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Simran Alphonso

Bitcoin Price – Should I Invest Now? – May 2020

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The cryptospace has eagerly been waiting for May 2020 – the month of the Bitcoin halving; an event that happens once in 4 years and has a record of pushing BTC to its newest all-time highs. 

This is also the month or rather phase where a lot of new people come into the space to invest and try their lucks out. Some enter with the intention of making some quick bucks, some to try it out for once and some people come to hodl. Nevertheless, whatsoever the intention maybe it is extremely important to understand that BItcoin and cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile; the best thing to do is to invest not more than what one can afford to lose. 

A couple of points to note before you invest more or get into the market at the current price i.e. $9800 per Bitcoin:-

For the newbies

  1. Check the legality of investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in your country
  2. Find a reliable and trusted exchange that supports your country
  3. Invest what you can afford to lose, halving ends with price drops. 
  4. Do your own research, read articles online and understand the market before anything 
  5. Don’t send money to people on random social media channels who tell you they’ll send you a bitcoin in return – they’re just scammers. 

Signals/Analysis by traders

  1. Resistance test – here
  2. Risky shorts and psychological resistance of $10000 
  3. Signals that show the sideways market has wrapped up and BTC is outside the wedge 
  4. Perfect set-up for more price growth
  5. Bitcoin Divergences

Sentiments of the cryptospace

  1. Bloomberg Commodity Index [used as an investable allocation to commodities for inflation hedging purposes] showed 25% decrease mainly due to oil prices tanking meanwhile, Gold and Bitcoin hiked a green trail with 11% and 22% pumps.
  2. On 7th May, Hedge fund legend Paul Tudor Jones announced that Tudor Investment Corp valued at $38 billion USD is now into BItcoin futures to gain better insight into the crypto market to hedge against the incoming inflation.
  3. $13 billion increase in market capitalization – check CMC for more details
  4. Crypto valley experts say they’re bullish and this time the halving scene is different from the previous ones. 
  5. Bitcoin hashrate is healthy, miners are mining and as of now there aren’t any significant hash wars in the pipeline – check here for more]
  6. The Bitcoin Lindy effect – a myth gone right?

Would you Call Bitcoin Decentralized if Satoshi was Still a Part of it?

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The only difference between deciding a project is decentralized or not is making sure its founder is MIA. Isn’t it?

Satoshi Nakamoto the creator of Bitcoin disappeared back in 2011 after handing over the project to Gavin Andresen and the core Bitcoin developers. 

Unknowingly or knowingly, this created such a powerful effect that any invention made after it, even with a better use case, was marked as a scam, a centralized shill coin, or * censored * a shit coin. However, this hasn’t stopped people from working on cryptospace development.

C’mon, Satoshi literally owns over 1 million Bitcoins and is considered to be a billionaire. If he cashes out not only would Bitcoin collapse but the entire crypto market would too. Isn’t the only reason you trust Bitcoin over others is that the founder of the king of cryptocurrencies doesn’t have a face?

Projects that actually are making a big difference but most won’t notice it

Ethereum 

No matter what the world talks about Vitalik Buterin or how Ethereum is his pet project and a centralized ecosystem, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s the second-largest cryptocurrency. Buterin was literally 21 years old when Ethereum was released. I mean, you can be smart, you can be cool too, but you’re never going to be half as smart and cool as a 21-year-old kid building a platform that allows Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications to be developed and run without any third-party intervention.

Even today, Ethereum stands as the number one platform to build dApps. DeFi projects built on top of Ethereum are the biggest drivers of volume growth with a 778% hike as compared to Q1 in 2019. Although Ethereum, Tron, and EOS are the biggest contributors to the transactional volume of the dapp sector, Ethereum is the only platform that experienced a year-over-year growth while the rest two have suffered decreases in users and transactional volume. [Source]

XRP 

XRP built by the Ripple team consists of an extraordinary ecosystem. The company runs around the basic vision of making cross-border remittances easier for every person throughout the globe using their products integrated with the RippleNet – xCurrent, xRapid, and xVia. 

Nevertheless, ever is so often the media talks about the “centralized” aspect of it. 

David Schwartz the CTO at Ripple has counteracted saying,  “Since these blockchains are considered decentralized, then by design, the XRP Ledger is also — if not more so — decentralized than both Bitcoin and Ethereum.”

Schwartz in simple words has even explained how the XRP Ledger is based on an “inherently decentralized, democratic, consensus mechanism — which no one party can control.” [Source]

With a decentralized at fast cross-border remittance ecosystem Ripple has managed to onboard way over 200 banks, startups, and payment companies in its RippleNet user network; making most xCurrent software the most used cross-border payments channel in cryptospace. 

Cardano 

Cardano has received the least attention amongst all the great projects in the space. With a slow, steady, and transparent plan of making the network decentralized, IOHK has built Cardano with a vision of a decentralized tomorrow. 

Even though decentralization is not at its best today, the project holds the potential to beat many moneymaking coins of the industry. The technology behind ADA stands on scientific philosophy and peer-reviewed academic research.

Speculators have even suggested that Cardano has attracted investors’ interest in 2020 due to the technological improvements of the coin. With a 5-layer decentralization plan – the team is all set to become the torchbearer of a future decentralized economy. 

Final thoughts

Even though the cryptospace is filled with scams there are a handful of projects worth exploring and understanding. Protocols such as Chainlink, MakerDAO, Dash, and more are always worth exploring. The basic idea of Bitcoin transitioned and evolved into multiple noteworthy technologies is what keeps the space moving forward.

Most traditional market professionals exclaimed that the cryptocurrency market would take more time than we anticipate to take off which was proved wrong when BTC pumped to $20K in 2017. Right now people in the fintech industry bank of the technical growth of other cryptocurrencies as no significant amount of improvement can be observed in Bitcoin. Adding to reasons why BTC may never be good enough for global adoption with its lack of scalability.

 

ETH, ADA, and EOS – Biggest Losers in the Past 24-Hrs

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On 1st May, the crypto market flipped the switch. Bitcoin [BTC] that was traded in the $7.7k range in April, is now trading in the range of $8.7k. The king of cryptocurrencies even touched the $9k range but couldn’t break the $10k resistance on 1st May. 

With the Bitcoin weekend bull, altcoins showed a green trail. At the time of press, altcoins such as XRP [XRP], Stellar [XLM], and Ethereum Classic [ETC] show a pump of 8.40%, 11.48%, and 12.73% respectively. Nevertheless, coins such as Ethereum, Cardano, and EOS have seen a fall of 6.33%, 7.55%, and 6.92% – making them the biggest losers in the top 15 in 24 hours. 

Ethereum 

In the past couple of days, Ethereum has been above $225 reaching $25 billion [market cap] the coin in less than three days lost $3 billion as it slipped back to low $200s showing signs of leaving the $200 support level. 

 

It looks like Ethereum has managed to recover from its intraday lows but still hangs at the edge with low uptrend momentum.  

Additionally, technical analysis of ETHUSD indicates a correction that will help to enter for long.

Professional traders comment:-

“The correction that began today will cool the market and provide the best levels of medium-term entry over the air. When MA25 goes above MA99, an uptrend will be confirmed and the BTBT strategy will open a long position with a leverage of 1: 3. Now, according to our BTBT trading strategy, there are no open positions.” – Source

“Some overhead resistance on short timeframes, but I expect a small move for +5% gain in less than 24 hours. It could go higher, but I expect it to at least stop to think at these resistance levels. A breakdown below the local low will invalidate this setup. Let’s see what happens.” – Source

Cardano [ADA]

The lack of momentum has bolstered the resistance of breaking $0.055 for ADA. The coin experienced a bearish trendline yesterday and follows the same trend today. With a major support level being $0.045, ADA is currently being traded at $0.47. 

MACD shows a bearish divergence since the signal line crosses over the MACD line indicating a lack of trading stability. The RSI stands below 45 but above 30; unless there’s an immediate uptrend the coin will experience heavy selling pressure.

#ADA

Cardano has had an eventful month with Charles Hoskinson stepping closer to the community and Shelly’s first block being produced – it seems like the technology will stabilize the sentiments around the coin despite the bears. 

EOS

EOS has slipped from being in the top 5, hardly making it into the top 10 on CMC in the past weeks. 

Technicals indicate that EOS is in a correction after its jump from $2.75 to $3.10. Irrespective of the buyers trying to break above the resistance the price dropped beneath the 100-days EMA.

#EOS

Nevertheless, despite the on-going downtrend the coin has managed to stay above its support level $2.70 and is currently trading at $2.75. 

RSI stands at 52.06 and shows a possible outcome of a bullish divergence. 

Disclaimer note: This article is not a piece of investment advice. 

Ledger Nano X – Hardware Wallet – Review, Walkthrough and FAQs

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TLDR:

  • Ledger Nano X is extremely portable hardware wallet with its in-built battery
  • Upgraded user experience; wider screen and better support
  • Can run up to 100 apps and supports 1100+ tokens
  • Nano X is great for pro traders, Nano S is sufficient for holders
  • Although it costs more than Ledger Nano S the extra $60 is worth it
  • Setup: 5/5 || UI/UX: 4/5 || Token Support: 5/5 || Security: 5/5

Specifications:-

Dimensions [cm]  7.2 x 1.86 x 1.18
Weight 34 g
Connection USB-C and Bluetooth
Inputs Two buttons
Battery 100 mAh Lithium-ion
Device Compatibility 64-bit desktop PCs – Windows 8+, macOS 10.8+, and Linux*
Tokens 1100+
Applications 100

If you’ve never owned a crypto hardware wallet it is perhaps high time you realize the importance of the saying “not your keys, not your coins”. Even though cryptocurrency exchanges are taking “world-class”, “high-end”, “advanced” security measures to protect your assets at the end of the day exchanges are CENTRALIZED. Even if you’re taking precautions and storing cryptocurrencies on decentralized exchanges or “trustworthy” hot wallets there’s a high amount of risk and chances of you losing your assets under malicious attacks.

The best way to be safe about your assets is to store in cold wallets, offline. The only risk here is for you to be dumb enough to tattoo your private keys on your wrist or throw away your hardware wallet without memorizing the recovery phrase. Nevertheless, if you know your private key and seed your funds can always be retrieved if you lose your wallet, or if it’s stolen you can always sweep your key and get the bread back. 

Amidst the global chaos, today, I finally got my hands on my Ledger Nano X – ever since its release last year, I was pretty intrigued and wanted to buy one. Better late than never, here’s a walkthrough review of the product. 

Inside the Ledger Nano X box

The Set-up

Step 1: To set Ledger Nano X you need to download Ledger Live on your PC/Smartphone. After downloading the app, you will get an option to select your respective device. 

#LedgernanoX

Step 2: After selecting your device you will receive a couple of options:-

  • Set up as a new device
  • Restore the device from the recovery phase
  • Skip device setup

Since my Ledger Nano X is new I went with “Set up as a new device”. You can select according to your own requirements. 

Step 3: The next step requires you to set your pin-up. The Ledger live application has an extremely smooth onboarding process and will guide you through it. 

[Note: Save your PIN in a safe space.]

Step 4: Ledger Nano X will walk you through your seed recovery phrase. Followed by instructions asking you to save the phrase.

[Note: Save your seed recovery phase this helps you to recover your assets if you lose your hardware wallet] 

Step 5: Ledger live will walk you through a couple of security checks to make sure you’ve saved your seed phrase. 

Step 6: Turn on your Bluetooth and pair your set up the device with Ledger Nano X. 

Step 7: Further, you will be asked for a “Password Lock”  in case someone comes across your PC/Smartphone and tries to access your funds. 

Step 8: It’ll ask you for permission, read carefully, and select accordingly. 

And, Voila!
#Ledgernanox

The Setup is super easy and took me less than 2-3 minutes to get done. 

The Exploration 

Ledger Nano X supports 1000+ cryptocurrencies and covers most of the top-ranked coins. For every cryptocurrency, you want to store in your ledger you have to install its respective application. 

I hold BTC, ETH, XRP, EOS, TRX, XLM, ADA, MIOTA along a few scam coins I bought as a newbie in 2016/17.

But for testing purposes, I tried sending 500 TRX to my Ledger Nano X. 

#Ledgernanox

The process was seamless and took me a few minutes to transfer my funds, the interface was impressive considering the low standards of UI/UX in this space. 

I wanted to explore the wallet but as much as I wanted to open it up to see the chips I knew there was a possibility I wouldn’t be able to pack it up.

Ledger Nano X has two chips much like S. The element chip [ST33J2M0] protects your private keys while other is a dual-core MCU with wireless support [STM32WB55].

One of the reasons why I was pretty hesitant to get a Ledger Nano X is Bluetooth. 

BlueTooth makes your device vulnerable and prone to attacks. To secure the device from hacks, it has been designed with a number of measures including hiding electromagnetic radiation and power usage that cancel out the chances of side-channel attacks. Even if your PC/Smartphone or BlueTooth or MCU gets compromised the secure element will always prompt you to verify the transaction with its original details and no transaction will go through without explicit consent.

You can even check out their official blog post to understand their security measures better.

Since Nano X has a battery and doesn’t need a USB  connection to run it they best and only viable option for it to connect to your operating device is through BlueTooth. Nevertheless, if you do not want to keep your BlueTooth on you can always switch to Nano S. 

FAQS on Ledger Nano X

  • Is Ledger Nano X safe?

Ans: Yes, in my opinion, it is the safest hardware wallet in the space and has a proven track record of cold wallet security. 

  • How do I transfer my cryptos from another wallet to Ledger Nano X?

Ans: Let’s assume you want to transfer some XRP. 

Set up Ledger Live -> Download the XRP app on your device and create an account -> Copy your XRP deposit address from your Ledger account -> Open your primary account from which you want to transfer XRP -> Paste the XRP deposit address on your XRP Primary account to “send” the XRP -> Confirm the transaction [Once done, you will be notified]

  •  Can I remove my assets once deposited in Ledger Nano X?

Ans: Yes, it is extremely efficient and fast as compared to the existing products in the market. Open Ledger Live -> Select the coin you want to transfer -> Enter the deposit address of your destination [where you want to send your asset to] -> Confirm the transaction 

  • Does Ledger Nano X support privacy coins?

Ans: You can check it out HERE on their official website to understand which coins they support. 

  • How to reset Nano X?

Ans: Please make sure you transfer all your tokens/coins to a safe wallet before resetting your Nano X. You can read instructions on resetting your Nano X HERE.

Cardano’s 1st Shelly Block has been produced!

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On 27th April, the founder of Cardano and Redditors celebrated the first block of Shelly that was produced earlier on 25th April 2020.

Recently, IOHK announced the release of Daedalus 1.0 an ADA wallet made after 1.5 years of hard work. The team yesterday exclaimed its success when Hoskinson said that it had received an “overwhelming response”. 

Just a day later, today the community celebrates Shelly’s first block. The Shelly phase of Cardano starts with users delegating their stakes – the key ingredient to produce new blocks in a Proof-of-Stake protocol. 

As Cardano’s plan is to move to a completely decentralized network, Shelly plays as a stepping stone to make history in terms of decentralized financial systems leveraged by blockchain.

Redditor, u/rawriclark posted on r/Cardano, stating how the genesis block of Shelly had been produced.

 

#cardano #shelly #genesisblock

The same was tweeted by Charles Hoskinson with the comment “Meanwhile in Cardano land, a Wizard arrives precisely when he means to!”. 

Right now Shelly is in its Testnet phase and Mainnet is expected to roll out by Q2 of 2020. Usually, incentivization and staking structures are planned for the Mainnet phase of a project, in the case of Cardano the Testnet itself allows ADA holders to participate in the network to earn ADAs through delegating their stake or by operating a stake pool. According to Cardano, this enables them to “test something earlier testnets couldn’t: real behavior – and real behavior requires real rewards”. 

Considering the Shelly phase is all about decentralization, the team has made it a point to be as careful and secure as they can be to keep the network from malicious plays.

As of now, large blockchain projects are controlled by less than 10 mining pools, making them vulnerable and exposed to attacks. With an incentive structure designed to achieve an equilibrium of around 1000 pools, Cardano could be 50-100 times more decentralized than the existing blockchain networks by the end of the Shelly era. 

Cardano claimed how Shelly can make the network 100% decentralized. Using a blockchain delegation certificate, operators can transfer their participation rights to stakeholder pool operators when they are offline.

The Shelly phase opens doors for a decentralized cryptocurrency ecosystem, much like Bitcoin, but faster in terms of synchronization and more effective client support among other benefits.

 

Purse.io Shuts Down after 6 Years of Operations – Why?

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On 16th April, the Purse.io released an official announcement of its shutdown. The online P2P marketplace enabled Bitcoiners to shop and use BTC/BCH to receive discounts on Amazon and even allowed earning BTC/BCH by selling Amazon gift cards to its customers. 

The company stated how it will no longer be taking in any new user logins. As of 16th April 2020, all new user signups have been disabled. The ‘Shop’ and ‘Earn’ functions will be stopped on April 23rd, 2020 and all operations will be ceased on 26th June 2020.

Purse released no official reason stating why it had to dissolve its firm and shut down its operations. Which is why Redditors and Twitteratis have flooded with their speculations. 

Purse.io is one of the oldest companies in the crypto/blockchain industry and entered the space when Bitcoin was at $400. The company has had a good reputation over all that has come and gone after the 2017 bull run. 

What’re people saying? Speculations.

A Redditor named Elum224 commented on a Purse.io shut down post saying,  “AMLR5 (new Anti-money regulations) came into force in January this year”. He stated, that banks and businesses complying with these regulations “means lots of crypto businesses will close. I’ve noticed that Amazon gift vouchers are no longer sold in shops either! I’m pretty sure it’s AMLR5. purse.io holds crypto funds. AMLR5 requires that crypto custodians KYC’s their users.”

Back in 2016 news Y Combinator had a discussion running around Purse.io. A user said that purse was “a website for committing fraud with stolen credit cards”. “It’s a website that specializes in letting criminals convert credit card details (PAN/CVV/expiry) into bitcoin while exposing them to minimal risk. There are very real ways to commit such fraud”, he added. 

Another user said, 

“This was literally one of the only ways to launder bitcoin into something as good as cash, anonymously. The people doing the buying using Amazon credit are acquiring those funds fraudulently. Surprised it took this long.”

#Moneylaundering #Purse.io

The founder of Bitcoin Cash, Roger Ver was an early investor of purse.io nevertheless after BCH halving and its prices tanking the advocate has made no comments on the shut down either.

Additionally, a Twitterati pointed out how Ver was promoting Purse.io on the BCH owned BTC forum on Reddit.

 

 

 

 

How Blockchain Can Help in Tracking COVID-19 Cases – India

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The world is going through a pandemic, financial markets are uncertain of their movements and the economy is on the edge of stumbling. Amidst the chaos, one good thing is that the world was never this technologically capable of handling such an undesirable phenomenon, but now, things are different. We have more technology now than ever. Right from Artificial intelligence to 3D printing, Drones, and Blockchain – Emerging Tech is breaking the norms. 

I know what you’re thinking! This is the same old, “Let’s put blockchain in everything we can” kind of an article. Honestly? It’s okay to feel so. Blockchain was meant for real-life use cases, doesn’t change the fact it can be integrated into multiple ecosystems for better functionality. 

Recently, I got a message from the government of India that was broadcasted in bulk to everyone. The message was about “Aarogya Setu” – a live COVID-19 case tracking application. The app has 10 million+ downloads from its launch which was a week ago! 

I downloaded the application to check out the type of data the government was taking for tracking. Didn’t come through as a surprise when the application needed endless permissions regarding, your location and requires you to keep your device Bluetooth on. 

Millions of people are totally fine with giving out their whereabouts just to make sure they’re safe [while quarantining in their homes] and at no point come in contact with a Covid-19 positive case. I mean does the general public care about what kind of applications suck their data and what is being done with it or not? 

As a technology enthusiast, I care and most tech-savvy people do because we understand the importance of data and how it can be misused if fallen into wrong hands. 

But Bluetooth seriously? The data between your device and the Bluetooth connected peripheral is encrypted but it isn’t too hard to not hack especially with the knowledge that millions of people in India have permitted it to be so. 

With all the vulnerability even Bluetooth is not a problem, there might be no other accurate way to scale it this way. The problem comes in when you think about how the data is being handled. 

To understand that better, I spoke to a couple of acquaintances and sources. 

A source told me how if you mark as “sick” on the Aarogya Setu app the next thing would be taking the information offline. A person visits your home, marks down your symptoms and delivers it to the nearest testing center, and arranges for a test. At this point, the data goes offline. 

We cannot track who all come out positive and who all don’t because there’s no empirical evidence after a point. 

Indicating how the count for Covid-19 positive cases could be way more than its actual count of 7445 [at the time of writing]. We can fight this with a blockchain!

Each testing center/ hospital can run a node on the blockchain. Every time a person shows positive symptoms for COVID-19 and gives out the details of it, a trigger alerts the hospitals. The person gets a timeslot to run tests and the result of it is put out on a public blockchain if it comes out as positive. 

Vikram Anand, the Co-founder of Hypermine a startup recently accelerated by Aeternity Ventures said:

“Blockchain can help in two aspects of COVID-19 traceability: Privacy and Tamper Proof. The privacy aspect stands second to tamper-proof. The primary setback is the way user data is being generated and stored. We don’t know for sure if it is being tampered or not, perhaps an immutable ledger can help over an unstructured database.”

While talking about blockchain to help in COVID-19 cases, a company that stands out is TruePic. Talk about bringing authenticity to the general public over all the photoshopped images and videos of Covid-19 cases. 

To help us out understand a bit more, I reached out to Mounir Ibrahim the VP of Strategic Initiatives at Truepic, he said:

“Truepic is helping its partner CIEPD in Nigeria track the community and government’s response to COVID-19 with verified imagery.  One important aspect to verified imagery is immutability, and currently, Truepic leverages Blockchain as a way to record immutable references to digital images and videos.” 

All that is being said and done, I reached out to the Deputy Chief Minister of Karnataka Dr. Ashwathnarayan, to pitch how blockchain could actually help us out better, no comment as of now. I’ll update the article as soon as I get one. 

 

 

 

Ripple – “Families Shouldn’t Have to Wait to Receive Payments from Overseas”

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On 9th April, Ripple published a blog on how the company was helping out people in Thailand for cross border payments. They established their plans for making new connections and expanding the remittance capabilities of RippleNet customers like digital money transfer service Azimo and universal banks like SCB Thailand. 

As one of the top global remittance destinations, Thailand receives over 6 billion USD from countries worldwide annually. Irrespective of the heavy payments coming in, the country experiences costly transactional fees. 

To fight the expense and time-consuming transactions, at a time when the pandemic is on the rise, Ripple is leveraging Azimo and SCB Thailand with Ripple’s Global Payments Network – RippleNet. This will enable “instant” cross-border payments from Europe to Thailand.

“Connections like this help solve the challenges of expensive and unreliable global payments. Before, remittances from Europe into Thailand averaged more than one business day to settle. Now, through the RippleNet connection with SCB, Azimo can clear Pounds and Euros into Thai Baht in less than a minute.”

Recently, Azimo launched RippleNet’s ODL [On-Demand Liquidity] service as a part pf their remittance capabilities in Philipines. According to Ripple, from the time Azimo joined hands with them, the payment provider has been able to expand their reach by offering more places and ways to move money. 

Cross border payments have always been a problem to the export/import community, but with the ever-increasing global businesses, cross-border payments needed a faster, secure and easier solution. With a single connection, financial institutions can now gain access to blockchain technology and its immutable ledger along with faster than ever transaction timeline using Ripple’s ecosystem especially in a time of crisis and global lockdowns. 

Unconfirmed: Bank of America and Ripple Have Something Cooking 

One of the XRP influencers on Twitter tweeted, “Bank of America and Ripple are about to drop the atomic bomb of announcements and it will send $XRP soaring. Mark my words it’s coming.”

The tweet included two screenshots, one belongs to the official account of Ripple which has asked the influencer to take down a post which consists of certain “larger campaign” and that the information was leaked prematurely. While the other screenshot consists of Bank of America details which hints at something Ripple and BOA might be working on. 

Here are the screenshots:

Azimo and SCB Thailand Bank of America

 

Image Source: XRP 2020 Twitter

Along with this, there are rumors going on about Ripple being acquired by Bank of America. You can check out more about it here!

Bitcoin Cash [BCH] Halving, Mining Rewards Cut Down to 6.5 BCH from 12.5 BCH

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Today, April 8th, 2020 marks as the first halving of Bitcoin Cash. The network block rewards halved at block 630,000 indicating how the rewards given to BCH miners have been decreased to 6.5 from 12.5 BCH.

BCH is the first SHA256 branch to get halved this year. In the coming days, BTC [Bitcoin] and BCH SV [Bitcoin Cash Satoshi Vision] will also be halving their miner rewards.

What is halving about?

The Bitcoin ecosystem revolves around certain pre-defined rules. One of them is a finite supply of the currency. There are 21 million Bitcoins in the world and the last BItcoin is likely to be mined in the year 2130 after which the network will stop minting more. The limited amount of Bitcoins in circulation gives it the gold-like feature of being limited. 

Every 4 years, Bitcoin mining rewards get cut into half. This was coded in the blockchain by Satoshi Nakamoto from the beginning to make the miners receive 50% less BTC once in 210,000 blocks.

Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin which is why the same rule is implied to it. Except in BCH after 630,000 blocks it gets halved. 

Why is halving necessary?

To understand why halving is necessary it is first important to understand how mining works. Miners solve mathematical puzzles to compete with each other in publishing a new block of transactions to the public blockchain. In return for the computational power and efforts put in to validate the block, miners get a reward along with transaction fees.

Miners have their skin in the game, they spend big on equipment to mine and the electricity to power the hardware. The equipment costs get covered with initial returns and the electricity costs keep reoccurring which is why the rewards at a point have to be converted in fiat to pay for the mining expenses as well as to utilize it for their regular expenditures.

Miners are willing to spend money on those resources in exchange for the possibility of receiving a block reward. But this only works out well if miners earn profits by keeping the cost of production/resources lower than the rewards they receive.

With halving, miners get half of the reward they received earlier forcing loss-making miners to quit. Making the existing miners in the community opt for energy-efficient hardware that have high processing power with lower power consumption.

Gradually, this keeps the network healthy even though there are initial hashrate falls and price drops. 

After today, the BCH mining community will reap half the rewards they did until yesterday. As this is the first BCH halving it is difficult to conclude what’s next for the coin. 

 

Tron’s DeFi Strategy Revolves Around a New Token, Twitteratis Call it a Scam

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On 4th April, Justin Sun the Founder/CEO of Tron tweeted an update on Tron’s upcoming stable coin ecosystem. Previously know as DJET has now been branded to JUST [Short for Justin] with JST as its tokens and USDJ as the stable coin. 

As soon as the news went out of the rebranding and token name change along with the successful launch of the Mainnet, Twitteratis started exclaiming their views on the newly launched CDP [Colatralized Debt Position] Portal. 

What’s the new token about?

To give a bit of background, MakerDAO one of the leading DeFi ecosystems of the cryptospace works around CDP. Users can create CDPs and lock their crypto as collaterals. In return for the collateralized crypto, users get DAI [MakerDAO’s native token] up to the ratio of 2:3 of the locked-up value. The DAI is a debt given to CDP users which they can convert into their preferred asset or convert it into fiat using exchanges. The collateralized crypto stays untouchable through MakerDAO’s smart contracts and is released once the CDP user pays up the borrowed DAI. If the user fails to return the debt the collateral crypto is ceased.

Similarly, Tron came up with its own CDP ecosystem with JUST tokens and USDJ Stable coins. 

According to their official website, JUST CDP Portal is “ a one-stop service platform for managing CDP and USDJ….. Offering an entrance into decentralized finance”. 

Further, the website explains, 

“When a user adds collateral to their CDP their TRX is held in escrow inside a smart contract for which they are issued PTRX in return. Once staked, a users PTRX holdings can be viewed as a percentage share of the total pool of collateral assets. This model allows the JUST contracts to a dilute or inflate the size of the pool depending on how well users of the system respond to Liquidation sales, and how wisely voters have chosen to manage the Risk Parameters.

Pooled TRXer can be viewed as a derivative instrument that represents the total amount of Wrapped TRXer that has capitalized the system.”

[* No more official information about PTRX is provided]

Additionally, on 5th April Poloniex – the US-based crypto exchange announced its upcoming TRX powered IEO [Initial Exchange Offer] platform. Directing that crypto projects who are on a look-out to conduct ICOs can use Poloniex’s LaunchBase platform to issue tokens.

With all this, Twitteratis spammed Justin Sun announcements posts. 

MetalGrow ( decentralization) @MetalGrow

Replying to @justinsuntron

“Looks like another @justinsuntron scam!”

ByteDoc1 @bytedoc1

Replying to @justinsuntron

“$JST –> #JUST another token in a long line of tokens. Would have been nice if he would have tended to adding value to the tokens that came before this one. #JUST saying….”

anayelis Hernandez @ladiva0712

Replying to @justinsuntron

“Wait justin this is another token, isn’t tron already producing more then the cap.. why are more tokens needed.. that make it tron ,btt,just,wink. All under tron. Why are u doing it like this ?? Can u make a statement for the people that’s been with u from beginning”

Patulacci Marcel Officiel @PatulacciOff

Replying to @justinsuntron

“The 50th USD stablecoin. So useless. What about an EURO stablecoin with potentially 340 millions people concerned?”