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Green Flag, Red Flag: Tips to Evaluate a TRON ICO

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The simple saying ‘Better safe than sorry’ takes a lot of precedences these days when it comes to choosing an ICO to invest within the TRON ecosystem. We have witnessed an astronomical growth regarding transactions being handled by the TRON network, a lot of credit for that goes to the SRs and the projects running on TRON protocol.

In a short span of time, we have seen close to 1600+ tokens being launched using the TRC10 protocol which is also helping a lot in terms of enhancing the usage. Most of these tokens trade only using TRX pair, ICO purchase is also through TRX only.

All these are helping TRON eventually hold its ground in this bear market and also promises for a prosperous future as a lot of these projects gets into mainstream usage. TRON (TRX) has made the token creation process super simple and almost free with the cost of token creation being just 1024 TRX. This is helping a lot of projects which had an idea but lacked access to funds and resources to launch their projects.

Having said this, there is a flip side to it; low entry barriers are also allowing a lot of ‘scamsters’ get into the system. They are creating tokens with the intent to exit scam at some point of time and escape with the investor’s fund.

Lack of regulation in this domain makes it all the more difficult for you to recover your funds once lost. The objective of this article is to assist you with 10 pointers which will help you evaluate a project and make an informed decision. Our humble request to all of you reading this article is not to gamble/speculate when it comes to ICO investments.

Success takes time; hence legit projects will take time, but the ROI will be phenomenal. Becoming millionaire overnight is a myth, it takes a lot of patience, perseverance, and knowledge to sail through this roller-coaster ride and achieve your financial goals. So be smart and choose wisely.

In this article we use a simple strategy to evaluate a project – Green Flag means the project is good to invest, the Red flag means we need to avoid investing in it. So here are our 10 pointers to conduct an essential evaluation of a project:

Product

This is the heart of any business. GREEN flag goes to the project which has a working or planned product, a clear use-case, has plans to launch BETA versions. Also, you need to evaluate if using blockchain actually makes it viable and useful.

RED flag a project which has vague or undefined use-case or is too simple that every kid off the blocks is doing it. Simple tipping/meme tokens are classic examples of this where you need to carefully access the usability and how the project differentiates itself from other off the mill projects.

Few note-worthy projects which can be given green flag on this aspect are – IGG, CyberTron, TronWatchMarket, TronWeeklyJournal, SEED, WIN, BeatzCoin, GEMS, Book.

Team

This is again one of the most important aspects to access a project. A team which is not public has a higher probability of pulling off an exit scam. The blockchain is about transparency, and if the unit itself is not transparent, then it’s a big RED flag. So look out if the project has a team, who are the developers, advisors, marketers.

Does the team has public profiles visible on the portal, do they have previous business / ICO / blockchain experience. Is the project happy to post the photographs of the team on the official website? Give it a RED flag if you don’t find these basic information, give a GREEN flag if the results of your finding are satisfactory.

Few projects which score green here are – TRWJ (Tron Weekly now), IGG, KsumNole, SEED.

Token supply and pricing

This is an excellent indicator to access the intent of the project. This differentiates the professionals from the noobs. A big RED flag goes to ICOs which creates ridiculously high supply which runs into thousands of billions/trillions with an absurd ICO price on www.tronscan.org ranging from 0.1 to 50 TRX for each token.

If you do simple mathematics you will realize that we will run out of all the TRX available and still the ICO will not be 100% sold, which means the creator doesn’t even intend to achieve full ICO sale, a clear exit strategy. If you observe this RED flag then immediately drop the idea of investing in that project as high chances you are dealing with a scam or a noob and both are not good for your investments.

GREEN flag goes to projects which if 100% sold at the ICO price covers only a small percentage of TRX supply thus leaving enough space for its value to grow and give good ROI to early investors.

White paper and website

These are the first impression of the project and again are a big differentiator between professionals and new kids of the block. Give a GREEN flag to a project which has a detailed whitepaper and website which clearly explains the project, product, use case, roadmap, key benefits, token distribution allocation, etc.

A RED flag goes to projects which either do not have these ready or it’s just for namesake. A project should have this basic stuff ready before they venture out to garner funds from the public.

Social Media

In the digital space, social media is the strongest tool available to create a huge global customer base. A legit team will strongly invest a lot of time and energy to build up their social media presence.

Give a GREEN flag to the project which is active on most of the social media channels like Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, Medium, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, etc. A RED flag goes to projects which create it for namesake and do not actually use it to build the community or engage proactively.

Communication of the team

The communication by the community managers and teams are a good indicator of accessing the true intent of the top bosses. Check if the community managers are engaging with the community to build relationships with them and spread awareness about the project, developments, future plans or are they just trying to hard sell the ICO.

Also, transparency of the community managers goes a long way in establishing the trust for the project. Give a GREEN flag where the admins are real and transparent, their social media profiles are matching in different platforms (i.e. they are the same person in the telegram, twitter, facebook, linkedin, Instagram, etc.) and they are actively involved in spreading knowledge and awareness.

Give RED flag to the admins whose real identity you cannot access. Real people who believe into an idea/project and are entrusted with the task of promoting it will never be required to hide their identity.

Pre-mine and freeze

A legit ICO will have a clearly defined roadmap for token release and distribution. GREEN flag goes to projects which follow their roadmap and keep the un-utilized tokens frozen as defined.

RED flag for projects which put 100% of supply into circulation and trade on day one itself, high chances they just want to sell whatever they can before they pull the plug.

Market size and potential

Give a GREEN flag to the project which has identified a niche market and are leveraging blockchain to create a global customer base. Typically products which have a global use case, sizeable customers already spending money in that domain( which will shift to blockchain over a period of time) are good green flag indicators.

RED flag for the projects which hardly has any existing or future market because the use case is vague or non-practical.

Community

Communicating with the community can give you a lot of indications about the project. Give GREEN flag to a project where the community is loyal and knowledgeable; they vouch for the product and the team, discussions in the group is constructive and project-centric. A RED flag where the community is not aware of the project as high chances they were just bought or are bots.

Commitment

This parameter kicks in a little later but still helps in safeguarding your money from becoming ZERO. Give a GREEN flag to the team that values responsibilities and delivers on time – be it a product release, partnerships, merchant onboarding, events, commitments to investors, etc. Vice-a-versa for teams which frequently backs out from their own words.

Apart from these also be cautious about the fake/counterfeit tokens which almost look real to the legit tokens except for a small change in the alphabets. It is advisable to buy your tokens from legit exchanges / tronscan link shared by the project officials / from the official telegram channel of the project. You are venturing into risky domain when you enter private sale groups having low control over the fake tokens.

Very few things in the world are perfect, but we need to aspire towards perfection on a daily basis. So after evaluating a project on above parameters if a project scores 8-10 it could be considered safe, any score below five should definitely be skipped for the time being till the team proves it another way around.

Due diligence and a little time investment can go a long way in not only safeguarding your money but also to give you phenomenally high ROI in the long run. It’s just a hunt to avoid garbage and fill your bags with gold.

Hope all of you create massive wealth in years to come. Happy Investing!

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Transaction fees: Tron vs. Ethereum vs. POA

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The days in which Bitcoin was the world’s only blockchain are long gone. There are hundreds of digital assets right now, and each one is a different blockchain, even if some are not 100% independent than others (for instance, many coins are based on Ethereum’s ETH20 technology, some others on Tron’s TRC20).

So the panorama can be confusing because it takes quite a bit of technical knowledge to understand exactly how each blockchain differs from others (especially when it comes to the consensus protocols). But one question still lingers in every user’s mind: how much will my transactions cost? We’ll endeavor to explain to you exactly that in this article.

Transaction fees: Why do we need them?

A blockchain is comprised of lots of independent nodes working in tandem and reaching consensus according to each network’s protocol. Independence is critical here because it implies that there must be some kind of incentive for those who run and support a node. That incentive usually comes in the form of tokens which come, at least in some proportion, from user transaction fees.

So we need the fees because that’s how we support every blockchain’s infrastructure. And that’s not cheap if you realize that Bitcoin alone is burning more electricity that some countries in Europe.

But that’s not all. Fees are useful also because they prevent users from wasting a network’s resources. For example, it’s not a good idea for hackers to try and do a DoS attack if they have to pay for every single request. So fees keep the network secure and available for significant projects.

So fees are not just an arbitrary thing, They matter a great deal. Now that we’ve (hopefully) persuaded you that fees are important (even good for you), let’s find out in some detail what is the deal offered by three of the most essential blockchain networks.

Ethereum

Ethereum is the first and quintessential second-generation blockchain. That means it created the first smart contract platform using the Proof of Work consensus protocol in which miners run the most important nodes. There are no limitations on the number of miners that can join the network.

They all compete between themselves to solve a mathematical problem (a cryptographic collision in a hash function that will create the next block). The miner who solves it first gets a reward for creating the next block. That needs specialized hardware and lots of power. So miners need to buy hardware and pay for their electricity which is why the rewards must be significant.

In the Ethereum environment, a transaction’s cost equals Gas times the gas price.

Gas: Ethereum needs to know the amount of computer power and storage it must provide to save and complete the transaction. That’s called “Gas.” If your transaction is a simple exchange of tokens, it will be cheap, but if you’re interacting with smart contracts and de dApps, it will be different.

And it could be tricky because the gas amount is computed only after the transaction is done. If you should want to know beforehand how much each of your transactions will cost you will need to ask the dApp provider how much the price has been in the past for similar operations.

Gas price: that’s how much you pay for every unit of gas/computing power, and it depends on your transaction. It’s paid in the native token (ETH in this case). Then miners rank pending transactions by price for blockchain inclusion. Miners get a better deal by processing higher gas prices, so more expensive transactions are completed sooner. The price changes all the time, and if you don’t choose it correctly, your transaction can be left in the Ether (no pun intended) for days.

There’s no doubt that Ethereum is a bonafide decentralized blockchain. But its protocol lacks scalability, and it can be very expensive, or slow, or both, especially when the network is loaded which happens often because of the most trivial reasons, such as betting games.

POA Network

PAO uses Proof of Authority (PoA) as a consensus protocol, hence the name. Unlike Ethereum, the number of miners is limited. Each validator (block producer) builds a block each time. This makes this chain light, efficient, and quick.

Fees are computed in POA using the same formula as Ethereum’s: it’s gas times a fixed price.

Gas: It’s the same definition as with Ethereum.

The difference between POA and Ethereum has nothing to do with the gas definition. The thing is that POA does all the tricks a decentralized blockchain can do while keeping things simpler. The PoA consensus allows for lower gas prices and for a straightforward transaction system. It’s designed to allow horizontal scalability, but not necessarily high loads.

Tron

Yet another consensus protocol for yet another blockchain. In this case, it’s called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPos), and it’s at Tron‘s blockchain’s heart. A limited number of privileged users (known as Super Representatives and elected by the community in a worldwide voting process) are the ones who create the blocks, one at a time. This design has allowed Tron’s blockchain one of the world’s fastest, safest, cheapest, and more reliable.

There are two ingredients needed to calculate Tron’s fees. They’re called Bandwidth and Energy. You take both of them and multiply it times a fixed price.

Bandwidth: this is the piece of the network (so to speak) needed to execute and save your transaction. The price is fixed (almost negligible) for simple financial transactions, but it can vary for dApps and smart contracts. But unlike Ethereum and POA, it can be easily calculated in advance if you just know the size (in bytes) your transactions needs.

Tron’s network allows for a bit of free bandwidth for everybody, roughly equivalent to 15 financial transactions.

Energy: The network needs a certain amount of power to compute and execute your transaction. That’s called “Energy.” If you’re asking for a simple transaction, then the Energy amount you need is zero. But smart contracts and dApps do need a bit of energy (just as Gas in Ethereum), and different transactions cost different amounts.

It’s not as straightforward as with Bandwidth because the SR knows the energy price only after the transaction is completed so, again, you need to have some idea of how previous, similar transactions, cost so you can know how much you’ll need to pay.

Freezing: this is Tron’s extra ingredient. If you freeze some of your Tronix coins, that will get you a bit of free Bandwidth, Energy, and also the ability to vote for SR’s which are often willing to reward voters with free tokens. The more coins you freeze, the more free transactions you get. Freezings also make the token scarcer, so it helps to drive its price up, so it ends up helping users, hodlers (if Tron has any) and SRs.

Tron’s system could seem quite a bit more complicated than the previous two. And it is. But it’s also faster, cheaper, it ensures a number of free transactions for all users.

Even if you overdo things and have to pay for transactions, it’s way cheaper than Ethereum or POA, and it also rewards SRs. Last but not least. These rewards facilitate vertical scalability in the network (unlike POA which is horizontal, or Ethereum, which is basically non-existing).

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Beatzcoin- A New Digital Currency You Should Reckon With

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Satoshi Nakatomo founded the Bitcoin network 2009 kick-starting what has now become one of the biggest global financial revolutions in the area of financial transactions and transfer of assets. Close to a decade later, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is experiencing immense churn with various similar digital currencies being introduced.  The newest kid on the block is Beatzcoin, a digital token that utilizes blockchain technology and is traded on VibraVid, a multi-chain, decentralized platform. This article aims to strengthen the cognizance about Beatzcoin amongst blockchain enthusiasts and potential investors, and the overall blockchain community. Let’s delve into what this newest cryptocurrency has to offer.

What are VibraVid and Beatzcoin?             

It is the need of the hour today for businesses to take their service offerings and products on the mobile platform to cater to a growing consumer pool that needs everything to be accessible in the palm of their hands. From insurance purchases to movie bookings, every service is now packaged into a convenient application. Music is no different.

Beats coin

With thousands of applications, platforms and websites available, over 5,00,000 hours of music video content is uploaded daily from across the globe on this wonder that is the internet. Add technological advancements, better mobile data connectivity and superior streaming services to the mix, and we notice a steady shift from conventional music platforms to digital music. While this is a boon for the music industry at large, it certainly creates a difficult situation for emerging talent to gather resources to fund their content as well as be noticed in the online space among a herd of creators. Added pressure is also on the content creator/artist to shoulder the mantle of promotion and marketing, thus taking their focus away from pure content creation. Existing platforms also focus on marketing and revenue generation as their primary motives, failing to incentivize new content creators or users who give fresh content a chance. Here’s where VibraVid and Beatzcoin come in.

VibraVid is a platform that taps into this space, offering a free peer to peer desktop and mobile streaming application that enables viewers to view and listen to content in the form of videos and audios. Content creators can upload, store, market, lease and sell their content to the users of this app alongside activities such as crowdfunding and sell merchandise and event tickets.

Beatzcoin is a cryptocurrency which is the value of exchange on the VibraVid platform. This ecosystem created by Beatzcoin and VibraVid provides creators and users with a means of exchange to share and purchase content. Users and creators are bestowed with Beatzcoin which they can use to purchase tickets, content and merchandise as well as promote their own content. In such a setup, the content creator is incentivized for their efforts, while the user too gains from giving new and exciting content a listen. Such a system encourages talented artists to go out there and create fresh music, while also giving them a chance to generate a fair income based on how catchy their content is.

VibraVid aims to create 3,000,000,000 Beatzcoin which can be purchased/exchanged using Tron (TRX). For the uninitiated, Tron is a blockchain-based decentralised platform that aims to build a free digital entertainment system that allows easy sharing of content and provides a distributed storage technology. Tron attempts to bridge the gap between content creators and content consumers. Both VibraVid and Tron work on the same shared principles of secured content and providing creators a platform to showcase and leverage their talent. Tronscan.org and Beatzcoin.io will be the only two platforms on which Beatzcoin can be traded.

Now that we have understood the business model of this revolutionary application, let’s understand how exactly users can earn Beatzcoin on the VibraVid platform. The beauty of this application is that at every point a user and well as a creator has the chance to earn Beatzcoin which they can use for a wide plethora of activities on the platform. A user earns Beatzcoins by signing up on the app, participating in bounties, watching paid to view advertisements, completing daily weekly/challenges and much more. On the other hand, creators cash in when someone watches/listens to their content, allowing paid to view videos ads on their content, crowdfunding among other activities. VibraVid has effectively tapped into a gaping market gap that is certain to benefit and reward video creators, record producers, musicians, music enthusiasts and the entire industry at large. VibraVid & Beatzcoin certainly make for a fun experience for one and all!

How Secure is VibraVid?

VibraVid is conceptualised around a reward structure for accessing, watching and listening to content while also allowing the creator of the content to hold the licensing control and ownership rights. Leveraging the IPFS protocol, a file system that makes it possible to distribute high volumes of data with high efficiency, VibraVid ensures that data security and sanctity is maintained. The IPFS protocol supports fast bandwidth speed by splitting large volumes of data into logical chunks for easy transmission through a pre-existing network structure. In order to nullify any possible loophole in the IPFS system, VibraVid encodes its videos with an overlay layer, making sure that either a Beatzcoin wallet or a node is required to decode it. This comprehensive framework protects the content of the creator ensuring their rights and ownership of work is upheld.

The problem of pirated content is plaguing the entire global music industry. Due to some bogus and spam links, pornographic materials too find their way into legitimate platforms. Their problems are tackled by a comprehensive watch and control system that identifies and blacklists the hash or the code of such videos rendering them unwatchable.beats

The Future of Beatzcoin

The creators of this one of a kind music platform have done their best to fashion a platform to streamline creative content and give deserved recognition and monetary benefit to talented creators. However, they plan on leaving the future of VibraVid and Beatzcoin to be decided by market dynamics and sentiment. A small percentage of the value of the transaction will be rolled back into the VibraVid platform as an operational fee, in order to fund the functioning and operating costs of the platform.

The creators aim to see VibraVid as a go-to platform for all entertainment needs as well as a space where upcoming talented creators can showcase their work without feeling the pinch of limited resources of the hassle of dealing with middlemen. The enthusiasm and involvement of creators, as well as users of this platform, will largely shape the future trajectory of Beatzcoin as a digital currency and VibraVid as a successful platform.