackedCom Feedback or Requests? Related Topics:initial coin offeringtoken sale Up Next ICO Analysis: Worldcore Don't Miss ICO Analysis: Bloom You may like ICO Analysis: Ambit Mining ICO Analysis: CoinJanitor ICO Analysis: ImmVRse ICO Analysis: Momentum ICO Analysis: Eligma ICO Analysis: NeuroChain (NCC) Click to comment You must be logged in to post a comment Login Leave a Reply Cancel replyYou must be logged in to post a comment. ICO ICO Analysis: Ambit Mining Published 11 hours ago on April 21, 2018 By Ross Peili By 2017, cryptocurrencies reached their mainstreampeak, where people like Alan Greenspan and Microsofts Bill Gates were talking about the possible value in this new digital asset class. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. The current state of blockchain technology has already proven itself more than just worthy, improving the lives of many people and legal entities in various ways. However, blockchain-powered platforms require an enormous amount of computing power to run smoothly. One of the most important gears of the current blockchain-factory is the concept of mining cryptocurrencies, or in a nutshell, lending your computing power and resources in order to provide the blockchain the power it needs to perform the transactions set within the network, in exchange for a portion of the transaction. While mining is necessary for most of the current blockchain systems, it is also a pain in the ass for various reasons, including // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // Mining has extremely high-energy costs The noiseand heat generated by the machinery could be really disturbing Requires a lot of physical space Requires expensive hi-tech ventilation/air-conditioning systems Requires 24/7 personnel to monitor the plant That is why, over time, mining ended up being extremely difficult and concentrated in a few hands. Most mining companies disappearedor merged with similar companies and those who take mining seriously even started to move to countries with low taxes and low electricity fees. For some countries, mining feels are very low. Take Georgia, for example, where the average rental price per a square meter is not more than a couple dollars. The price per KWhis not more than $0.05, in opposition to the average European KWh price that is currently around $0.20. Ambit Mining is a Georgian-based start-up that has been taking advantage of these features for some time now. The company operates its own mining plant, powered by major industrial titans like Schneider Electrics, AMD, NVidia, Cisco and Kingston. Ambit Mining is constantly evolving and are now launching their own ICO to power an ecosystem of investors and developers under the Ambit Mining roof. The Georgian company not only is one of the most promising, according to their latest transparency release, but they have ties to governmental institutions in Georgia, understanding both local and international markets with a solid and modern business plan. Unlike most mining plants with a business model, that rent you specific hash power, Ambit Mining gives you the opportunity to be part of the business model by releasing 85% of their total token supply to the public. Ambit Mining uses both ASICs and GPUs to diversify risks. They have a modern plant and they keep expanding. Ambit Mining unites mining, cloud, and hosting services into one decentralized platform, guided by the community shareholders. The company is part of the economic free zone of Tbilisi, capital of Georgia and they have an interesting and transparent history when it comes to mining. Their latest project achieved 100% ROI in just five months. Token The AMBT token is Ambit Mining ecosystems native currency. It can be used to purchase mining contracts, computing power, or even cloud space. Each token has a value that can be translated as a vote on significant community events and updates. At the same time, naturally, you can swap your AMBT for ETH, or any other major cryptocurrency and find shelter in fiat or other altcoins. The total token supply is set to 104,000,000 AMBT, 85% of which (88,000,000) will be accessible during the public sales. Ambit Mining, unlike most ICOs, will require only 3% to be reserved for the company, while 9% is distributed to team and advisers, and the final 3% will be given to bounty participants. The starting price of an AMBT token is approximately set around $0.5 per unit, which is ultra cheap, if you consider that projects with a similar total supply cost between $10 and $200 at the moment, with Ethereum (~99 million total supply) being the most expensive per unit at $585 US dollars. Team Beka Vashakidze (Founder & CEO) is the CEO of BF group holding Company operating on mining in Georgia. He is involved in numerous different industries including Fintech, Digital Media, oil and gas among others. Giorgi Inashvili (Chief Operational Officer) is behind numerous projects around marketing, sales, and logistics areas. He is talented in business planning and project management. George Khmaladze (Chief Financial Officer) is currently a professor and lecturer at Georgian Technical University. He is an important figure in Georgia, having served director and chairman in various organizations in his country. In the board of advisers, we can find Karan Khemani, CEO of Spectre, Miguel Palencia, Chief Information Officer at Qtum Foundation and Andri Matiukhin, Chief Technical Director at Hacken among others. Overall, the Ambit team consists of professionals with years of experience in the mining scene. A big portion of the initial team is native Georgian, acknowledging the benefits of the grounds they live in. Verdict Mining is a crucial part of most blockchain-based technology companies. The more companies adopting distributed ledger technology, the more mining will be required. Ambit offers its services as a solution to this problem, with specified facilities and reduced mining costs. Indeed, Ambit has favorable synergies that could be very beneficial for someone looking at mining seriously. Within its years of operation, Ambit has managed already to create a 1 MW diversified mining facility in Tbilisi where its based. This facility has managed to achieve 100% ROI in five months. This indicates that the operation is up and running, proving it can grow, provided that the terminals are put into place and running. Having the whole of the investment concentrated on one spot means that the service team will be able to respond very fast in case something goes wrong. Ambit plans to grow its operation to 20 MW through this project, having mining enthusiasts on their side and the support of the high-end technology manufacturers affiliatedwith the company. While mining is very important for most blockchain-platforms, there is a new wave of decentralized distributed ledgers that have a pre-established number of tokens, pre-mined and they use variations of the PoW protocol, eliminating the need for miners. Risks From an investors perspective, the following facts are important to consider when weighing Ambit Mining: While Georgia may be friendly to mining at the moment, it still is a very expensive and energy-consuming sport that might be changed or even faded away in the future. -1.5 Mining nowadays is not as easy and profiting as it was during the golden days of the blockchain. Major mining companies have already established plants that work for years, having a standard client database. Ambit Mining will have to work hard to attract new investors into their network. Even with the lowest prices of the market, that is a challenge. -2 In general, mining facilities are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, and that does not exclude Ambit Mining from the list. For an example, an earthquake can be devastating for the company itself as the whole operation is relying on a single geo-location. -1 Ambit Minings native token, AMBT, does not offer anything out of the box, as there are infinite options already doing what AMBT is created to do. -2.5 Growth Opportunity On the other hand, if considered seriously and programmed with technical craftsmanship, mining can be still one of the most profiting sub-sectors of blockchain technology. Ambit Mining seems to understand the specific market well with a series of transparency reports backing this fact. +2.5 Finding cheap operational fees in the sector is not a walk in the park. Whether Ambit Mining has chosen Georgia as their base due to the fact that it is their home country or the fact that it has cheap taxes, and electricity fees, it is one of their best key points for the moment. +3 Unlike most mining plants that are decentrally centralized, keeping almost half of the total token supply for the company, Ambit Mining is in position to share 85% of the total token supply with the community. +4 $0.5 per AMBT or any other token with a logical total token supply is more than just fair and it could bring an easy x4 to x5 just after the token enters the mainstream markets. +2.5 Disposition Ambit Mining could be a profitable model for ICO investors or even blockchain investors, but we should consider the fact that mining will have to eventually upscale its model into a less consuming, energy-efficient platform. The company, as well as the team, look really promising and wise on the sector, although relying your whole business plan on a single country, on a single location could lead to unpleasant surprises in the future. A score of5out of 10is reserved for Ambit Mining, based on present facts. Investment Details Type: Crowdsale Symbol: AMBT Platform: Ethereum Pre-Sale: Apr. 20, 2018 Public Sale: May 10, 2018 PaymentsAccepted:ETH, BTC (KYC Required) Official Website White Paper Disclaimer: The writer has no position in Ambit Mining at the time of writing. Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock. Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. Rate this post: Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (0 votes, average: 0.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this. Loading... Ross Peili 3.1 stars on average, based on 7 rated posts Follow @HackedCom Feedback or Requests? Continue Reading ICO ICO Analysis: CoinJanitor Published 20 hours ago on April 21, 2018 By noahsayres There are more than 4,500 crypto assets of some sort in circulation. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. Yet many of them are functionally dead. This is problematic for both the owners of these dead tokens and the cryptocurrency markets at large. For the owners of the dead coins, the issue is that they cannot recover the value locked in either a token and/or network that doesnt allow them to trade for anything else. Meanwhile, cryptocurrency markets themselves suffer from the dilution of capital, resources and reputation issues due to the sheer number of unusable coins. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // CoinJanitor aims to solve these issues by taking over failed projects and exchanging the associated failed tokens with that of its native Janitor token (JAN). Their plan is to burn all failed project tokens they receive. Through this approach, they posit that value will be restored to individual users who can then sell or trade their CoinJanitor tokens for other cryptocurrencies. An additional benefit will also come to the community via the recycling of codebases and project assets. The project is premised on the belief that by reducing resource dilution in the overall cryptocurrency market, CoinJanitor will contribute to the network effect of truly functional coins, more effectively leverage fragmented communities, and implement mechanisms for the recycling of spent resources back into future projects. As a result of this valuable market service, CoinJanitor proposes that it will also benefit from its own network effect and create a highly engaged, loyal community of coin holders working towards the improvement of utility and value in the crypto economy. Token According to their own whitepaper, CoinJanitor tokens will be a deflationary asset with an increasing community and reach, which should push prices up and give us more comfortable terms to buy out subsequent failed projects. Therefore, users of the first projects that we buy out will enjoy a double benefit. They will receive relatively more CoinJanitor tokens for their locked value, and as CoinJanitor proceeds to buy out the next projects, the value and the price of the CoinJanitor tokens they hold, should increase accordingly. The hope for CoinJanitor is that this economic incentive will create enough interest to speed up the achievement of their stated goal of buying out 3 dead or failed coins within the first 2 months of operations. From that point forward, they believe the pace should accelerate since they would be able to prove the viability of the project, gather more users under the CoinJanitor umbrella, and generate more demand from dead or failed coin holders. In theory this is a coin whose very business model and inherent token economics should lead to exponential growth for long-term holders if implemented correctly. There will be a total of 100,000,000 JAN tokens generated in the ICO.Token distribution is as follows: 50% of all tokens will be sold in the open market to fund the project and all operations. 30% of the coins will be held by the CoinJanitor project to buy out dead or failed coins. According to the whitepaper, CoinJanitor will only use the tokens it issued to buy dead coin holders out. 5% CoinJanitor Partners 5% Bounty Program 10% Founders, Team and Future Employees Their whitepaper states that all CoinJanitor tokens not sold during the public sale will be airdropped proportionally to contributors. This airdrop will importantly EXCLUDE CoinJanitor team members and the CoinJanitor reserve. Team This appears to be a highly qualified team. CEO: Marc Kenigsberg Marc has been involved in Bitcoin since 2013 and has 18 years experience in online marketing. He was one of the worlds largest cryptocurrency affiliates and the founder of BlockSmarter and Bitcoin Chaser. Marc is one of the worlds leading ICO advisors and works with various ICOs and blockchain businesses. He is a regular speaker at conferences around the world and a contributor to leading industry publications. CTO: Asaf Yosifov Head of Innovation at Titanium Technologies, a leading R&D, and Innovation company. Asaf has 16 years of experience developing software and leading R&D teams in industries such as education, gaming, telecom, finance, and travel. Biz Dev: Tzahi Kanza CEO of Titanium Technologies, a leading R&D, and Innovation company. Tzahi has 17 years of experience managing global companies. He is an expert in start-up management, Blockchain, strategic planning and international business activity. CMO: Tzvi Shishler CEO of 4KingMedia, a leading Crypto Media company. Tzvi has extensive marketing experience in the disruptive online space and has been involved in Bitcoin and Crypto marketing from the beginning. CIO: Theo Morgan-Somers CEO of CryptoBuild, a financial technology company producing trading platforms for cryptocurrency. Theo has a marketing background but moved into investment and information analysis for DLT in 2015. Steven Gleiser, Economic Architect Steven first came across Bitcoin in 2013, looking at hedging opportunities in forex. He has been studying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies ever since, moving into the field as an analyst on a full-time basis 2 and a half years ago. Verdict In the eyes of this analyst, CoinJanitor looks like a fascinating and incredibly useful project. They have a detailed multi-year operational plan that considers the use of all resources in great detail within their white paper, with logical explanations for everything they want to spend money on. When combined with the extremely friendly ICO price relative to the total token supply, the basic deflationary economics of the project, and fact that they are the only project attempting something like this gives me great confidence that this could be highly successful going forward. Risks Unprecedented project goals. This makes it harder to define what long-term success would look truly look like. With no existing similar projects to compare to it, CoinJanitor has both the blessing and the curse of having a first mover advantage. -2.5 The project could suffer from malicious opportunists who could attempt pump and dump or mining attacks on the coins that CoinJanitor attempts to recycle. -3 Growth Potential Incredibly low token supply means it will not take a lot of capital inflows to pump up the price +3 The coin is deflationary with a small and finite supply. Paradoxically, the more dead projects CoinJanitor absorbs, the more valuable their native token will become. +4.5 Highly qualified and experienced team +3.5 Disposition We are left with a score of 6.5 out of 10 for CoinJanitor. This analyst believes this to be a potentially fantastic investment, especially as a long-term play. Investment Details Token Type: Utility Platform: Ethereum Symbol: JAN ICO Price: One JAN= 0.16 USD Token Supply: 100,000,000 Hard Cap: $7,5,000,000 USD Public Sale: May 1st-May 31st Jurisdictions Barred From Participating: TBD Website: https://www.coinjanitor.io/ Whitepaper: e-Paper-v4.5.pdf Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock. Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. Rate this post: Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (0 votes, average: 0.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this. Loading... noahsayres 5 stars on average, based on 2 rated posts Follow @HackedCom Feedback or Requests? Continue Reading ICO ICO Analysis: ImmVRse Published 2 days ago on April 20, 2018 By Alex Moskov ImmVRse is a blockchain-based virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) video sharing and hiring platform. Similar to YouTube, the platform allows you to like, comment, and share videos with other users but also connects creators with those who need their services (e.g. brands and advertisers). The combined VR/AR market targeted by the team is projected to reach $162 billion by 2020. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. VR/AR Industry Problems Because the VR/AR space is still relatively young, there are numerous roadblocks inhibiting its growth. Primarily, content creators are spread across platforms because theres no dominant space for them to publish their work. As a brand or advertiser, this makes it difficult to connect with quality video producers. Additionally, many of the companies that are dedicated to AR/VR video sharing are highly centralized and limit who they allow to use their platform. Another hindrance to the growth of this market is the difficulty to generate revenue. Several countries have strict legislation revolving around payments, especially in overseas transactions. This, in combination with the oversaturation of video on traditional platforms, prevents quality AR/VR creators from expanding. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // ImmVRse Solutions ImmVRse is tackling all of these problems head-on. The team is not only building a sharing platform but a community as well. They want users to interact heavily with one another to help foster a supportive AR/VR ecosystem. To prevent restrictions on membership and content, ImmVRse uses Ethereum smart contracts for the peer-to-peer aspect of the platform. The entire jobs matching process, from inquiry to publication, is decentralized without any intermediary control. As with most other platforms implementing cryptocurrency, a large function of blockchain for ImmVRse is in their payments system. Users give and receive payments using the projects ERC20 token, IMV. Additionally, normal viewers who interact with the platform are rewarded with IMV as well. This opens up the platform to people in countries with prohibitive legislation and/or limited financial infrastructure. Finally, ImmVRse provides a unique solution to the revenue problems mentioned earlier. Because its an AR/VR dedicated platform, brands and advertisers are able to easily find the AR/VR talent theyre looking to hire for content production. One thing that stands out in the revenue model, though, is that high-value creators need to pay a monthly subscription to maintain a premium status on ImmVRse. This seems odd because theyre the driving force behind the platform. However, if the leads and value they receive from keeping their status are high enough, this may be a non-issue. Token The ImmVRse team is currently preparing for their token crowdsale but have a pre-sale announcement on May 15. No other dates have been announced yet, but the whitepaper states that the token sale will last for 6 to 8 weeks. During the ICO, the team will mint a maximum supply of 300 million IMV with no additional token creation after. IMVs are ERC20 tokens, so you can use any standard ERC20 wallet to participate in the ICO. IMV tokens will cost $0.20 with discounts to early contributors and pre-ICO participants. During the pre-ICO, tokens will have a 20% discount while early contributors can receive an additional 10% discount. The IMV token distribution is more centralized than most other projects with only one-third going to crowdsale participants. The distribution is as follows: 53% ImmVRse 33% ICO participants 10% Team and advisors 4% Rewards and bounties Creating even more centralization, only 60% of the crowdsale tokens are slotted for the public crowdsale. The remaining 40% will be distributed among private investors and pre-ICO participants. The crowdsale has a hard cap of $20 million. Team The ImmVRse team is headquartered in London and led by co-founders Farabi Shayor and Limon Rahman. Shayor has two and a half years of VR production experience alongside proficiency in Solidity development. Rahman is a seasoned entrepreneur with 14 years of financial control and management experience. Together they form a yin (product) and yang (business) combination thats great to see in a founding team. Unfortunately, the rest of the team is lacking in both AR/VR and blockchain experience. Although the technologies are new, it wouldve been nice to see a few team members with related projects under their belt. On a positive note, the team has a solid advisory board that should be able to help with any gaps in their knowledge base. Verdict The ImmVRse team is building a platform to highlight AR/VR content creators and connect them with companies looking for their services. Theyre attempting to solve some of the biggest growth problems in the video space now: censorship and profitability. Although the majority of team members dont have ample experience in key areas, the co-founders and advisory board should be able to carry them through. However, with so much of the platform revolving around quality content creation, ImmVRses decision to charge content creators for premium status may end up hurting them in the long run. Risks New market. The demand for AR/VR content is still yet to be proven. Its entirely possible that the need for this type of video is still multiple years away. Remember 3D televisions? (-1) Reliance on creators. Without happy creators, the platform has no value. Charging them for a premium status is starting off on the wrong foot. (-2) Terrible token distribution. Even if the platform becomes wildly successful, ImmVRse can just release more tokens into the ecosystem to keep the price at a reasonable level. (-3) Growth Potential Emerging market. Yes, I know I put the market as a risk, but theres huge growth potential here as well. AR/VR content has a multitude of use-cases and this market could end up being gigantic. (+5) Supportive advisers. Any expertise that the team is missing is filled in by some member of their advisory board. (+3) Multiple revenue streams. Advertising, job completion fees, creator monthly subscriptions, and numerous other things theres plenty of ways for the platform to make money. (+4) Disposition ImmVRse receives a respectable 6 out of 10. The platform is highly dependent on an industry that hasnt really broken ground yet. If AR/VR adoption is still far outside of the horizon, it may be years before ImmVRse shows value too long for a young project to survive. However, an AR/VR market boom could position ImmVRse to be the next big media platform to take the world by storm. Investment Details The ImmVRse team hasnt released any important investment details, but you can stay up-to-date with their announcements here. Symbol: IMV Platform: Ethereum Public Sale Start: N/A Price: 1 IMV = $0.20 U.S. Hard Cap: $20 million Minimum Investment: $50 U.S. Payments Accepted: ETH Jurisdictions Barred from Participation: United States Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock. Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. Rate this post: Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (0 votes, average: 0.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this. Loading... Alex Moskov 4.5 stars on average, based on 14 rated postsAlex Moskov is a writer and entrepreneur with a passion for building and creating awesome things. Alex has experience in music tech startups, digital marketing, and cryptocurrency investing. Follow @HackedCom Feedback or Requests? Continue Reading Recent Commentsembersburnbrightly on Technical Analysis: Bitcoin Tests $9000 as Altcoins Pull Back after Strong Rallyidm2000 on Bithumb to Launch ICO in Singapore Later This YearBossa on One Week With Live Streaming and I Ended Up With 13 500 USD in ProfitKiril Nikolaev on Trade Recommendation: Bytecoin/MoneroJochem50 on Trade Recommendation: Bytecoin/Monero Bitcoin:$25,000 By Year End? Technical Analysis: Bitcoin Tests $9000 as Altcoin... 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Seven years ago, eight brainiacs with diverse talents and lofty ambitions broke bread in Zug, Switzerland, and hashed out the future of what would become the world’s busiest blockchain.

With Ethereum, the enterprising octad sought to overcome Bitcoin’s limitations by creating a community-driven, open-source project capable of supporting decentralized applications (dApps). Today, the smart contract platform has made good on many of its goals, facilitating value transfer on an eye-watering scale. Its native cryptocurrency ETH, meanwhile, is the second-largest digital asset by market cap.

Ethereum’s major London upgrade – which slashes the supply of new tokens hitting the market by a third – seems like as good a time as any to focus on the co-founders whose ideologies and aspirations took them in different directions. And specifically on the four figures who remain involved in blockchain on a day-to-day basis: Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Charles Hoskinson.

What Became of the Likely Lads?

Russian-Canadian computer programmer Buterin remains Ethereum’s figurehead, the name and face of the platform for all intents and purposes. Boasting a Twitter following of 2.2 million, the 27-year-old author of the Ethereum whitepaper often appears at conferences to discuss the future direction of the network, and he’s hard at work on Ethereum 2.0, its vaunted proof-of-stake overhaul.

By transitioning away from proof-of-work, the energy-intensive consensus mechanism favored by Bitcoin, Buterin believes Ethereum will reduce its energy consumption by between 1,000 and 10,000x. “We go from consuming the same energy as a medium-sized country to consuming the same energy as a village,” he says.

Improvements overseen by Buterin also include stability features such as rollups and sharding, which are intended to vastly improve Ethereum’s scalability. Last month, while appearing at Hong Kong’s Startmeup HK Festival, Buterin emphasized the importance of such upgrades: “Once you have rollups and sharding, Ethereum and things on top of Ethereum will actually be able to have the kind of scalability that the large scale enterprise applications are expecting.”

Buterin also conceded that building Ethereum’s successor had taken much longer than anticipated. Interestingly, he cited “internal team conflicts” as an explanation for the sluggish transition rather than technical difficulties. Internal team conflicts, of course, led to the departures of the aforementioned co-founders Wood and Hoskinson, both of whom started blockchains of their own.

Buterin has been ably assisted by a small army of Ethereum developers – around 2,300 per month according to Electric Capital’s latest Developer Report. He’s also been able to rely on the counsel of co-founder Joseph Lubin, a serial investor and seasoned tech developer who has brought commercial partners (JPMorgan, BNY Mellon, Credit Suisse) and developer talent into Ethereum’s orbit.

Much of the platform’s recent-years success can be traced back to Lubin, whose Ethereum-focused startup studio ConsenSys raised $65 million in funding from the likes of UBS and Mastercard back in April. ConsenSys has also partnered with China’s Blockchain-based Service Network to accelerate the enterprise adoption of Ethereum apps in the region.

Polkadot and Cardano: Upstart Challengers or Ethereum Killers?

Charles Hoskinson was once the CEO of Ethereum; Gavin Wood, meanwhile, wrote the technical specification of Buterin’s whitepaper and pioneered its programming language Solidity. Despite their influential roles in the project’s formative years, both have since departed to found alternative blockchain platforms.

Hoskinson’s desire to make Ethereum a commercial (rather than nonprofit) enterprise ultimately caused a schism that led to his withdrawal. ‘Leaving under a cloud’ would be putting it mildly – Joseph Lubin referred to Hoskinson as a pathological liar, prone to telling people he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy figure who created Bitcoin. In any case, Hoskinson’s departure led him to found Cardano, an open-source, proof-of-stake platform launched in 2017. In the four years since its release, Cardano has established itself as a major player. Not only is its native asset, ADA, the fifth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, but the platform supports almost 7,000 assets following its Mary hard fork.

The upcoming Alonzo upgrade will finally bring smart contract functionality to Cardano, enabling defi applications to be deployed on it for the first time. While this milestone is loudly trumpeted by Cardano and its supporters, its delayed implementation has made the project the butt of many jokes. More than once, Hoskinson has touted a smart contract launch – only to kick the can further down the road.

Whether Hoskinson will make good on his promise this time is anyone’s guess. In any case, Cardano has made an impact beyond the world of speculation: earlier this year, it secured a deal with the Ethiopian government, enabling students to create a digital identity recorded on the Cardano blockchain.

Hoskinson is vocal about Cardano’s commitment to Africa, referencing “new voting systems, new property systems, new payment systems, new ways of identifying people, new ways of trading securities” and pitching Cardano’s blockchain infrastructure as a key cog in such transformation: “All of these things are possible with the technology we've constructed, built with formal methods and advanced programming languages like Haskell, and validated by peer review.”

It’s fair to say that while Hoskinson has built Cardano into a formidable beast, he remains a polarizing figure. Last month, the outspoken CEO caught flak for an old tweet in which he predicted Cardano would by now support “thousands of dApps.” Of the almost 7,000 assets built on Cardano, a mere two log over 10,000 transactions per month. Hoskinson also raised eyebrows after conceding that Cardano engaged in analyzing code from rivals such as Polkadot to borrow concepts.

Ethereum’s ex-Chief Technology Officer Gavin Wood has been every bit as busy as Hoskinson, with his sharded blockchain platform Polkadot launching on mainnet last year. Polkadot was created to connect disparate blockchains into one interconnected network, known as the Relay Chain, and to solve the sector’s long-standing interoperability problem.

As Wood framed it while attending CoinDesk’s Consensus: Distributed virtual conference in May, “Ethereum can do 25 transactions per second (TPS), but, of course, the more you use it, the worse it gets. Polkadot uses parachains [parallel processing chains] and can go from 100K TPS to up to 1 million TPS.”

The aforementioned Developer Report showed that Polkadot doubled its developer count last year, with almost 400 active devs getting the platform ready for the introduction of parachains, layer-1 blockchains that bolt onto Polkadot and run in parallel to it. Distinct from Ethereum, Polkadot has its own system for implementing upgrades on-chain, and these changes occur a level up from the base protocol.

Unlike Cardano, Polkadot already supports a burgeoning defi ecosystem complete with stablecoins, staking protocols, and cross-chain money markets. Wood and his supporters are convinced that Polkadot’s vision of parachains will usher in the next generation of blockchain innovation and value transfer, with consumers benefiting from reduced fees, faster confirmation times, and cross-chain interaction. As it stands, Polkadot seems likely to realize parachain auctions (and thus full operationality) before Ethereum debuts 2.0. Its usage of a live experimental ‘canary network’, Kusama, also means it’s likely to hit the ground running and capture the interest of those sick and tired of waiting for Ethereum to haul itself across the finish line.

Three of Ethereum’s co-founders now preside over altogether rivalrous empires, and at this juncture there’s no telling who will make the greatest long-term impact. One thing’s for sure, we’ll be in a better position to judge by the time Eth2 makes its way into the world – although Hoskinson and Wood aren’t the type to go quietly into the night. However their careers play out, their shared history is likely to remain a topic of intense debate and speculation for years to come.