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Cryptocurrencies

Private, Public and Consortium Blockchains

Bitcoin brought with it blockchain technology – the technology that allows digital information to be distributed but not edited or copied. After it became a hit with Bitcoin, eager innovators from all over the world have made it their mission to replicate it in nearly every conceivable industry. From finance to healthcare to supply chains, industries are experimenting with blockchain to improve efficiency, transparency, and accountability in their systems.

Bitcoin brought with it blockchain technology – the technology that allows digital information to be distributed but not edited or copied. After it became a hit with Bitcoin, eager innovators from all over the world have made it their mission to replicate it in nearly every conceivable industry. From finance to healthcare to supply chains, industries are experimenting with blockchain to improve efficiency, transparency, and accountability in their systems.

Bitcoin brought with it blockchain technology – the technology that allows digital information to be distributed but not edited or copied. After it became a hit with Bitcoin, eager innovators from all over the world have made it their mission to replicate it in nearly every conceivable industry. From finance to healthcare to supply chains, industries are experimenting with blockchain to improve efficiency, transparency, and accountability in their systems.

What is Blockchain? 

A blockchain is a database whose entries cannot be deleted or edited but only distributed. It’s a time-stamped series of transactions that are immutable and whose data is managed by a network of computers.

Cryptocurrency, a form of digital money that prevents double-spending, is so far the dominant application of blockchain. Blockchain as a concept had been floated around the computer science space from as early as 1991, but only materialized 18 years later when Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, employed it as the underlying technology of Bitcoin. 

Now, as its appeal has increased in recent years, it has been borrowed for use in all kinds of digital information.

Today, there are three kinds of blockchains: private, public, and consortium chains. This article sets to exploring each of these. Before that, let’s point out three characteristics all three share. 

☑️ An append-only ledger – this means that on a blockchain, you can’t modify or alter what’s already recorded – you can only add to the last block. This procedure greatly reduces the chances of fraud.

☑️ A network of peers – all network participants (called nodes) hold a copy of the database. This setup promotes fairness and autonomy. 

☑️ A consensus mechanism – a blockchain network must have a mechanism through which nodes can agree upon the authenticity of a transaction. This feature promotes a democratic – everyone-has-a-say – process.

What is a Public Blockchain?

A public blockchain is an open-source blockchain. That means it’s open to the public. Anyone and everyone of every age, nationality, or social status is welcome to join the network, have a say, and take part in core activities. Public blockchains are also called ‘permissionless’ since you don’t need permission from anyone to interact with the protocol.

The idea behind public blockchains is self-governance and autonomy. No one dictates the rules, and anyone can join and leave as they wish. As well, all transactions that take place on a public blockchain are entirely open for anyone to see.

Public blockchains are ‘censorship-resistant’ in that they are run by users all over the world, making it hard for any authority or government to control or shut them down.

Also, public blockchains have a token that incentivizes various participants of the network to keep the network active.

The Good

Public blockchains are highly secure, courtesy of being run by computers from all over the world.

They ensure privacy for users in that you don’t leave your personally-identifying details on the chain, but rather transaction information like wallet number, time, and amount.

Transactions are peer-to-peer, meaning users are in complete control of their money with no one capable of freezing their funds

The Bad

Public blockchains like Bitcoin consume a lot of energy, which is expensive and bad for the environment

The majority of public blockchains are pseudonymous, meaning users do not have absolute and inviolable privacy or anonymity.

Some users of the network might have malicious intent, including hacking, stealing of tokens, or network clogging.

Public Blockchain Use Case

Bitcoin is the first-ever and the most well-known application of a public blockchain. 

Bitcoin transactions can be examined by anyone on the Blockchain Explorer. Other public blockchains are Ethereum, Litecoin, ZCash, Monero, Dash, and so on.

What is a Private Blockchain?

A private blockchain is one in which you need authentic and verified credentials to gain access. A private blockchain differs from a public one in that you need permission, depending on your position in the system’s hierarchy, to contribute and maintain the network. People at the top of the hierarchy or those with express access can also override processes as they deem necessary.

A private blockchain makes sense in a business context where managers want to improve efficiency but don’t want to put company data on the public blockchain. As well, a business has the right to amp up privacy restrictions any time they deem fit.

In a private blockchain, there’s the question of who enters entries, who can see updated transactions, who can begin a process, and so on.

The Good

Since only specific users can control the network, there’s no waiting times or periods of high demand which would slow down the network.

Entities that use private blockchains can keep sensitive data from the public while also realizing improved levels of efficiency.

Private blockchains do not have to provide any incentives to participants; neither do they consume massive amounts of energy. 

There is no possibility of downtimes arising from a spike in demand.

The Bad

Without support from computer users all over the world, a private blockchain is prone to stunted growth. It can also be slow to scale up and meet changing customer needs. 

Since they are centralized, public blockchains are susceptible to human error, manipulation, abuse, and other unfair dealings.

Use Case of a Private Blockchain

The best use case of a private blockchain is Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain that businesses can deploy on their platform. The blockchain is also available in a plug and play mode, allowing businesses to set it up anytime and plug off when they don’t need to use it.

Walmart is a well-known user of Hyperledger Fabric. The retail giant can now trace the origin of more than 25 food products, from farm to store, to ensure quality levels and food safety.

What is a Consortium Blockchain?

The consortium blockchain is a type of blockchain that combines elements of both public and private blockchains. This is the distinction between a consortium blockchain and either of the two other types:  in a public blockchain, anyone can contribute to the network by inputting entries, validating blocks, etc. In a private blockchain, only a few entities have access to the chain and have the authority to initiate processes, enter entries, and so on. On a consortium blockchain, it’s a handful of equally powerful participants that can access the chain.

After that distinction, the rules of the system are not cast in stone. Some selected individuals may be the only ones who can view the chain, or it can be everyone in the consortium. As long as decisions are arrived at by consensus, they can be rolled out to the satisfaction of all parties.

Consortium blockchains rely significantly on the integrity of the validators. Provided a certain threshold of the validators can act with integrity, the network will work without issue.

Consortium blockchains make sense in the context where multiple organizations operate in the same industry and see it fit to collaborate on certain aspects of their business. This way, they can save on costs and function better individually and collectively. An organization would be motivated to join such a consortium courtesy of information and insights into the industry that they’d gain from other industry players. Sometimes the organizations involved can be termed “frenemies” since they are working together but also competing against each other.

Use Cases of Consortium Blockchains

There are currently many consortium blockchains that exist all over the world. Let’s briefly look at a few below:

☑️BankChain, a platform for banks whose goal is to explore, build, and implement blockchain software. Members of the BankChain community include Deutsche Bank, Bank of Baroda, Lulu Exchange, Kotak Bank, etc. 

☑️B3i, a community of insurers and reinsurers that attempts to improve industry efficiency through blockchain. Members include Liberty Mutual, Swiss Re, SBI Group, Tokio Marine, Allianz, and so on.

☑️Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a consortium that aims to promote Enterprise Ethereum, an organization that delivers both public and private Ethereum blockchain for businesses.

Final Words

Blockchain has evolved a lot from the days when it was associated with Bitcoin only. It’s definitely exciting to see it as the new and hot technology that industries of all types are scrambling to get a piece of. And understandably so, because it embodies features that are a first, and which have the potential to revolutionize not just how we do business but also society itself. 

Companies need to choose what type of blockchain they want to get involved with, depending on their end goal and overall objective. Meanwhile, blockchain enthusiasts will be watching for new developments in this thrilling space.

Categories
Crypto Videos

Hedging Your Cryptocurrency Portfolio Part 3 – The Best Methods Explained

https://youtu.be/K5uCj5rSQ7M

https://youtu.be/K5uCj5rSQ7M

Hedging your cryptocurrency portfolio – part 3/4

 

Options
Options are a fairly new and limited concept in the cryptocurrency space. The only exchanges that actually offer it are Deribit and Bitmex.
Hedging using options can be pretty complicated. There are multiple ways you can build exactly what you want. We will show one of the most straightforward ways you can hedge out downside risk.


Why You Would Use This Method

One of the main benefits of hedging by using options is the difference in the payout. Hedging by buying put options can turn your existing options into a call option payout (which have limited downside with unlimited upside). The caveat to the method is that options, especially in the cryptocurrency market, are quite expensive.

Another great thing is that the margin does not need to be monitored as we are purchasing options to construct the hedge. These pros make it a fairly good method for investors that:
Are looking to hedge their positions but cannot, or don’t want to monitor their margin requirements Want the downside protection while still maintaining the potential upside gains.

How to Construct it

You will need:
An account with Deribit (they are the only exchange that offers crypto options)
The steps to constructing this method are similar to using futures:
Based on the current price of Bitcoin and your expected hedging time frame, check for the closest in the money (ITM) put option.
As an example, if BTC is at 6432 and you would like to hold it until the end of the quarter, look for the 6500 put option pricing for the end of the current quarter.
Check the current price of your chosen ITM put option and calculate how much funds you would need to deposit so you could make a 1:1 coverage of your BTC holdings.
Deposit the predetermined funds into the exchange.
Purchase the put option and simply hold it until expiration.

Summary

Hedging with options can be quite a complex task. However, this also means that it can be better tailored to your needs. If you want to use options to hedge and you want to hedge frequently, learning all there is about options is certainly a no-brainer.
Options hedging, as any type of hedging, has its Pros and Cons:


Check out our final part of the Hedging your crypto portfolio, where we will talk about hedging by using Perpetual Swaps.

Categories
Crypto Videos

Hedging Your Cryptocurrency Portfolio Part 2 – The Best Methods Explained

https://youtu.be/EjzGIQ47IZA

https://youtu.be/EjzGIQ47IZA

Hedging your cryptocurrency portfolio – part 2/4


Futures

Futures represent financial contracts that obligate the buyer to purchase a certain asset (or the seller to sell a certain asset) at a predetermined future date and a predetermined price.
Just like in traditional finance, cryptocurrencies have futures contracts that you can use to hedge out your position. Crypto market comes with two types of futures:
Futures that trade in USD and settle in USD, such as CME Bitcoin Futures and CBOE Bitcoin

Futures
Inverse Futures that trade in USD pricing, but settle in BTC, such as Bitmex Quarterly Contract Futures
The profit and loss calculations work slightly differently for these two methods. However, they can both come to the same result.
An example of the investment is (if you wish to hedge your position fully):

Calculation explained:
As Bitmex offers only BTCUSD and ETHBTC futures, we need to convert ETH to BTC first. As the contracts are denominated in ETH, we will:
Short 10 ETHBTC futures
Factor this into our BTCUSD hedge. The total short of the BTCUSD position = $6,500 x 10 + $200 x 10 = $6,700
By using this method, your portfolio will be fully hedged (as long as you make sure to maintain your hedge).

Why Would You Use This?

Futures contracts are a fairly cost-efficient way of hedging out your risk. This is because:
You have a lower capital requirement due to the leverage you can use.
You can profit from the hedge over time if the market goes in your favor.
You know the full cost of your hedge the moment you place the hedge on, unlike some other methods of hedging.
How You Construct The Hedge
In order to start hedging by utilizing futures, you will need:

An account with a crypto futures exchange.
To construct this hedged portfolio:
Choose which future contract you will use. Your decision should depend on which currency you wish to settle in and fund the exchange.
If you are settling in USD, you can sell some crypto to fund the account. However, keep in mind that withdrawals and deposits could take some time to process.
Based upon your holdings and what is available on the exchange, you need to calculate which combination of futures contracts you need as well as how many contracts.
Monitor your short positions profit and loss so that if you are getting close to your margin call, you will need to deposit more USD or cryptocurrency into the exchange to maintain your short position.

Depositing into the exchanges can take some time, and since crypto markets are very volatile, make sure to do everything in time.
Close out the short position when you think there is no reason to hedge anymore.

Summary


Hedging by using futures is best suited for cryptocurrency investors that carry the standard coins and are not overly diversified into altcoins. Hedging by using futures is very efficient but requires knowledge of the market as well as futures themselves.

Categories
Crypto Guides

What Are IEOs & How Are They Better Than ICOs?

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

In our previous guide, we learned about what an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is all about. We also discussed that 2017-18 was the golden era of ICOs, where some of the biggest ever ICOs like EOS, Telegram, and Dragon Coin happened. But what happened after that? ICOs took a hard hit after the Chinese government banned them. Also, there was a lot of negativity in this space after many large ICOs turned out to be scams. So it has been challenging for the Crypto startups to raise funds for their companies ever since the downfall of ICOs. This necessity resulted in the invention of a fantastic solution – Initial Exchange Offering (IEO)

Understanding IEO

In an IEO, any crypto company willing to raise funds for their project will approach a credible cryptocurrency exchange. The crypto tokens sales of that particular company will happen on that exchange, and the companies will have to pay a certain amount of fee and a percentage of tokens that got sold during an IEO. The exchange here is acting as a platform for the companies to sell their tokens.

So basically, Initial Exchange Offering works just like how Initial Coin Offering works without the decentralization part. That means, there is Smart Contract functionality in this process. All the transactions are centralized as they are authorized by the exchange in which the tokens are being sold. This is a win-win situation where the crypto companies can have a smooth fundraising process, and the exchanges can make profits by listing new crypto tokens in their platform.

Working of an IEO

In an ICO, people who are interested in purchasing tokens must send their funds to a given smart contract. But since IEO is a centralized process, interested participants must create an account with the exchange that is undertaking an IEO and complete their respective KYC procedures. Then they must deposit their funds in the exchange wallet and purchase the newly issued tokens using those funds. Most of the deposits are accepted in cryptocurrency only.

Top IEOs Till Now

Unless you are absolutely new to the crypto world, you must have heard about the Binance exchange. This exchange is one of the first ones to start the IEO revolution by designing a platform known as Binance Launchpad. The first successful IEO was of BitTorrent, a popular torrent service provider, and it was launched on the Binance Launchpad. BTT (BitTorrent Token) sales created a record in the world of IEOs by raising more than seven million dollars in a mere fifteen minutes. This company was backed by TRON, so this success isn’t a surprise.

If not for IEOs, it would be impossible for a new crypto startup to raise this amount of funds in hours or minutes. One more notable success story of an IEO is also from the Binance Launchpad only. A crypto company known as Fetch has raised about six million dollars and met the target in less than half a minute. After seeing the massive success of Binance Launchpad, many other exchanges have shown keen interest in this space. Let’s see what those exchanges are in the below section.

Top Exchanges That Embrace IEOs

As discussed, it is a potential business for any exchange for conducting IEOs using their platform. So many exchanges have shown great interest in the recent past to conduct IEOs and increase their visibility as well. Some of the top exchanges include Binance (Binance Launchpad), BitMax (BitMax Launchpad), Bittrex (Bittrex Int. IEO), KuCoin (KuCoin Spotlight) and Huobi (Huobi Prime).

IEOs have many pros over ICOs in terms of legality, security, and ease of access. That’s about IEOs; in our upcoming article, let’s discuss another fundraising method known as STO.

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 27 – “Craig Wright is a disgrace”; $150 million worth of BTC positions liquidated

The crypto market dropped severely as bear pressure continued throughout the day. Bitcoin is currently trading for $793, which represents a 4.45% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 5.76% on the day, while XRP lost 3.07%.

The crypto market dropped severely as bear pressure continued throughout the day. Bitcoin is currently trading for $793, which represents a 4.45% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 5.76% on the day, while XRP lost 3.07%.

The crypto market dropped severely as bear pressure continued throughout the day. Bitcoin is currently trading for $793, which represents a 4.45% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 5.76% on the day, while XRP lost 3.07%.

Aion took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 17.23%. On the other side, Swipe lost 16.79% on the day, making it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance remained in the same place in the past 24 hours. Its value is now 64.08%, which represents a 0.03 difference to the downside when compared to the value from when we last reported.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization a lot of its value over the past 24 hours. It is currently valued at $250.01 billion, which represents a decrease of $11.61 billion when its value is compared to the value it had yesterday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao recently tweeted about Craig Wright, the Bitcoin SV (BSV) founder. He made it clear that he did not trust the self-proclaimed Bitcoin (BTC) creator, and called him a fraud.

Zhao said that Wright is not only hurting his own reputation, but rather the reputation of the cryptocurrency industry as a whole. “He claims to be the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, which is a lie. He hurts the credibility of Bitcoin and is a disgrace to our entire industry.”

Honorable mention

Bitcoin 

According to the data provided by the analytics website Skew, over $150 million worth of Bitcoin got liquidated on the trading exchange BitMEX on Feb 26. This is the biggest liquidation in 2020.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin spent the past 24 hours spiraling down below $9,000. The largest cryptocurrency dropped in price fast and decisively as the bear pressure was high and many longs liquidated. However, ever since the bounce off of the $8,650 support, Bitcoin seems to have been going up slightly.


Bitcoin’s volume was increased during the price drop, during its normal or slightly lower than that at the time of writing. It’s RSI level is currently in the oversold territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $8,825                                           1: $8,650

2: $9,115                                           2: $$8,535

3: $9,250                                            3: $8,250

Ethereum

Ethereum’s price took a dive, just like Bitcoin’s price did. Its price broke many support levels along the way, but the $217.7 one held up quite strong and managed to bounce ETH’s price back up. Ethereum looks like it’s gaining some value now, as it managed to even pass the next resistance level, which is standing at $225.5.


Ethereum’s volume is elevated, while its RSI level has just recently left the oversold territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $240                                                1: $225.5

2: $251.3                                            2: $217.7  

3: $259.5                                             3: $198

Ripple

When Bitcoin drops in price, it is common that Ethereum falls a bit more in price, while XRP does either better than Bitcoin or worse than almost every other coin in the industry. This time, XRP did better than both Bitcoin and Ethereum price-wise as it did not drop as much over the past 24 hours. The downwards moving trend seems to have stopped at the $0.227 and XRP turned slightly bullish from there as its price started to increase. The move was strong enough to even break the $0.235 resistance, which is where XRP is currently at.


XRP’s volume is elevated, while its RSI level is just above the oversold territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.2454                                          1: $0.235

2: $0.266                                            2: $0.227

3: $0.285                                             3: $0.221

Categories
Crypto Guides

What Is An ICO and What Were The Biggest ICOs Ever?

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

We have discussed many things cryptocurrencies in our recent guides, which talk about their evolution, properties, pros & cons, etc. We also learned a lot about Bitcoin and some of the other major altcoins. As of Feb 2020, more than five thousand cryptos are prevailing in the market. Have you ever wondered how these cryptos come into existence? The answer to this question is ICO. To understand what ICO, AKA, Initial Coin Offering

Irrespective of its size, every company needs sufficient funds to bring an idea to a reality. In the case of conventional companies, there is a concept known as IPO, which translates to Initial Public Offering. Here, a company would go public after they establish their brand name in the market. ‘Going public’ essentially means selling a part of their company to raise more funds and expand its business across the markets to gain more profits.

What Is An ICO?

Like how IPO is for traditional companies, ICO is for the companies who are willing to raise funds to build a cryptocurrency. There might be various agendas for crypto companies, which we will be discussing in the later parts of this article. But not every random crypto company can have an ICO and raise funds. Companies must make their whitepaper public that has all the technicalities of the coin they are going to launch. They must also mention the amount of money they are willing to raise through this ICO.  Along with this, the complete business plan and the acceptable Fiat or Cryptos should also be clearly mentioned.

Once they release the duration of the ICO, interested people can go through the whitepaper of that company and understand the problem they are willing to solve. If that is making sense, and all the other technicalities interest them, they can participate in the ICO by purchasing tokens of that company. Most of the companies accept both Bitcoin and Ethereum to purchase their tokens. The ultimate goal here is to bet on a company that has enormous growth potential in the cryptocurrency space. If that happens, the money they have invested here can have exponential growth and yield huge profits in the future.

If the funds that are raised meets the goal set by the company, the ICO can be considered to be successful. The companies can use these funds and bring their whitepaper to an actual cryptocurrency. But, if the funds raised don’t meet the goal, we can say that the ICO is a failed attempt, and the collected funds will be returned to the investors. Returning the collected funds is a seamless process because all of these transactions are executed through Smart Contracts. So the entire process of an ICO is decentralized and is not regulated by any central authority.

Notable ICO Success Stories

In the year 2013, the first-ever ICO took place where Mastercoin raised around 500k worth of Bitcoin. Then, the ICO of Ethereum took place, which changed the face of the crypto world forever. Without this particular ICO, the crypto world wouldn’t have been the way we are seeing it today. This record-breaking ICO took place in 2014, where the company has raised $18 million worth of funds. This ICO’s massive success enabled the amazing Ethereum platform to transform from an idea on a paper to reality.

Once the Ethereum platform was live with the revolutionary smart contract feature, ICO token sales have been extremely simplified. This resulted in the formation of some of the biggest ICOs to date. One such ICO which is conducted on the Ethereum platform is DAO. If you are a crypto enthusiast, you must have heard about this crypto. DAO has raised about $150 million worth of Ether in just four weeks.

Some of the biggest ICOs we have ever witnessed include EOS ($4 Billion), Telegram ($1.7 Billion), Dragon Coin ($320 Million) & Huobi ($320 Million). Most of the biggest ICOs like the ones mentioned above, happened in 2017-18. This is considered as a golden age of ICOs. The number of ICOs has reduced significantly, and there could be many reasons for that. Some of them include the fall of the crypto market, regulations from the US Securities Exchange Commission, frauds and scams occurred, etc.

Bottom Line

That’s about ICOs and some of the biggest ICOs ever to take place. We must be extremely cautious while participating in an ICO. Getting to know the founders well, analyzing the whitepaper, understanding the feasibility of the project, etc. is crucial before making your investments. Market experts believe that the ICOs are almost dead, but there are a few promising ICOs that are going to take place in 2020, and most of them can be found here. In the upcoming articles, let’s understand what IEOs and STOs are and how different are from ICOs. Cheers!  

Categories
Crypto Videos

Hedging Your Cryptocurrency Portfolio Part 1 – The Best Methods Explained

https://youtu.be/LDJ0E8i3JDQ

https://youtu.be/LDJ0E8i3JDQ

Hedging your cryptocurrency portfolio – part 1/4

If you are looking for ways to hedge out your crypto investment exposure, this guide will cover four different methods that you can use:

Short Selling
Futures
Perpetual Swaps
Options

Selling vs. Hedging

The first question that should be asked is, why is there a need to hedge when you can just sell. This point will be covered in each hedge method section individually to avoid any misunderstandings.

Short Selling

This is the most straightforward method of hedging out your investments. All you need to do is to short sell the cryptocurrencies so that your portfolio will look like shown on the picture (assuming you want to hedge your exposure fully).

Why Would You Use This?

Long-term investors say that you are better off just selling your cryptos as the cost of short selling is higher for the amount of margin funding cost. However, hedging is good for reducing risk in the short-term.
There are several reasons why hedging crypto in the short term is better than selling:
Once you sell your cryptocurrencies on the exchange, the proceeds of the sale remain on the exchange until withdrawal (which isn’t always that easy). This makes your funds subject to default risk. Short selling requires you to have fewer funds on the exchange (which is not the best to store your cryptos on). If your hedge period is short, the process of selling, withdrawing, and then depositing and buying back could be too slow.

How To Construct This

For this method, you are required to have:
An account with any exchange that provides the option to short sell (Optional) USD for maintaining margin in your account
We will be using BTC as an example of constructing a short-sell hedge:

1. Deposit your USD into the exchange that provides the option to short sell. If you do not have any USD available, you can deposit some cryptocurrency and sell a fraction of it
2. The amount of USD that should be on the account will depend on the margin requirements of the exchange
3. Put on a short position on the cryptocurrency that you want to hedge against at a 1:1 ratio. As an example, hedging 10 BTC at a 1:1 ratio will require a short position of 10 BTC
4. Monitor your short positions to avoid reaching the margin call.
6. Close out your short position when you decide to close out your hedge.
Summary
Short selling as a hedge method is best suited for investors that are already diversified, and that want to hedge as selling parts of their portfolio would take too long.
There are quite a few pros as well as cons to using short selling for hedging. This table shows some of them:


Check out the next part of the Hedging your cryptocurrency portfolio, where we will talk about using futures as a hedge.

Categories
Cryptocurrencies

Decred Review: Is It the Ideal Cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency represents freedom of finance. Decentralized, censorship-resistant, and peer-to-peer are some of the words that we ascribe to it. But whether the vast majority of cryptocurrencies meet these criteria is a grey area.

Cryptocurrency represents freedom of finance. Decentralized, censorship-resistant, and peer-to-peer are some of the words that we ascribe to it. But whether the vast majority of cryptocurrencies meet these criteria is a grey area.

Cryptocurrency represents freedom of finance. Decentralized, censorship-resistant, and peer-to-peer are some of the words that we ascribe to it. But whether the vast majority of cryptocurrencies meet these criteria is a grey area.

Decred is a cryptocurrency launched in February 2016 that attempts to live up to these ideals. Its team of founding developers comprises of former developers of the notable btcsuite, a version of Bitcoin programmed in the Go language.

In this article, we’ll cover the exciting highlights of the Decred project and leave you to decide whether it’s the optimal currency or not. 

The Principles of Decred

Decred endeavors to live by these principles:

☑️ Free and Open Software – All software developed as part of Decred shall be free and open software

☑️ Free Speech and Consideration – Every member has the right to communicate opinions and ideas without fear of censorship, as long as it’s based on fact and reason. 

☑️ Multi-Stakeholder Inclusivity – A diverse set of views and users shall be represented and encouraged.

☑️ Incremental Privacy and Security – Privacy and security are priorities, and they shall be treated as such, and shall be incrementally implemented and on a continuing basis, both proactively and in direct response to attacks.

☑️ Fixed Finite Supply – Issuance of coins is finite, and the total issuance shall not exceed 20, 999,999.99800912 DCR, with a block subsidy that adjusts every 21.33 days by a reducing factor of 100/101.

☑️ Universal Fungibility – Universal fungibility is central to Decred as a store of value, and any attacks against it shall be met with countermeasures.

Breaking down Decred

Decred has a maximum supply of 21 million. The project never held an ICO, but an airdrop of 282.64 DCR was awarded to 2972 selected participants during the launch. Its all-time high was $99.74 on April 25, 2018, and its all-time low at $0. 394796 on December 28, 2016.

As of February 21 21, 2020, the price of Decred is $20.53 at a market rank of #37. Its 24-hour volume is $28, 260, 170, with a circulating supply of 10, 786, 831.

Each time DCR is mined, 60% is awarded to the PoW miner, 30% to PoS voters, and 10% held by Decred for future development.

How to Get Involved With Decred

Decred designates three ways through which you can interact with the platform:

The Wallet – Through the wallet, you can send and receive funds as well as take part in PoS voting.

Proof-of-Work Mining – You can use your computing power to validate transactions on the network and generate new tokens.

Proof-of-Stake Mining – Through ownership OF Decred tokens, you can vote on network development issues and validate transactions. 

All you need to send or receive Decred tokens is an address that you can easily generate from any Decred wallet. Once you own Decred, you’re eligible to join a staking pool and participate in PoS voting and earn rewards while at it.

What Problems Does Decred Intend to Solve?

Decred developers are huge blockchain and Bitcoin fans. However, they identified problems with how Bitcoin operates. As Bitcoin’s popularity has surged, the decision-making process seems to get more centralized by the day. This is evidenced by, for instance, the concentrated power in the hands of powerful mining companies.

In addition, almost any major upgrades to the Bitcoin software have to take place via a hard fork. This is what happened in 2017 when one section of the community proposed the SegWit2x hard fork on the chain. The two opposing sides got involved in hostile debates, peppered with name-calling and threats. The hard fork was finally called off, but not before leaving sharp divides in the Bitcoin community.

According to Decred, such divisions and the power that a particular section of the community might have over the cryptocurrency is counterproductive to the ideals, spirit, and the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

We’ve all seen what happens when two opposing sides do not arrive at a consensus. Factions can decide at any time to create a hard fork off the open-source Bitcoin code. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision, and Bitcoin Diamond are all offshoots of the original Bitcoin blockchain.

The Problem with Hard Forks

Forking is never the ideal outcome for cryptocurrency. Let’s see below why:

Repeated hard forks are bad for investor sentiment. After the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, Bitcoin prices took a tumble.

Hard forks fracture the Bitcoin community. The flared up tensions, and hard-line stances do no good for the community and the cryptocurrency sphere as a whole.

New hard forks are susceptible to attacks. So far, the biggest public blockchain to succumb to a 51% attack is, you guessed it, a hard fork. This blockchain is Bitcoin gold, and the attack happened in May 2018. The attacker made away with roughly 388,000 BTG worth $17.8 million then.

Hard forking undercuts the economic aspect of cryptocurrencies. For instance, the Bitcoin hard forks are confusing to users and undermine Bitcoin’s principle of a capped supply.

Decred presents a vision and cryptocurrency that’s free of hard forks, especially ones that fracture the community. While a hard fork is possible on Decred, its voting protocol is designed so that users can democratically vote on changes before activation.

Let’s look at the various mechanisms that Decred employ that will help it realize fair, smooth, and efficient governance.

Decred’s Hybrid PoS and PoW System

Decred’s voting system utilizes a hybrid of the two best-known consensus mechanisms: proof of work and proof of stake. 

These are the basics of how these two interact:

  • Miners mine for a block using PoW
  • Five token holders are randomly chosen to verify the block
  • If three of these validators confirm the validity of the block, it is recorded on the blockchain
  • 60% of the block rewards go to the miners, 30% to the validators, and 10% to the Decred project for future development.

With PoS, anyone who holds Decred tokens can participate in the staking system in this way:

  • DCR holders can purchase tickets with their tokens. The tickets give them pass to be part of the system
  • Only 20 tickets can go to any one block at any time. You may have to wait to get mined, but if you wish to get mined faster, you’ll need to pay some fees.
  • Once mined, your ticket is “immature” and will be held outside the random draw pool until 256 blocks have been mined, which is in approximately 20 hours.
  • After your ticket enters the draw pool, you will have to hold out for your chance to be chosen as one of the five validators that are randomly picked to verify the block
  • Your ticket has a 50% chance of being selected within 28 days and a 99.5% chance of being selected before it expires (after around four months).
  • Once your ticket’s chosen, you’ll help validate a block and be rewarded with a price for the ticket and also a staking reward.

The Decred system is also fair in that validators can participate in staking pools. As such, if a validator can’t make it to be part of the validation process, they can simply have their pool validate a block on their behalf.  

So far, you can see that Decred gives the power of participation to both users and miners. Unlike the Bitcoin system, miners do not possess disproportionate power over the network. If, for instance, a miner decides to mine a malicious block i.e., a transaction unrelated to the chain, validators can simply decline to verify the block. As you know already, PoW takes a lot of computational power, and for that, miners have very little incentive to do something that won’t pass with the validators.

How Safe Is the PoW/PoS Hybrid?

Just HOW safe is the PoW/PoS hybrid mechanism? A crypto analyst named Zubair Zia made it his mission to test the security of Decred’s chain vs. Bitcoin’s or a PoW/PoS model vs. a pure PoW model. He wanted to see which chain would more easily succumb to a 51% attack.

He used BITMAIN’s Antminer s9i’s, which has a rate of 14 tera-hashes per second. His calculations demonstrated that it was 22 times as expensive to hit Decred as compared to Bitcoin as of June 2, 2018.

In short, the hybrid system is 22 times more secure than a purely PoW system.

Lightning Network for Transactions

Decred has also implemented the Lightning Network.  The Lightning Network (LN) is an off-chain technology that has been explored by multiple cryptocurrencies to improve scalability. LN helps to settle payments outside of the blockchain so as to reduce traffic and backlog on the main chain.

LN works by having two users set up a payment channel on the network and depositing an equal amount of funds. Any time one user wishes to transact, they simply send a promissory note to the other user indicating a change of the total sum in the shared channel.

Since transactions happen off the chain, users also pay fewer fees since there’s no queue. Transactions are also instant, and there’s even added privacy thanks to a Tor-like routing algorithm for transactions. 

Decred’s Politeia

Thanks to a decision-making system called Politeia, Decred has managed to achieve decentralization more than any other existing cryptocurrency project.

Politeia is an ancient Greek word employed in Greek political writings, especially that of Plato and Aristotle. The term has many senses, from meaning “rights of citizens” to “form of government.”

Decred’s Politeia is designed to be the ultimate form of self-governance and community autonomy over a cryptocurrency project. Users can vote to accept or reject proposals, including budgets, software upgrades, marketing plans, constitutional amendments, and so on. When launching the system, project lead Jake Yocom-Piatt noted: “The direction of Decred now lies with the collective intelligence and creativity of its stakeholders.

We look forward to the exciting projects our community will propose.”

Where to Buy and Store DCR

You can purchase DCR from several exchanges, including Binance, Bittrex, Coinswitch, Changelly, Kucoin, Huobi, and so on by trading Bitcoin for it.

As for storage, the best wallet so far is the Decrediton wallet that’s available for Mac, Linux, Windows, and so on.

Great third party options also include Exodus, Coinomi, Atomic, Ledger Nano, etc.

Final Words

Decred has undoubtedly broken the mold, especially with its first of the kind governance system. Even though not as well-known as of yet, it’s one that has modeled cryptocurrency ideals better than perhaps the whole cryptocurrency pool right now.

The team behind it is also very well-regarded in the blockchain and crypto space, which is just the icing on the cake. With such a sound philosophy and a fantastic team, Decred is poised for success. But this will depend on the community. One can only hope it will mobilize for better and more exciting features for the platform before newer projects arrive and overtake the platform. 

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic

The Two ‘Flash Loan’ Attacks That Shook DeFi

Two attacks took the DeFi world by storm recently in what is the first DeFi major security incident. bZx, a decentralized finance protocol on Ethereum’s blockchain, endured two separate attacks after unknown persons manipulated “flash loans” and managed to drain nearly hundreds of thousands of Ether.

Two attacks took the DeFi world by storm recently in what is the first DeFi major security incident. bZx, a decentralized finance protocol on Ethereum’s blockchain, endured two separate attacks after unknown persons manipulated “flash loans” and managed to drain nearly hundreds of thousands of Ether.

Two attacks took the DeFi world by storm recently in what is the first DeFi major security incident. bZx, a decentralized finance protocol on Ethereum’s blockchain, endured two separate attacks after unknown persons manipulated “flash loans” and managed to drain nearly hundreds of thousands of Ether.

The First Attack

The first attack took place on Valentine’s night when the bZx team was attending ETHDenver – an Ethereum conference that brings together minds across the blockchain and DeFi space annually. The attacker took out $350,000 worth of ETH from Fulcrum, bZx’s lending platform by playing together several other DeFi protocols; Compound, Uniswap, and dYdX.

The attack happened this way:

The person borrowed 10,000 ETH from dYdX and then posted half the amount to DeFi protocol Compound and the other half to bZx. They then borrowed 112 wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC, which are ERC-20 tokens backed on a 1:1 ratio by Bitcoin.) With the amount on bZx, they entered into a short position for 112 WBTC, after which they sold the 112 WBTC from Compound on Uniswap. This move made the bZx sale very profitable. The attacker then repaid their dYdX loan and kept the proceeds from the short sale – 1,300 ETH. All this happened in a single transaction.

bZx admits the attack was “one of the most sophisticated” they’ve ever seen, which is big. Whoever pulled the attack must’ve had a very in-depth knowledge of all the protocols involved, together with their various tools. It also demonstrates the high levels of interoperability possible among various DeFi protocols – which is ideal, except when that interoperability can be maliciously manipulated. The attack had no precedent in DeFi, prompting the DeFi space to ask hard questions about the security future of DeFi.

In response to the attack, bZx in a slightly controversial move shut down Fulcrum.  Users and analysts noted bZx shut down the platform using a non-decentralized master key. But the firm defended the move, arguing, “the core of the debate here is whether we should be ruled by machines or economics. When you have an immutable contract that can’t be upgraded, you are ruled by machines. When the power to exist is distributed among representative stakeholders, you are ruled by economics. Both are valid methods for implementing decentralization.”

The Second Attack

And just when trading had resumed over the weekend and operations back to normal, attackers targeted bZx again, this time netting $633,000. This one took place just after 03:00 UTC Tuesday. The person(s) took out a flash loan of 7,500 ETH using 3, 518 ETH to purchase the stablecoin sUSD stablecoin from the issuer, which they then deposited as collateral for a bZx loan.

They then used 900 ETH to bid up the value of sUSD through Uniswap/Kyber then borrowed another 6,796 of ETH from bZx, using it to repay the 7,500 ETH loan and then pocketed the remaining value: 2, 378 ETH.

What’s shocking but also impressive is that the entire attack took place in just over a minute.

What are Flash Loans?

Flash loans are loans that users take and pay back in the same transaction so as to amplify their payouts. With a flash loan, a borrower loses nothing. The network can usually see whether or not a flash loan will be instantly repaid, and if not, it can reject all transactions associated with it. If it goes through, however, the lender gets a small fee, and the trader gains a profit, and everybody is happy.

But things aren’t always as simple as demonstrated by the bZx scenario. A flash loan carries great risk, especially with exploitable bugs in a platform’s code, or unreliable price feeds. In this case, the attacker(s) did not intend to simply buy low or sell high, but to deliberately manipulate vulnerable price markets.

Aftermath

Shortly after the first attack, investors started jumping from the bZx ship, but things seemed to get back to normal after the firm released a statement acknowledging the issue and addressing the way forward. 

As for the future of DeFi security, DeFi experts agree that this is a new territory; hence mistakes are bound to occur. Speaking to CoinDesk, Staked CEO asserted: “These are big risks. It’s a new category, it’s moving fast, and some things are going to break.”

The bZx team is now focused on securing the network and deterring future attacks. The firm already implemented a check that will disallow even overcollateralized loans in the future and has already put a cap on maximum trade sizes so as to limit the scope of potential attacks. It will also be implementing a Chainlink oracle to supplement Kyber’s price feed to be able to get time-weighted price info at any given time.

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 26 – Crypto market continuing the downtrend; BTC to retest $9,000?

The crypto market continued its path down and lost some value as a whole. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,170, which represents a 3.78% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 6.59% on the day, while XRP lost 7.89%.

The crypto market continued its path down and lost some value as a whole. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,170, which represents a 3.78% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 6.59% on the day, while XRP lost 7.89%.

The crypto market continued its path down and lost some value as a whole. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,170, which represents a 3.78% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 6.59% on the day, while XRP lost 7.89%.

Dragon Coins took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 22.16%. On the other side, Decentraland lost 16.54% on the day, making it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s gained some dominance in the past 24 hours. Its value is now 64.11%, which represents a 0.73 difference to the upside when compared to the value from when we last reported.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization a lot of its value over the past 24 hours. It is currently valued at $261.62 billion, which represents a decrease of $13.63 billion when its value is compared to the value it had yesterday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

Coinbase announced that the company became a principal member of Visa on Feb 19. Coinbase, which is one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world, is now able to issue their own debit cards without involving any third parties.

While Coinbase didn’t share what it would do in the future, its new status grants it the possibility to issue debit cards to other cryptocurrency firms. This development certainly marks an important milestone for the cryptocurrency payments sector.

Honorable mention

Chainlink 

Polkadot is preparing for its upcoming network launch after the reveal that they will be integrating with Chainlink. The integration of Chainlink oracles could be crucial for the development of DeFi (Polkadot decentralized finance) as well as other advanced smart contracts.

Chainlink has completed its initial integration on Kusama, which is a canary network for Polkadot (similar to a testnet).

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Technical analysis

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Bitcoin

Bitcoin continued to move downwards as a prolonged Feb 24 bearish move. The largest cryptocurrency fell under the $9,255 support, which could not hold the bear pressure for long. The RSI finally entered the oversold area where the bear move stopped (for now) and BTC started consolidating.


Bitcoin’s volume is average for this week. It’s RSI level is currently in the oversold territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,255                                           1: $9,120

2: $9,580                                           2: $9,070

3: $9,735                                            3: $8,915

Ethereum

Ethereum’s price took an even bigger hit than Bitcoin’s. The second-largest cryptocurrency continued its move down and dropped under the $251.3 support as well as under the $240 one. However, bulls came to the market and pushed the price slightly above the $240 support, which is where ETH’s price is at right now.


Ethereum’s volume average when compared to volumes from this week, while its RSI level is currently just above the oversold territory on the 4-hour chart.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $251.3                                             1: $240

2: $259.5                                            2: $225.5  

3: $279                                                3: $217.7

Ripple

XRP performed the worst out of the top3 cryptos in the past 24 hours. After its price fell below the $0.266 major support (now resistance), the outlook quickly became bearish. However, the drop did not end there, as XRP managed to break $0.2454 to the downside as well. Its price is now right under this level.


XRP’s volume quite low, with the exception of one candlestick, which brought its price below $0.2454. Its RSI level is currently sitting in oversold territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.2454                                          1: $0.235

2: $0.266                                            2: $0.227

3: $0.285                                             3: $0.221

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 25 – Crypto market continuing its move down; First crypto bank in the US?

The crypto market dropped some value as Bitcoin, and the other cryptos failed to reach new highs. This move is a continuation of the small downtrend that started on Feb 24. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,527, which represents a 2.29% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 4.03% on the day, while XRP lost 3.96%.

The crypto market dropped some value as Bitcoin, and the other cryptos failed to reach new highs. This move is a continuation of the small downtrend that started on Feb 24. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,527, which represents a 2.29% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 4.03% on the day, while XRP lost 3.96%.

The crypto market dropped some value as Bitcoin, and the other cryptos failed to reach new highs. This move is a continuation of the small downtrend that started on Feb 24. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,527, which represents a 2.29% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 4.03% on the day, while XRP lost 3.96%.

DxChain Token took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 5.46%. On the other side, Wayki Chain lost 22.69% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance increased slightly in the past 24 hours. Its value is now 63.38%, which represents a 0.53 difference to the upside when compared to the value from when we last reported.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization increased slightly over the past 24 hours. It is currently valued at $275.25 billion, which represents a decrease of $7.28 billion when its value is compared to the value it had yesterday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

Former Wall Street executive Caitlin Long is taking advantage of Wyoming legislature to establish the first crypto-native bank in the United States. The bank’s name will be Avanti, meaning “forward” in Italian.

Long announced the news in a series of 29 tweets. She believes that a critical piece of US market infrastructure is missing, with her bank being the solution.

Honorable mention

EOS troubles? 

One of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, said that the EOS has degraded its performance, with sends and receives possibly suffering from delays.

The exchange later stated that the EOS network is still suffering from degraded performance. However, EOS Nation responded that the EOS main net is “currently extremely reliable.”

The tweet that EOS Nation posted included a chart that was showing a slight blip on Feb 20, with 192 blocks missing due to the micro-forking issue. However, the chart also indicated a stable mainnet performance for the past two weeks.

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Technical analysis

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Bitcoin

Bitcoin continued to move down as a prolonged Feb 24 move to the downside. The largest cryptocurrency is now under the $9,580 support, and it looks like it will drop some more. With RSI still not reaching oversold and plenty of leeway to the next support, Bitcoin certainly has a big chance of pulling back even further.


Bitcoin’s volume is lower when compared to the past week. It’s RSI level is approaching lower values of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,580                                           1: $9,255

2: $9,735                                           2: $9,120

3: $9,870                                            3: $9,070

Ethereum

Ethereum followed in Bitcoin’s footsteps and lost some value as well. In fact, Ethereum managed to drop more in price than Bitcoin over the past 24 hours. While going down in price, Ethereum broke its $259.5 support.


Ethereum’s volume is on the lower side of the spectrum, while its RSI level is slightly below the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $259.5                                             1: $251.3

2: $279                                               2: $240  

3: $289                                                3: $225.5

Ripple

XRP made pretty much the same move as Ethereum. Its price continued to move down, breaking one of the biggest support levels to the downside. XRP broke $0.266 and is slowly moving below it. However, the 4-hour candle did not close below the support (now resistance) yet.


XRP’s volume is extremely low, while its RSI level is approaching oversold.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.266                                            1: $0.2454

2: $0.285                                            2: $0.235

3: $0.31                                               3: $0.227

Categories
Crypto Videos

Five Of The Best Trading Strategies For Trading Part 2

https://youtu.be/nY-e_vjYt3I

https://youtu.be/nY-e_vjYt3I

Five proper trading strategies for trading crypto during turbulent periods – part 2/2

This video will touch upon three more ways of dealing with turbulent periods of the crypto market.

Following the Trend

If you did your research and concluded that trend would continue for a while, or if it is too hard to predict when the price will change its direction, following the trend is a more risk-averse strategy. With this strategy, you should trade with the trend rather than trading with the swings. If the market is trending up, open only long trades. If the market is dropping, open only short trades. Trend followers start trading only after a trend has been established, while they exit when the trend changes. This trading method is also called “Position Trading.”
There is quite a number of tools that you can use to maximize profits as well as to minimize risks. These include margin trading, leverage, and stop-loss orders.

Advantages: Strategy such as following the trend is more of a risk-averse strategy. It works if the market, whether the market is going up or down.
Downsides: Crypto markets are unpredictable, so you will need good mechanisms put in place to protect against sudden changes in price direction.

Investing in Staking Coins

Employing this strategy will require doing some serious research.
Staking coins and tokens are the assets that perfectly align with the diversification goal an investor might have, as they generate staking profits over time. All you have to do is to buy them, lock them and stake, therefore becoming a validator node in their network. Validator nodes receive rewards for generating new blocks and securing blockchain networks. There are many staking coins and tokens out there, such as DASH, NEO, Lisk, Qtum, etc.
Advantages: This investment strategy doesn’t require any additional maintenance from you.
Downsides: You are still exposed, to some degree, to the ups and downs of the market.

Investing in a Tokenized Crypto Fund

If you want to collect some form of profit from all of the strategies mentioned above, you should opt for tokenized crypto funds.
These funds are pools of investor capital that are managed by a team of professional investors. Fund managers use a range of strategies to earn returns on all of the capital within the fund. Investors that join the pool benefit from having access to the skills professional traders have, while the professional traders benefit from having much more capital to work with.
Tokenized crypto funds examples
There are some examples of tokenized crypto funds available to the public. Crypto20 is an autonomously organized crypto fund that functions as an index fund for, but for cryptocurrencies. This is not the only crypto fund available, as there are quite a few nowadays.

Conclusion

In times of panic and market downfall, experienced investors usually come out on top. By using the right strategies and having a cool head, it’s possible to be profitable during all market conditions.

Categories
Crypto Guides

5 Things To Consider Before Investing In Cryptos

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

Cryptocurrencies have been buzzing our lives continuously ever since the Bitcoin boom at the year-end of 2017. The people who didn’t give a serious thought about investing in cryptos before that period has started taking it seriously, at least after that boom. One thing is for sure. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay; there is no doubt about that.

Hence, it is common for a potential investor to think if they should be investing in cryptos or not. Our answer is ‘Yes,’ they should be. However, investors should be very careful before investing in this space. So, we are providing some tips and considerations one should ponder upon before venturing into the world of cryptocurrencies.

📋 Always invest the money which you are ready to lose

We all save money for a rainy day. We are always advised by our parents when we start our financial life to save at least 10% of your paycheck. We never know what unexpected expenses pop up, and we should be able to face them without any inconvenience; otherwise, it is easy to fall in a debt pit.

Hence don’t ever invest in cryptocurrencies from your savings. We never know how the highly volatile markets of Cryptos will treat us. Always invest the money which you are ready to lose so that you don’t sell off your investments at the wrong time only because you need money.

📋 Do your research

Don’t invest in anything just because your friends/colleagues/cousins are doing it. Do your research before you venture into something new. Only after getting enough knowledge and when you think you have a grip on it, (like – when to buy and when to sell) start investing in cryptocurrencies. It is always advisable to start with the prominent ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Then gradually jump into the niche coins if you want to. When one would like to invest in niche coins, it is better to go through the white paper, the tech behind the new currency, people who are developing the coin, etc. so that you will be aware if it is a scam. As the crypto industry is full of scams and fraudsters, we should be very cautious.

📋 Diversifying your investments

When people start out investing in cryptocurrencies, most of them start with Bitcoin and stay with Bitcoin only. There are many other coins other than Bitcoin. Try to invest in at least ten coins that have huge potential. You can check the market capitalization or pick the currency based on the number of coins in circulation. So that you won’t lose all your money when the value of a single coin has fallen.

We are all familiar with the saying, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in a single basket.’ Hence don’t invest all your money in only Cryptocurrencies. It would be helpful if you diversified the investment portfolio. You may invest in potential markets like Stocks, Mutual funds, Real estate, Bonds, etc. Since the cryptocurrency market is extremely volatile, it is advised that you may consider investing 10% of your portfolio in this space.

📋 Securing your coins

Once you invest in cryptos, you better don’t leave them in your accounts in the exchange. All the hacks that ever happened on cryptos happened on only exchanges so far. We have a variety of wallets to choose for, say paper wallets, electronic wallets, hardware wallets, desktop wallets, mobile wallets, etc. In turn, you can choose different wallets to use as well. For a long term investment, you may choose hardware wallets while for the short-term traders, mobile wallets can be used as they are easily accessible.

📋 Track the investments

Once you invest in cryptos, you should start tracking the performance of the coins so that you would be informed all the time. We have apps to monitor the same where we must enter the coin name, the number of coins purchased date of purchase, and other minor details. Apps like Blockfolio and Bitmap can be considered for this purpose.

While these are the essential points to consider, alternatively, you can follow people on different platforms who are best in the said fields, which reaffirms your learnings. Don’t sell off all your crypto investments when you say huge profits, try to sell on a percentage basis so that you can cash in on when there is a spike. At the same time, one will have money to buy in dips. Finally, be proud that by investing, you are a part of the crypto revolution. Cheers!

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 24 – New Jersey regulating crypto?

The crypto market is currently at the same price level as when we last reported. However, that does not mean that the markets were stagnant over the weekend. Many cryptos attempted to reclaim previous highs but failed and started consolidating or losing a bit of value. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,736, which represents a 1.41% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 1.39% on the day, while XRP lost 3.29%.

The crypto market is currently at the same price level as when we last reported. However, that does not mean that the markets were stagnant over the weekend. Many cryptos attempted to reclaim previous highs but failed and started consolidating or losing a bit of value. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,736, which represents a 1.41% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 1.39% on the day, while XRP lost 3.29%.

The crypto market is currently at the same price level as when we last reported. However, that does not mean that the markets were stagnant over the weekend. Many cryptos attempted to reclaim previous highs but failed and started consolidating or losing a bit of value. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,736, which represents a 1.41% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 1.39% on the day, while XRP lost 3.29%.

WaykiChain took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 62.30%. On the other side, Swipe lost 9.58% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance remained at exactly the same place as before the weekend. It is now at 62.85%, which represents a decrease of 0.03% when compared to the value it had on Friday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization increased slightly over the weekend. It is currently valued at $282.53 billion, which represents an increase of $1.78 billion when its value is compared to the value it had on Friday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

The New Jersey state legislature is considering a new bill to regulate cryptocurrency. If passed, every cryptocurrency businesses would have to obtain a proper license in order to operate in their state.

This bill is called the Digital Asset and Blockchain Technology Act, which was proposed by assemblywoman Yvonne Lopez on Feb 20.

Honorable mention

Monero 

Italy’s crypto-powered debit card supplier Bitsa is continuing with its expansion. Its prepaid card expanded by adding support to the privacy-focused altcoin Monero (XMR).

By enabling support for Monero on its Bitsa Card, this company unclocks the ability to use all Monero-based card transactions in both physical stores and online.

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Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin had a turbulent weekend, though its current price doesn’t show it (if compared to our last report on Friday). The largers cryptocurrency by market cap attempted to break $10,000 over the weekend on two ocasions. however, the $10,015 resistance held up nicely and the bulls could not reach above. The price fell sharply after the second failed attempt, which brought BTC to the support of $9,580. However, the bulls did not allow it to drop further and BTC is now consolidating just above the $9,735 support level.


Bitcoin’s volume is slightly lower when compared to the past week. It’s RSI level is in the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,870                                           1: $9,735

2: $10,015                                         2: $9,580

3: $10,360                                          3: $9,255

Ethereum

Ethereum had a nice upwards-moving trend that started on Feb 20. However, the most recent failed attempt to break $279 made bears take over and bring the price down to lower levels. Ethereum is now consolidating at $268, which is in the middle of the range between $279 to the upside and $259.5 to the downside.


Ethereum’s is slightly lower when compared to the past week, while its RSI level is slightly above the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $279                                                1: $259.5

2: $289                                               2: $251.3  

3: $302                                                3: $240

Ripple

XRP was, unlike ETH and BTC, extremely stagnant over the weekend. In fact, its price has been moving within the range bound by $0.285 to the upside and $0.266 to the downside since Feb 19. XRP made one attempt to break this range to the upside over the weekend but failed. Its price is now consolidating in the middle of the range.


XRP’s volume is quite low at the moment, while its RSI level is in the lower part of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.285                                            1: $0.266

2: $0.31                                              2: $0.2454

3: $0.324                                             3: $0.235

Categories
Crypto Videos

Five Of The Best Trading Strategies For Trading Part 1

https://youtu.be/YVrJOWf6M6g

https://youtu.be/YVrJOWf6M6g

Five trading strategies for trading crypto during turbulent periods – part 1/2

The cryptocurrency market is known to be quite volatile. Volatility brings a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of risk to the traders. These are five of the best ways to make a profit when markets are turbulent.


Scalping

Scalping is a well-known strategy amongst traders. This strategy takes advantage of small market movements and requires precision and decisiveness. Traders are quickly entering and exiting positions during an hour, a minute, or even just a few seconds. The key to this strategy is making many small trades. There is no need for high returns per trade, as there are many opportunities for scalpers. You should rather be aiming to maintain or increase your win/loss ratio. With this strategy, the size of winning and losing trades is almost the same as there is no opportunity to maintain a high reward-to-risk trade setup. Therefore, in order to profit, you need to win more often than to lose.
Scalper traders usually want to avoid high volatility because this trading strategy does not cope well with unpredictable moves. The best time for a scalper to trade is during a ranging market bound by strict support and resistance levels.
While scalping is considered relatively safe, it requires patience and discipline as well as some experience in reading the charts. Scalpers may utilize trading algorithms and bots to make trades for them, therefore avoiding any emotion-based trades.


Buying the Dips

This strategy may seem counterintuitive to some people, but a drop in any asset’s price is a great time to buy it, as long as the asset is known for being volatile. Assuming we are talking about a strong asset, the price will revert and reach the previous highs as soon as the market regains its confidence.

When taking a quick look at the Bitcoin price over the past decade, we can see a strong upward trend, but also times when the price was over and undervalued. As most buyers and sellers are just regular people and not professional traders and investors, the crypto market is extremely sensitive to news stories and media hype. When the good news gets published, people rush to buy already overvalued cryptocurrencies. On the other hand, when something bad happens, people panic and sell their holdings at below their true value.
Times such as these are the perfect opportunity for investors to buy the undervalued cryptocurrencies. Using their expertise to assess the market conditions and fundamentals, they predict when the market is most undervalued. When they determine that the market is likely to make a recovery, they buy.

As an opposite strategy to scalping, buying the price dips doesn’t require much precision, but rather expertise and “feel” in order to recognize when an asset is undervalued. You only need to make a single trade and wait for the profit from the upward trajectory to kick in. However, you probably won’t see any quick profits. On top of that, perfect market timing is everything with this strategy as you need to recognize market reversals.

Check out part 2 of our trading strategies to find out more about how to trade during volatile periods of the crypto market.

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic

ETH’s Bullish Behavior and the Case of Flash Loans

ETH has pulled a surprise on everyone Tuesday by posting bullish prices as high as $287 up from Monday’s low of $245.

ETH has pulled a surprise on everyone Tuesday by posting bullish prices as high as $287 up from Monday’s low of $245.

ETH has pulled a surprise on everyone Tuesday by posting bullish prices as high as $287 up from Monday’s low of $245.

This surge couldn’t have come at a weirder time; when Ethereum was on the spot for two attacks or ‘exploits’ on the Ethereum-based DeFI protocol bZx that saw it lose almost $1m worth of ETH.

 

The CEO of the crypto site The Block, Mike Dudas, tweeted Tuesday in acknowledgment of ETH’s Tuesday rally.

Respected economist Alex Kruger’s response to Dud’s tweet may explain this bullish behavior, though. While saying ETH did not actually ‘shrug off’ the exploit, he stated the attacks were naturally bullish for Ether since it’s “great advertising” and it “should generate interest in Ethereum from the finance industry and thus increase demand for ETH, even if the many DeFi platforms die in the near term because of this.” In essence, the attack raised Ethereum’s profile, its DeFi use case will be damned (at least in the short term.)

Flash Loans

The DeFi attack that helped reverse fortunes for ETH Tuesday was a result of the manipulation of flash loans. To understand flash loans, let’s look again at what Kruger had to say about them. In the same thread, he said, “flash loans provide access to instantaneous liquidity and collateral, and work on top of deterministic transactions that fully eliminate risk for both borrower and lender. This is extremely valuable, and the very best expression of programmable money…”

Flash loans are a new entry in the crypto world, a new decentralized finance innovation atop Ethereum’s blockchain. A flash loan allows a trader to take an uncollateralized loan to maximize the profits from a trade. They are ‘flash’ because they’re super-fast – in that the borrower repays the loan in the same transaction.

What happened with bZx is that the attackers exploited weak points in the protocol, making away with $300, 000 and around $650,000 worth of Ether.

Ensuing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

After the Ethereum debacle, some individuals took the chance to pontificate about DeFi being an inherently flawed technology. But just like with the DAO attack in 2015, such incidents invariably point to weaknesses in a system, which in turn helps make it better and more resilient. Like with any technology, DeFi is undergoing ‘growing pains,’ and it helps to provide solutions to such imperfections rather than knocking everything down.  

What’s next for bZx

As for bZx, the firm will mitigate the damage of the attack in several ways, like liquidating collateral to cover a loan that the attack left uncovered, as well spread the loss across its user accounts. (Users will barely feel the impact of the loss, despite the magnitude of the attack.) The firm has also indicated plans of setting up an insurance fund as a long-term solution in case of a similar future incident. 

Perhaps DeFi proponents can look at the bright side: the attacks are a testament to DeFi taking up space in finance. The nascent technology is developing enough clout to warrant exploiting attacks.

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic Cryptocurrencies

What is Bumo Blockchain?

Before we say a single thing about Bumo blockchain, we need to talk about blockchain. Blockchain is a publicly distributed ledger that records transactions between parties permanently, transparently, and in a peer-to-peer manner.  

Before we say a single thing about Bumo blockchain, we need to talk about blockchain. Blockchain is a publicly distributed ledger that records transactions between parties permanently, transparently, and in a peer-to-peer manner.  

Before we say a single thing about Bumo blockchain, we need to talk about blockchain. Blockchain is a publicly distributed ledger that records transactions between parties permanently, transparently, and in a peer-to-peer manner.  

The concept of blockchain existed in the developer community for years. Still, it only came to life in 2008 when a person/people under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto created a blockchain to serve as the underlying technology under the world’s first cryptocurrency – Bitcoin.

Since then, numerous cryptocurrencies have been created by developers all over the world – either running on their own blockchains or other cryptocurrencies’ blockchains.  The technology has also broken out of the cryptocurrency application and has been adopted in other industries – from finance to healthcare to supply chain and so on. These applications represent the private, enterprise side, of blockchain.

What is Bumo?

Bumo is a next-generation enterprise-grade public blockchain that hopes to host what it calls a ‘ubiquitous’ value transfer, smart contracts, and decentralized applications platform. The Bumo project is still in beta, i.e., still in development. 

Let’s look at some of Bumo’s unique selling points right off the park:

  • Two or more users can create an account together, thanks to what the platform calls “individual account weightage”
  • A Merkle-Patricia Tree to help store data efficiently
  • A “trailer” system that helps segregate on-chain and off-chain data
  • An ‘Orbit’ infrastructure helping support Bumo’s 2-layer multiform architecture
  • A 2-layer multi-chain consensus structure that’ll enable up to 10,000 transactions per second
  • A “Canal” system to facilitate interoperability
  • A robust and friendly toolkit for developers to create smart contracts
  • The ability for developers to build apps that aren’t necessarily backed by a smart contract

In this guide, we’ll look at these features in greater detail and see what Bumo hopes to do differently for the blockchain ecosystem. To do that, we first need to talk about the inherent problems with blockchain right now.  

Problems with the Blockchain

Scalability

The first and second-generation blockchain’s scalability issue refers to their inability to handle high-volume transactions within a short period of time – hence they can’t be used to serve millions of people all over the world.

One reason for this is the mining-based verification mechanism that requires miners to verify transactions and then record the verified transactions in the blockchain. This creates a backlog of transactions and a slow, overloaded network since a miner can only mine a certain number of transactions at any time.

The other reason is the 1MB sized blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain, which severely limits how much data any one block can hold. This means your transactions have to wait in a queue for roughly 10 minutes. On the Ethereum blockchain, there are no block size limits, but transactions may take an average of 15 seconds before verification. 

Lack of Interoperability

Interoperability, or lack of it, is another issue with existing blockchains. Existing blockchains e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum, are not built to be able to interact with each other. This is why crypto exchanges have the power that they do since they provide a much-needed portal on which different cryptos can interact with each other.

But exchanges are centralized entities, which goes against the decentralization principle of cryptocurrencies. Besides, centralization makes cryptocurrencies vulnerable to hacking and blackouts, which can stall services.

The lack of interoperability also means mainstream adoption of the blockchain is impossible. This is because, for blockchain technology to be integrated into the mainstream, it needs to be able to interact with existing systems.

BUMO is a next-generation blockchain that’s going to be catering to businesses. It comprises of two-layer chains that will help streamline transactions on the blockchain. The Bumo system will also be interoperable with both heterogeneous and homogeneous blockchain.  

The Team behind Bumo

Bumo is a vision of four core people: Steven Li, Steven Guo, John Zhao, and Yuliang Zheng. This team has between them a wealth of experience in Physics, blockchain, cryptography, and hashing technology.

Core Features of Bumo

Let’s dive deeper into the core features the Bumo blockchain that makes it stand out: 

A Multisig account

A multisig (multi-signature) is an account owned and controlled by more than one party. The Bumo blockchain uses something known as ‘account weightage’ to give more power of access to some signature holders over others. For example, if three people own a business and they have an account on the Bumo blockchain, the CEO’s approval, for instance, will count more than the other two’s.  This is an approach that the Bumo team hopes will appeal to big companies.

The Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT)

The Merkle Patricia Trie is a tool that combines the technologies of Merkle Tree and Patricia (Practical Algorithm to Retrieve Information Coded in Alphanumeric) Tree. This combination makes it easier to find particular transactions by reducing the time that would be taken to ascertain if that transaction belongs to a particular block or not.

Trailer System for Off-Chain and On-Chain Data

Depending on the characteristics of the data, the Bumo blockchain will differentiate data into off-chain and on-chain data, providing a streamlined system for handling heavy and complex data. This differentiation will help reduce the burden on the blockchain and save on hardware costs because the node network will experience less strain.

Interoperability Feature of the Bumo Blockchain

The Bumo blockchain has the Canal system, which is two-layered – with main chains and cross chains. The main chains comprise collection and validation nodes. The validation nodes provide “high-level” consensus for transactions on the cross-chain.

Cross chains are akin to the routers in a traditional network system. They route data from various blockchains towards the target blockchain. 

BUMO and Smart Contracts

BUMO hopes to be the best destination for smart contracts. The platform will feature these properties which are specifically geared to help it achieve this purpose:

i) Turing complete, or ‘computationally universal,’ which means a contract can solve any problem with the right tools

ii) Fast deployment 

iii) Flexible calls

iv) Reliable execution of smart contracts

v) The Bumo platform features a virtual machine called the BuVM (Bumo Virtual Machine). BuVM has the following properties to enable what Bumo calls “Eco-Friendly Smart Contracts.”

  • More advanced smart contract performance
  • Increased security for smart contracts
  • Multi-language support for smart contracts
  • Developer-friendly tools and environment

Also, the Bumo platform will provide a unique space for app developers, thanks to the following features:

  • Native application programming interface tools
  • WebSocket-like features
  • Ability to create an app or tokenize assets without the need for a smart contract. This is what Bumo calls “Account-based Tokenization Protocol,” in which users will be able to issue tokens by the mere virtue of having an account on the Bumo blockchain.

Benefits of Bumo

☑️The ability to tokenize assets quickly, safely and reliably

☑️A friendly environment for developers to create decentralized applications

☑️The ability to handle up to 10,000 transactions per second

☑️Reduce the costs of operation, maintenance, and exchange of data in the blockchain

☑️It will allow the connection of Internet of Things devices that will create value for thousands of people

☑️It is user-friendly

☑️People can exchange smart contract values faster and safely

☑️It promotes the free flow of digital assets

Final Thoughts

The Bumo blockchain is poised to reinvent several aspects of blockchain and stir the crypto space for the better. If Bumo succeeds, it’s very likely the blockchain world will bid goodbye problems like scalability issues, lack of interoperability, and the need to be well-versed in programing language so as to create applications. Will the Bumo team deliver, or is it another overhyped blockchain project? As with many things in blockchain tech, only time will tell. 

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 21 – Morgan Stanley dipping its toes into crypto? Analysts still confused by the price drop

The crypto market seems to have taken the day off, as there were no significant price movements. Meanwhile, analysts are still trying to pinpoint the cause of the fifth-largest single-hour drop since 2017. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,677, which represents a 0.77% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 0.01% on the day, while XRP lost 0.38%.

The crypto market seems to have taken the day off, as there were no significant price movements. Meanwhile, analysts are still trying to pinpoint the cause of the fifth-largest single-hour drop since 2017. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,677, which represents a 0.77% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 0.01% on the day, while XRP lost 0.38%.

The crypto market seems to have taken the day off, as there were no significant price movements. Meanwhile, analysts are still trying to pinpoint the cause of the fifth-largest single-hour drop since 2017. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,677, which represents a 0.77% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 0.01% on the day, while XRP lost 0.38%.

Algorand took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 15.96%. On the other side, ABBC Coin lost 11.94% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance increased slightly as altcoins fell just a bit more than BTC did in the past 24 hours. It is now at 62.85%, which represents an increase of 0.11% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization increased slightly in the past 24 hours. It is currently valued at $280.75 billion, which represents an increase of $1.85 billion when compared to yesterday’s value.

What happened in the past 24 hours

Morgan Stanley, one of the biggest investment banks, is buying an online trading firm called E*Trade Financial Group. This $13 billion deal will be Morgan Stanley’s largest takeover since the economic breakdown of 2008. Morgan Stanley will bring E*Trade’s five million clients as well as $360 billion in assets.

E*Trade is planning to offer digital currency trading on its platform. The company is preparing to offer BTC and ETH trading.

Honorable mention

Cardano 

The Cardano network is scheduled to perform a network upgrade on Feb 20. This upgrade will introduce Ouroboros BFT to its users. Ouroboros BFT is an improved consensus mechanism, which will allow for staking.

The upgrade will be executed on Thursday at exactly 9:44 PM UTC, or 4:44 PM EST. The network will undergo a hard fork.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin didn’t move much price-wise in the past 24 hours. Bulls attempted to make a run and take over the $9,735 resistance level, but failed to do so. This put Bitcoin in the same spot as yesterday, bound between the $9,735 resistance and $9,580 support levels.


Bitcoin’s volume fell in the past 24 hours, while its RSI level is just below the middle of the value range. All key levels stayed the same as the largest cryptocurrency did not break any supports or resistances.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,735                                           1: $9,580

2: $9,870                                           2: $9,255

3: $10,015                                          3: $9,120

Ethereum

Ethereum didn’t move much either. In fact, most of the market had quite a low volume, so the volatility was low as well. The second-largest cryptocurrency fell below the $259.5 support level at one point but managed to reach back above it. It is currently hovering at around $260.


Ethereum’s volume dropped slightly, just like Bitcoin’s. It’s RSI level is also at nearly the same level, which is just under the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $279                                                1: $259.5

2: $289                                               2: $251.3  

3: $302                                                3: $240

Ripple

XRP suffered from the same fate as the top3 cryptocurrencies in the past 24 hours. However, its price movement was more alike to Ethereum’s than to Bitcoin’s. The third-largest cryptocurrency attempted to break the $0.266 support line but failed to do so. The price has increased since and XRP is now trading at $0.275, which is almost exactly where it was during our last report.


XRP’s volume is quite low at the moment, while its RSI level is in the lower parts of the value range. No key levels have been broken in the past 24 hours.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.285                                            1: $0.266

2: $0.31                                              2: $0.2454

3: $0.324                                             3: $0.235

Categories
Crypto Guides

Top 4 Ways To Earn Cryptocurrency For Free

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

Cryptocurrencies have been one of the most spoken topics in the last decade. That too, in the last three years, the interest in investing or trading cryptos has been the maximum. We have also been discussing a lot about cryptocurrency lately in our detailed guides. We understood the various properties of cryptos and what makes this currency truly amazing. So, if you are a novice trader or investor or just a reader, we believe that you have at least a little interest in owning some of the top cryptos in the market.

One can buy cryptos easily in different ways, such as purchasing them in an exchange or using services like localbitcoin.com, etc. While these are some of the easiest ways to purchase cryptos, all of them involve investing your own money. But what if we say there are various ways in the market where you can earn cryptos for free? Yes. Many people are already grabbing these opportunities and earning a good amount of cryptos without having to invest their hard-earned money.

We have listed four of the most efficient ways to earn crypto for free. Please note that earning these cryptos does involve some amount of work from your side because nothing on this planet is truly free. However, you are not required to put any of your funds or take a full-time job for a crypto company. So let’s see the different possible ways to earn free cryptos.

💸 Through Airdrops

This is by far the most popular way of earning free cryptos. Airdrops work just like giveaways. Any crypto startup would prefer giving their coins for free in order to spread their name. It’s a marketing strategy where the participants of the airdrop get to avail free cryptos. There is a minimum amount of work involved in this process, like follow the company’s Twitter account, joining their telegram page, etc.

Anyone with an active ERC-20 compatible Ethereum Wallet can participate in these airdrops. Make sure to do your research to find the airdrops offered by some of the most potential crypto companies; because the free cryptos that you have earned in airdrops must increase in value later to make a profit out of them.

As we can see below, the last Stellar’s airdrop involved an offering of close to 375 million Stellar coins.

Picture Taken From – Blockchain.com

💸 Coinbase Earn Programme

Users of one of the very well-known crypto exchange – Coinbase, can earn free cryptocurrencies by completing some of the interesting courses provided by them. These courses include lessons about the basics of how certain cryptocurrencies work. The point here is that this exchange offers free coins of crypto to their users by educating them and creating exposure to that crypto.

Picture Taken From – Coinbase

We can currently earn cryptos worth $186 (as of Feb 2020) by just signing up with Coinbase and completing the courses offered by them. Dai, EOS, Stellar, and Zcash are some of the familiar cryptos that can be earned through this program. You can follow this link to start with the courses.

💸 Participating In the Bounty Programs

Free cryptocurrencies can be earned through participating in various bounty programs offered by the crypto/blockchain companies. There are different types of bounties, such as Bug bounties, Content bounties, Social bounties, and Signature bounties. In bug bounties, cryptos are offered to the people who help the companies in finding bugs in their code. The rest of the bounties involve creating content and exposure for both crypto start-ups and well-established companies in different forums. So these programs are not just for tech-savvy individuals but also for promotors.

Recently, Coinbase has offered about $30,000 worth of cryptos to an ethical hacker who founds potential bugs in their system.

Picture Taken From – Hackerone

💸 Through Affiliate Marketing

Many of the cryptocurrency companies have their own affiliate marketing programs for individuals or companies who are willing to promote and generate sales for them. For instance, companies like Trezor, Ledger, Binance, and LocalBitcoins offer 10% – 40% of commissions to their referrals. Details about each of these affiliate marketing programs can be found in their corresponding websites.

Bottom line

There are many other ways through which free cryptocurrency can be earned, but these seemed to the most effective ones. Not every company that offer free cryptos have the best interest for their customers. So please do thorough research about the authenticity of any program you are willing to take part in. All the best.

Categories
Crypto Videos

Five Tips For Entering The Cryptocurrency Bull Market – Avoiding Common Mistakes

https://youtu.be/OzwDYX_LzbU

https://youtu.be/OzwDYX_LzbU

Five tips for entering the cryptocurrency bull market

 

With the cryptocurrency market being on the verge of a bull market, it is good to know what to do when that happens.

1. Withdraw from the crypto exchange after you’ve finished trading!


Exchanges are notoriously insecure, and with all the security breaches, mismanaging of the user funds, exit scams, or a surprise AML/KYC to seize the investors’ funds, you’re always at risk with your holdings being held by the exchange. There are many valid reasons why “Not your keys, not your Bitcoin,” became a mantra among traders. Many traders lost substantial amounts of money to hacks, unethical exchanges, and exit scams.
When it comes to surprise AML/KYC seizures, it could be possible to recover funds by doxxing yourself, which is not ideal. However, some platforms simply make the demands for personal information that are so appalling that you may never get your cryptos back.

2. Stop talking about your portfolio!

Operational security is the king in the land of cryptocurrencies. During the last bull market, some people that were talking about their outrageous gains got kidnapped, become victims of home invaders trying to find their crypto-keys and devices. All this because they wanted to brag about their portfolio gains on social media. Advertising your gains on social media (or anywhere for that matter) is like painting a red dot on your forehead.

3. Keep your holdings on a hardware wallet!


Another security consideration should be to store your holdings offline on a hardware wallet. Preferably, it would help if you kept the hardware wallet and recovery seed in different and secure locations. Hacking, as well as ransomware, is, sadly, an epidemic online. Therefore, keeping your coins off your laptop or mobile phone is an easy way to sidestep the risk of losing your holdings this way.

4. Don’t use trading signal services!


Countless trading coaches popped up on the internet during the last bull run. They offered courses, trading signals, and paid trading signal groups without any testimonials of what they did prior to being coaches. While it is obvious that these trading coaches are scam artists, many people fell for their scam and lost quite a lot of money.

There are many ways to learn how to trade safely. Taking free courses or reading free ebooks about trading, as well as practicing on a demo account, all fall into this category.

5. Perform in-depth research before investing!

The cryptocurrency industry is young and full of scammers, as most of the retail investors are young and have never tried themselves in the traditional markets. This attracts the most unscrupulous scammers that are trying to take the funds away from the investors in any way possible. During the bull market and the ICO craze of 2017, many scams and terrible investment opportunities started popping up.
The scammers in the crypto field basically forced the world’s regulatory agencies to step in and put an end to the “scammer’s free for all.” As a fun fact, there was even an ICO that used a picture of the famous actor Ryan Gosling as their supposed “graphic designer.”
Even if the projects are not scams, it is important to do the research in order to gauge whether it is worth your money or not. Do your due diligence and always make sure you are fully aware of what you’re actually investing in.

Categories
Crypto Videos

Surviving a Bear Market! – Crypto Money Making Strategies Part 2

https://youtu.be/UKIf7hxe7Y8

https://youtu.be/UKIf7hxe7Y8

Cryptos in a bear market – what to do? – part 2/2

This article is picking up where the first one left off, which is explaining various things a trader can do while the cryptocurrency market is in a bearish trend.


Holding

The second strategy would be holding, or “HODLing.” This is often a confusing term for a lot of newcomers, as most of them think that it is a misspelling. Interestingly enough, “HODL” became an acronym for “Hold On for Dear Life,” which means that investors will not sell their holdings even if the market goes into a deep downtrend.

The term represents a trading strategy, if it may be called a strategy, that is used by those who are willing to wait for greener pastures. Holding is a long-term strategy but also a philosophy of numerous investors. Since the crypto market is still young and new, it is widely believed that the current volatility, prices, and market crashes are just regular occurrences that happen on the path to stabilization and maturity. HODLers often think that the key to making a profit with cryptos is to stick to their holdings and endure the pressure. When the market stabilizes, and cryptos reach widespread adoption, it is expected that the HODLers will be rewarded for trusting in their cryptocurrencies.
HODLing is a huge part of the crypto culture nowadays. This strategy has gained a lot of support from investors all over the globe. As the overall opinion is that cryptocurrencies are here to stay, HODLing has a big potential in the long run. This strategy, just like short-selling, did not get created by crypto traders. The best example of failing to HODL, as well as the true testament of HODLing working, is Ronald Wayne’s sale of Apple shares in 1970. Back then, he made $800 from selling the shares. If he had waited a few decades, his $800 gain would have become $100 billion.

Everyone knows that predicting the future is impossible. However, popular investors such as Jay Smith think that holding is always the best option if you trust in the asset. He is convinced that cryptocurrencies will replace the old stock markets. He also said that they would power machines, the Internet of Things, governance, and voting systems, maybe even the internet itself. While he understands that it might take years, maybe even decades before this prediction comes true, he is convinced that cryptos are the future and that there is no better way to invest in crypto than by buying and holding.

Buy Low – Sell High

Naturally, investors always want to make a profit. For that reason, when the value of cryptocurrencies goes down, many investors decide to cut their losses. Only a rare few are willing to risk it and keep buying, even if their prices are going down. Most of the people tend to buy near the top and sell near the bottom of the move. This occurrence is not limited only to crypto; it is rather the human nature of risk-aversion.

While many investors panic-sell their holdings that they have bought near the top, some others are trying to average down the price of their holdings. As always, any and every investor must do proper in-depth research before buying any coin.


Diversification

Finally, the last so-called strategy for aspiring investors is always to diversify their holdings. Since predicting the future is impossible, any investment is a risk, especially cryptocurrencies. However, investing in a few projects that you are interested in increases the chances of making the right call.
Traders can diversify by investing in projects they like, but the main thing is to diversify by investing in assets with low correlation. By investing in such assets, the price drop of one asset will not affect the price of the others.

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 20 – Sudden selloff puts crypto market in the red; Bitcoin under $10,000 yet again

The crypto market fell significantly in the past 24 hours as Bitcoin dropped below $10,000 yet again. Bitcoin is currently trading for $0,590, which represents a 4.63% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 5.84% on the day, while XRP lost 6.09%.

The crypto market fell significantly in the past 24 hours as Bitcoin dropped below $10,000 yet again. Bitcoin is currently trading for $0,590, which represents a 4.63% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 5.84% on the day, while XRP lost 6.09%.

The crypto market fell significantly in the past 24 hours as Bitcoin dropped below $10,000 yet again. Bitcoin is currently trading for $0,590, which represents a 4.63% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 5.84% on the day, while XRP lost 6.09%.

Kyber Network took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 22.18%. On the other side, WAX lost 21.81% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance increased slightly as altcoins fell just a bit more than BTC did in the past 24 hours. It is now at 62.74%, which represents an increase of 0.19% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization decreased significantly in the past 24 hours. It is currently valued at $278.90 billion, which represents a decrease of $14.94 billion when compared to the value it had yesterday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

South Korean technology giant Samsung unveiled its latest smartphone series recently. The Galaxy S20 was revealed at the Unpacked 2020 event that took place in San Francisco.

While most people looked at the new camera, the official marketing material assured the market that the phone would also improve the integrated blockchain security features that they introduced a year ago with the Galaxy S10.

Honorable mention

Bitcoin Gold 

Bitcoin Gold’s price is being heavily manipulated by a whale controlling almost half of the circulating supply. Independent trader and analyst, who wants to remain anonymous, conducted this research, and came to the conclusion that one whale holds this much BTG.

He published the findings in a blog post, explaining why he believes that an individual or a single group of people accumulated a huge Bitcoin Gold position.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin was moving slightly up or sideways until one big red candle, which brought its price to the $9,300 levels. The largest cryptocurrency experienced a massive sell-off (possibly from a single source) as the price fell from $10,150 to $9,300 during only one 5-minute candle. Bitcoin is now stable and trading above the $9,580 support level.


Bitcoin’s volume in the past 24 hours was average, with the exception of one big candle which occurred during the sudden price drop.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,735                                           1: $9,580

2: $9,870                                           2: $9,255

3: $10,015                                          3: $9,120

Ethereum

Ethereum experienced the same fate as Bitcoin. Its price was solid and stable while moving to the upside or sideways until one big red candle brought ETH’s price to $250. Ethereum recovered and managed to stay above the $259.5 support line.


Ethereum’s volume was average, with the exception of the big red candle. Its RSI level is hovering around the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $279                                                1: $259.5

2: $289                                               2: $251.3  

3: $302                                                3: $240

Ripple

XRP was no different from the other two of the top3 cryptocurrencies in the past 24 hours. The third-largest cryptocurrency experienced a quick and sudden selloff, which brought its price from $0.31 all the way down to $0.27. The price has not moved much from the bottom, so it is currently hovering just around $0.275.


XRP’s volume declined slightly, while the red candle during the selloff was above the daily average candle, but below average big “spike” candle XRP had recently. It’s RSI level is approaching oversold territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.285                                            1: $0.266

2: $0.31                                              2: $0.2454

3: $0.324                                             3: $0.235

Categories
Crypto Guides

What Problems Do Stable (cryptocurrency) Coins Solve?

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

We have learnt a lot about cryptocurrencies and their properties in our previous guides. Even though this financial instrument has gone through a lot of up & down in the last three years of the past decade, many financial experts believe that this asset class can still be considered a potential investment. Some experienced crypto traders believe that Bitcoin, at its peak (~$18,000 in Dec 2017), is still undervalued. This is because of the strong fundaments Bitcoin possesses. Not just Bitcoin, the entire crypto market has enormous investment potential in this decade.

The Need for Stable Coins

But there is one thing that concerns both short-term and long-term crypto investors – which is undoubtfully the volatility. Most of the cryptos currently present in the market possess huge volatility. This is one crucial reason why most of the investors are not confident enough to invest in this space. This volatility is also the reason why cryptos cannot be used as a standard medium of exchange. Hence the need for a Stable Currency or Stable Coin has risen.

A Stable Coin is a currency that has all the critical properties of typical crypto while achieving price stability. This stability in price is achieved by pegging their value to the major fiat currencies like USD & Euro in a 1:1 ratio. One of the very first and famous stable coins is Tether, and its value is pegged to USD. So the value of one Tether (₮) is always equal to one US Dollar ($). The main goal of any stable coin is to achieve maximum decentralization while maintaining price stability. But in the case of Tether, even though it has most of the properties of crypto, it is highly scrutinized ever since it is pegged with the USD.

Significance of Stable Currency

Stable Currency, as the name suggests, provides both short-term & long-term stability for the traders and investors. Short-term stability allows users to make day to day transactions just like fiat currencies. While the long-term stability provides confidence for the investors to include these stable coins in their portfolio. For instance, in the case of extreme bear markets, crypto traders and investors must need some stable storage where they can protect their portfolio from significant losses. The only other way is to convert all these cryptos to desired fiat currencies and convert back to crypto again once the downtrend is over. This sounds redundant. Isn’t it?

But with the help of stable coins in their portfolio, investors can just trade the cryptos that are bleeding for stable coins and hold them without having to worry about the volatility. Apart from the investment point of view, stable coins can also help short-term crypto traders to confidently keep their profits that they have gained within the exchange wallets (in the form of stable coins). But in the absence of stable coins, they will have to continuously worry about them losing their profit value due to the high volatility.

If you are interested in adding stable coins to your portfolio, we have mentioned some of the most promising ones below.

Tether | MakerDAO | True USD | Carbon

Many stable currency projects like these have come to existence after Tether, and some of them showed promising results. However, a completely decentralized stable coin that can be used for day-to-day transactions securely is yet to come.

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic Cryptocurrencies

What Is Rootstock (RSK): Understanding The Most Popular Bitcoin Blockchain

Bitcoin technology has played a phenomenal role in revolutionizing the global finance industry. Finance industry players, retail companies, and individuals understand this, hence its massive adoption across all industries. But Rootstock (RSK) sidechain developers believe that Bitcoin blockchain could be doing more. And that limitations in scalability, transaction processing, and lack of support for smart contracts the dominant cryptocoin is facing today are its biggest hindrances.

Bitcoin technology has played a phenomenal role in revolutionizing the global finance industry. Finance industry players, retail companies, and individuals understand this, hence its massive adoption across all industries. But Rootstock (RSK) sidechain developers believe that Bitcoin blockchain could be doing more. And that limitations in scalability, transaction processing, and lack of support for smart contracts the dominant cryptocoin is facing today are its biggest hindrances.

Bitcoin technology has played a phenomenal role in revolutionizing the global finance industry. Finance industry players, retail companies, and individuals understand this, hence its massive adoption across all industries. But Rootstock (RSK) sidechain developers believe that Bitcoin blockchain could be doing more. And that limitations in scalability, transaction processing, and lack of support for smart contracts the dominant cryptocoin is facing today are its biggest hindrances.

RSK developers also believe that the pioneer blockchain is money-dominated, implying that people concentrate more on Bitcoin Value than the technological revolution it promises the finance sector. And to address these issues, RSK labs sought to create a Bitcoin sidechain – Rootstock, also known as the ‘SMARTER BITCOIN.’ According to the company, the Sidechain will help Bitcoin overcome these limitations and boost its functionality and interoperability.

But what is RSK, and what progress has it made in making these feasible?

What Is RSK?

RSK is a Bitcoin sidechain connected to the BTC blockchain by a two-way peg. It can also be said to be an innovative virtual machine (RVM), tethered to the root of bitcoin blockchain with the aim of introducing the smart contract concept to the pioneer blockchain while effectively boosting its scalability. Plus, its through RSK sidechain that the crypto community will be able to create and run Bitcoin blockchain-backed smart contracts.

How does RSK hope to achieve these?

Ideally, the RSK sidechain seeks to marry the functionalities of the Ethereum blockchain with the security and efficiency of the bitcoin blockchain. To make this possible, the smart contract sidechain is tethered to the main blockchain by a two-way peg. This ensures that the side chain runs parallel to the main blockchain and that there is interchangeability of assets between both parent and side chain. It also has the backing of a semi-trusted third party that oversees the reliability of all transactions between RSK sidechain and Bitcoin blockchain in the execution of these smart contracts.

Hybrid federation to actualize smart contracts:

The semi-trusted-third-party (STTP) comprises of 25 highly accredited crypto community members of proven crypto knowledge and unquestionable integrity. And they serve as an interlink between RSK sidechain and Bitcoin blockchain, where they determine when to lock or release smart contract funds.

Why does the execution of smart contracts need a third party, you might ask? Well, because Bitcoin blockchain does not support the creation of smart contracts on its platform, RSK platform users needed an assurance that the Sidechain was operating in their best interests. And who to better provide such oversight and regularly audit the transactions carried out on the platform than the crème del crème of the crypto industry.

The 25 STTPs effectively form the hybrid federation that, in turn, operates the multi-signature wallet used to authorize the locking and release of funds. Each multi-sig wallet member has one vote, and it takes a simple majority to authorize the execution of a smart contract.

Two-way peg to actualize scalability and transaction speeds

The RSK Labs has been involved in the audit and analysis of both Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. In RSK sidechain, they have come up with a highly scalable platform that seeks to boost on-chain transaction processing speeds to 2000 in the long-run from the 3 TPS recorded by bitcoin blockchain today. They also intend to increase block confirmation speeds from 10 minutes per block to less than 10 seconds per block. To achieve this, RSK Labs developers utilized the GHOST protocol used on the Ethereum blockchain to speed up transaction processing speeds, and the DÉCOR+ block reward sharing protocol.

Note that RSK is a sidechain and will not be modifying the bitcoin blockchain code. How then does its scalability and transaction speeds impact Bitcoin? Well, the 2-way peg ensures the two blockchains run parallel to each other, and share assets like the blockchain database. This implies that if a transaction is recorded on the sidechain block, it automatically records on the main bitcoin blockchain, effectively eliminating chances of duplication. The tokens are also interchangeable, where 1 BTC = 1 SBTC (the token used on the RSK sidechain network).

RSK key features and components

Virtual machine:

RSK is to bitcoin, what EVM is Ethereum. A virtual machine through which bitcoin smart contracts can be executed. RSK, however, goes a notch higher to provide a platform on which the crypto community can create Bitcoin-based decentralized apps. And this effectively earns it the title –SmartBitcoin.

No commercializing tokens:

The fact that RSK is a sidechain that complements the Bitcoin blockchain means that its tokens won’t be commercially available. They will be restricted within the RSK to boost network operations like DApps creation. And to allow for easier interchangeability, 1 SBTC will always hold the same value as 1BTC. Let’s say you had 5 BTC and that you wanted to transact but want to leverage the speed and efficiency of the RSK sidechain. You simply exchange them for an equivalent amount of SBTC, and once done, convert your SBTC balance back to BTC.

Transactions not fully trustless:

The fact that Bitcoin’s blockchain does not support the creation of smart contracts on its native network necessitates the use of the Hybrid Federation interlink. When you exchange your BTC for SBTC or vice versa, your coins are locked in a multi-signature wallet within the 2-way peg. The federation, consisting of 25 highly accredited crypto community members, holds the keys to the multi-sig wallet. And locking and releasing funds held in the wallet only requires the authorization of a simple majority.  It provides a semi-trustless oversight over the funds as opposed to the fully independent, trustless, and automated oversight needed in a smart contract.

Merge-mining security:

 Bitcoin miners don’t need special applications or hardware to mine SBTC tokens. The RSK token mining applications are completely compatible with the bitcoin mining infrastructure. And as Bitcoin mining halves and block confirmation become harder, SBTC mining is a well-timed incentive.

The bridge between bitcoin and Ethereum:

RSK also supports the Turing Complete Programming language used by Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Ethereum DAPPs. This makes it possible for Ethereum blockchain users to easily migrate their systems to the RSK network. It is a viable option for Ethereum users, uncertain about the efficiency and reliability of the upcoming shift by Ethreum from proof of work to proof of stake.

What is the future of RSK?

Federation transitions to a drivechain/sidechain model?

Currently, RSK transactions over the 2-way peg are audited by the semi-trustless federation. Moving forward, however, and as the Sidechain gains traction and usage, RSK hopes to shift the custody of the locked coins on the 2-way peg to the merge-miners. A significant move aimed at reducing the need for trust.

RSK Educate:

RSK also looks forward to educating the crypto community on the effectiveness of its innovative Sidechain. To this end, RSK has published all the whitepapers related to this project and even created a blog where they share tips and educate the masses on how to interact with the Sidechain.

Why hasn’t RSK picked?

When RSK made public their intention to create and actualize the implementation of smart contracts, every crypto community member expected a flawless process. In its stead, RSK Labs, the developers of RSK sidechain, decided to include the semi-trustless federation of signees to maintain custody of the coins exchanged between Bitcoin main net and Sidechain.

The inherent risk associated with such an arrangement, especially considering their small and compromisable size of just 25 participants,  have seen the crypto community shy off the platform. Most of these lie in wait of the proposed upgrade to the 2-way link that elbows out the federation in favor of BTC and SBTC merge miners. 

Bottom line

It is about time Bitcoin blockchain took advantage of its massive industry support and incorporated smart contract features. And the Rootstock sidechain is here to give the blockchain its much-needed push towards execution of smart contracts. By adopting RSK, users of the already dominant legacy coin stand to benefit from such features only available with the newer blockchain models as faster transaction processing speeds, a DApps building platform, and the ability to execute bitcoin blockchain-backed smart contracts. Looking at the Bitcoin community, however, one can’t help but notice the pockets of resistance and doubts forming around the effectiveness and reliability of the Sidechain. And these are majorly attributable to its reliance on the federation of signees as custodians of the locked coins. Only time will tell if this will change once RSK migrates to verification by merge-miners.

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 19 – IRS aiming at Crypto regulation; BTC over $10,000 once again

The crypto market rallied as Bitcoin moved above the $10,000 mark yet again. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,058, which represents a 2.54% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained 2.97% on the day, while XRP gained 0.04%.

The crypto market rallied as Bitcoin moved above the $10,000 mark yet again. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,058, which represents a 2.54% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained 2.97% on the day, while XRP gained 0.04%.

The crypto market rallied as Bitcoin moved above the $10,000 mark yet again. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,058, which represents a 2.54% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained 2.97% on the day, while XRP gained 0.04%.

ABBC Coin took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 29.24%. On the other side, MonaCoin lost 7.83% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance increased slightly as altcoins rose while BTC stood still in the past 24 hours. It is now at 62.55%, which represents an increase of 0.44% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization increased slightly in the past 24 hours. It is currently valued at $293.84 billion, which represents an increase of $6.87 billion when compared to the value it had yesterday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

With the 2019 US tax season just around the block, the IRS wants to leave nothing off the table. The IRS has invited crypto companies and advocates to show up for a March 3 summit in Washington DC. One of the aims of the summit is to determine how to “balance taxpayer service with regulatory enforcement.”

Topics that will be discussed at the summit include regulatory guidance as well as compliance, preparing tax returns, crypto exchange issues, and technology updates.

Honorable mention

Ripple (XRP) 

A recent Medium post from Whale Alert (blockchain monitor) showed Jed McCaleb, CTO of Stellar, sold more than 1 billion XRP between 2014 and 2019. Whale Alert, however, noted that compared with the trade volume XRP has on a daily basis, the amount McCaleb sold seems insignificant.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s went above $10,000 yet again. The bull presence increased and the price spiked from the $9,580 support level all the way to $10,290, breezing through the $9,735, $9,870 and $10,015 resistance levels. As the bulls got tired and overextended, bears took over and the price fell a bit. Bitcoin is now consolidating at the $10,100 level.


Bitcoin’s volume quite average when compared to the past week, while its RSI is now near the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $10,360                                         1: $10,015

2: $10,505                                         2: $9,870

3: $10,855                                          3: $9,735

Ethereum

Ethereum also had a green day, with gains similar to Bitcoin’s. The second-largest cryptocurrency increased in price from $244 all the way up to $286. The move broke the $251.3, $259.5, and $279 resistances with ease. The move, however, ended, and Ethereum’s price fell slightly, dropping under the $279 support (now resistance) level.


Ethereum’s volume is quite average, while its RSI level is just above the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $279                                                1: $259.5

2: $302                                              2: $251.3  

                                                           3: $240

Ripple

XRP performed worse than Bitcoin and Ethereum on the day. The third-largest cryptocurrency gained a bit of value, but actually stayed at the same level it was at 24 hours ago. It is currently consolidating and preparing for the next move, bound by the $0.31 resistance as well as $0.285 support level.


XRP’s volume is on the same levels it was at during the past week (if we disregard the few large candlesticks during the breakouts), while its RSI just under the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.31                                              1: $0.285

2: $0.324                                            2: $0.266

3: $0.332                                             3: $0.2454

 

Categories
Crypto Videos

Surviving a Bear Market! – Crypto Trading Strategies Part 1

https://youtu.be/DbtJs7LljaI

https://youtu.be/DbtJs7LljaI

Cryptos in a bear market – what to do? part 1/2

Ever since Bitcoin got created (over ten years ago), investors have learned how volatile the cryptocurrency market can be. As the years passed, bull and bear trends have constantly replaced one another, with little to no way of predicting or preventing them. Even the smallest details were enough to change the situation of the market completely.


The biggest growth that cryptocurrencies have ever seen came in 2017 when the bulls took over the market and brought coins to entirely new heights. Those that have invested prior to the bull run, made quite a fortune. However, those that invested while the prices were up — lost a fortune. This was due to a massive market crash that happened in early 2018. The downtrend continued throughout the year, all the way until now.

These days, experts predict a new bull run, as they believe that cryptocurrencies follow an established market cycle. Considering the situation and the state the crypto market was in, investors needed to develop various strategies in order to survive the bear market. These strategies were not necessarily about making a profit but rather preserving money. We will present four strategies that might work in such a situation, and these are as follows:

Shooting
Holding
Buy low – sell high
Diversification
Shorting


Short-selling, or “shorting,” occurs when traders predict that a market is about to decline. If their prediction is correct, they earn a profit as they bet on the market going down. This method works in many different markets and is not limited to just crypto markets.

The most well-known example of shorting happened in 1992 when an investor called George Soros predicted the drop of the British pound and made nearly $1 billion in profit.
Shorting has proven itself to be quite an effective way of making a profit. This way of trading is possible through CFDs (Contracts For Difference) as well as cryptocurrency margin exchanges. By employing this strategy, traders can sell assets that they do not own. Instead, they borrow assets and sell them at current prices, and then rebuy them at (hopefully) lower prices.
If the market moves down, their position goes up, which then lets traders buy the asset at a much lower price, and make a profit. Exchanges such as Bitmex offer its users shorting options based on how much Bitcoin they own.
Shorting doesn’t have to be used for just making a profit. It can also be used for hedging purposes.


If a trader is holding large amounts of a certain asset, such as Bitcoin, they can open a short position to decrease the risk of losing money in case the asset moves in the opposite direction.

Check out part 2 of our How to trade in a bear market guide to learn more about the strategies that can be employed in a downtrend.

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 18 – Altcoins on the rise yet again; India voting with Blockchain

The crypto market suffered decent losses over the weekend as BTC failed to break the $10,500 mark. The aftermath was BTC falling under $10,000 and altcoins dropping massively in price. However, the past 24 hours passed with altcoins rising (some more and some less) while BTC was stagnating. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,791, which represents a 0.13% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained 7.04% on the day, while XRP gained 3.06%.

The crypto market suffered decent losses over the weekend as BTC failed to break the $10,500 mark. The aftermath was BTC falling under $10,000 and altcoins dropping massively in price. However, the past 24 hours passed with altcoins rising (some more and some less) while BTC was stagnating. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,791, which represents a 0.13% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained 7.04% on the day, while XRP gained 3.06%.

The crypto market suffered decent losses over the weekend as BTC failed to break the $10,500 mark. The aftermath was BTC falling under $10,000 and altcoins dropping massively in price. However, the past 24 hours passed with altcoins rising (some more and some less) while BTC was stagnating. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,791, which represents a 0.13% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained 7.04% on the day, while XRP gained 3.06%.

Golem took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 20.23%. On the other side, WAX lost 7.51% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance dropped slightly as altcoins rose while BTC stood still in the past 24 hours. It is now at 62.11%, which represents a decrease of 1.47% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization increased slightly in the past 24 hours. It is currently valued at $286.97 billion, which represents an increase of $6.4 billion when compared to the value it had yesterday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

India’s citizens will be able to vote even while outside their city of registration, all thanks to a blockchain-based system of voting.

India’s Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora announced that the country, in hopes of increasing voter turnout, will implement a blockchain-based voting solution. Arora added that, in the 2019 elections, over 300 million eligible voters did not manage to cast their vote because they were either not politically engaged or could not make it to their city of registration on that day.

Honorable mention

IOTA updating their Trinity wallet 

As we recently reported, IOTA’s Trinity wallet had a security breach where many users reported their funds as missing. The IOTA Foundation has recently released a safe desktop version of the Trinity wallet, which will hopefully not suffer from the same security issues.

According to a Feb 17 update post, IOTA will update their Trinity application to securely check balances and transactions by using Trinity 1.4.1. Trinity 1.4.1. is a new version of the wallet that is designed to remove the detected vulnerability from the wallets.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s price failed to go above $10,500 due to the lack of bull pressure during the weekend, which was a great time for bears to take over. The largest cryptocurrency spent the weekend falling in price, and even touched the $$9,460 level on Feb 17. However, that price point was quickly rejected and its price rose above the $9,580 support line. The price went further up above the $9,735, which is where it is at right now.


Bitcoin’s volume is on a lower level than where it was over the past week. Its RSI is now on the lower side of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,870                                           1: $9,735

2: $10,015                                         2: $9,580

3: $10,360                                          3: $9,375

Ethereum

Ethereum had a worse than Bitcoin, as most of the altcoins dropped significantly in price. Its price fell from its highs of $287 all the way down to $237. However, the price got rejected, and bulls took over yet again. The story has changed in the past 24 hours, as Ethereum exploded to the upside and gained over 7%. Its price is now hovering around the $265 mark.


Ethereum’s volume is quite average, while its RSI level is around the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $279                                                1: $259.5

2: $302                                              2: $251.3  

3: $240

Ripple

XRP performed better than the stagnating Bitcoin on the day but worse than Ethereum, which increased its price by over 7%. The third-largest cryptocurrency tested the $0.266 support level a few times over the past couple of days. The support held up nicely, and the price now pushed past the $0.285 resistance as the bulls established their presence. XRP is now stable and consolidating at the $0.29 level.


XRP’s volume is on the same levels it was at during the past week (if we disregard the few enormous candlesticks during the breakouts), while its RSI is slowly rising to the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.31                                              1: $0.285

2: $0.324                                            2: $0.266

3: $0.332                                             3: $0.2454

 

Categories
Crypto Videos

Bitcoin & Cryptocurrencies During The Coronavirus Outbreak – What We Know & How To Trade!

https://youtu.be/aD724p8fJnY

https://youtu.be/aD724p8fJnY

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies during the coronavirus outbreak

Since the first patient was diagnosed on Dec 8 in Wuhan, the virus has claimed over 800 lives. There were nearly 34,000 confirmed cases.
Given China’s status as a cryptocurrency investment hub, professionals are concerned, to varying degrees, about coronavirus’s potential to disrupt the business as well as the impact on prices.


Optimistic market?

While Chinese cryptocurrency investors are a considerable market force, statistics say that it’s difficult to conclude a one-to-one correlation between the moves and the outbreak in the crypto market.

The whole market capitalization of cryptocurrencies is small when compared to the stock market, which means that many factors could make an impact on the market.
Most crypto investors from Asia seem to be retail investors, and they have (historically) become more active during major holidays such as the Chinese New Year. No one can predict the market prices, but based on past experiences, the prices tended to get more volatile around Chinese holidays. The virus outbreak could potentially lead to more cryptocurrency trading when it comes to retail investors as they would just stay at home and have more time to check the market.


It is also difficult to predict the market prices as digital assets such as Bitcoin have a unique set of return drivers, told Kostya Etus, senior portfolio manager at CLS Investments.
“Bitcoin isn’t viewed as a safe-haven asset like gold or cash and doesn’t have much in common with risk-on assets such as stocks either,” told Etus. “While most assets are specific to both risk-on and risk-off environments, in which you could predict the price reactions to certain events, Bitcoin is not one of such assets.”

Fluid situation

As crypto is highly speculative, the coronavirus could possibly have a significant impact on the global market, said Samuel Lee, a financial advisor at SVRN Asset Management.
“The crypto market could overreact to the outbreak since it tends to be quite irrational compared to the traditional financial market,” said Lee.
On the other hand, Lee also said that the outbreak is more likely to have a limited effect on the markets.
“We had seen Bitcoin go up at the time when there was a possibility of a war between Iran and the U.S.,” Samuel Lee announced. “However, the coronavirus might not have such a geopolitical influence.”
The World Health Organization was debating on whether to declare this outbreak as an international public health emergency but finally did after many deaths struck the infected.
The S&P 500 turned positive even after the WHO summoned an emergency meeting on how to tackle the coronavirus outbreak. However, the market is dropped slightly in recent days.
“Most previous regional epidemics seem to have had very limited impact on the equity market, except for SARS,” said Wilfred Daye, senior advisor of Bardi Co. However, coronavirus ended up surpassing SARS in deaths.
“When prolonged epidemics become a market-driving factor, the cryptocurrency market will surely react more sharply,” said Daye. Daye also worked as the former head of financial markets at OkCoin.

Conclusion

While there is no sure way to determine whether coronavirus will affect crypto trading, it is almost certain that it will not affect it negatively. The markets will either not be affected by this event, or have an increased volume due to Chinese investors staying at home and having more time to trade.

 

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic Forex Price Action

Calculate Risk-Reward along with Candle’s Attributes

In today’s lesson, we are going to demonstrate an example of the importance of risk-reward. To be successful in price action trading, traders are to calculate risk-reward before every single entry they execute. Let us find out from the charts below the importance of risk-reward.

In today’s lesson, we are going to demonstrate an example of the importance of risk-reward. To be successful in price action trading, traders are to calculate risk-reward before every single entry they execute. Let us find out from the charts below the importance of risk-reward.

In today’s lesson, we are going to demonstrate an example of the importance of risk-reward. To be successful in price action trading, traders are to calculate risk-reward before every single entry they execute. Let us find out from the charts below the importance of risk-reward.

The price heads towards the South with an average bearish momentum. Ideally, it is the sellers’ territory. However, it has come a long way. The buyers must wait for a strong bullish reversal candle to go long on this chart.

This is an extremely strong bullish reversal candle. The buyers may wait for the price to consolidate and produce a bullish reversal candle. Within a candle, things are very different now.

The chart produces a bearish inside bar. Thus, buyers may get more optimistic. They are to wait for a bullish engulfing candle closing above the last swing high to trigger a long entry. The price may travel towards the drawn level, which is a significant level of resistance on the chart.

The chart produces a bullish engulfing candle closing well above the last resistance. As explained earlier, the buyers are to set their stop loss below the last candle and trigger a short entry right after the candle closes. The question is whether they shall take a long entry here or not. Think about it. The last candle closes within the level of resistance. Technically, there is no space for the price for traveling towards the North unless it makes another breakout here. The reward is zero here.

As anticipated, the price consolidates again and struggles to make another breakout. The last candle comes out as a bearish candle. Thus, things do not look good for the buyers. It may change its direction. If it makes a bullish breakout, that is another ball game, though. Let us proceed to the next chart.

The price does not make a bullish breakout but changes its trend. It is the sellers’ territory again. By looking at the last candle, the sellers may trigger a short entry by setting their take profit at the last swing low.

In this lesson, we have seen that the trend-initiating candle and the signal candle both get 10 on 10. However, the chart does not offer an entry because there is no space for the price for traveling towards the upside. Consequently, the sellers take over and drive the price towards the downside. To sum up, we not only look at the candle’s attributes but also calculate risk-reward.

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic Cryptocurrencies

Your Complete Guide to Using Cryptocurrency Trading Bots

While trading cryptocurrency is fairly straightforward, it can be quite a draining task trying to keep tabs on market trends, considering that the crypto market never closes. On top of it all, the unpredictable market’s volatility doesn’t make things easier for both new and experienced crypto traders. This is where trading bots come into play. 

While trading cryptocurrency is fairly straightforward, it can be quite a draining task trying to keep tabs on market trends, considering that the crypto market never closes. On top of it all, the unpredictable market’s volatility doesn’t make things easier for both new and experienced crypto traders. This is where trading bots come into play. 

While trading cryptocurrency is fairly straightforward, it can be quite a draining task trying to keep tabs on market trends, considering that the crypto market never closes. On top of it all, the unpredictable market’s volatility doesn’t make things easier for both new and experienced crypto traders. This is where trading bots come into play. 

Generally, a trading bot is a special algorithm designed to read different market indicators and to mark trade entry and exit points, as well as complete trading transactions on behalf of the user. 

The biggest advantage of trading bots, besides deeply analyzing intricate trading data, is the accuracy and high speed at which they execute trading processes. Such a high degree of efficiency is appreciated by traders whose strategies involve time-sensitive processes such as limit order and stop-loss order. 

It’s easy to create your own trading bot, especially if you have a good grasp of coding and programming languages. But this doesn’t mean the less tech-savvy traders are locked out from trading using bots. 

There are a good number of pre-programmed trading bots that cryptocurrency traders can utilize and even customize to fit their trading strategies. 

But before you pick the first trading bot that shows up from your search, there are a few things you should consider to ensure you make the right decision. 

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Trading Bot

☑️Ease of Use

The idea of leveraging the efficiency of bots is to automate your trading process. However, it doesn’t mean that you will entirely leave the bot to handle everything. You need a trading bot that you can easily manipulate its functionalities and tweak it in line with your trading objectives. 

So, ensure your trading bot of choice has an intuitive interface, allowing you to control it without the need for any technical knowledge. 

☑️Security

Cryptocurrency, much like anything else on the cyber-space, is prone to hacking among other cybersecurity threats. Besides, using a trading bot means that you are giving the bot access to your funds. This can be risky, especially if the bot’s security is questionable. 

The true test of a bot’s security is examining the company behind the bot. Ideally, the bot should be built by reputable developers who stand behind their work. You can also check users’ reviews on the bot’s security. 

☑️Reliability 

Even with its efficiency, a trading bot isn’t helpful if it frequently experiences downtime or goes offline for whatever reason. An unreliable bot means that you’ll miss out on a trading opportunity. 

Again, users’ reviews can help you know whether a particular bot is reliable or not. 

☑️Profitability

The main reason for using a trading bot in the first place is to maximize profits by utilizing the bot’s efficiency. 

One way to know if a bot is profitable is by checking whether it allows for the customization of trading strategies. Also, look out for handy trading features that give you an edge when trading. 

☑️Compatibility with Exchanges

Although most crypto trading bots are compatible with major exchanges, it’s always good to ensure that your bot of choice is compatible with the exchange you want to trade on. 

Best cryptocurrency trading bots in the market:

1. Cryptohopper 

The definition of a reliable bot, as we know it, is changing thanks to this cloud-based cryptocurrency trading bot. The bot continues to trade even when your computer is switched off, ensuring you don’t miss any trading opportunity. Additionally, since the bot doesn’t run on local storage, your computer is able to maintain its peak performance, which isn’t the case when using typical bots.

Being cloud-based, you might be tempted to think that the bot is reserved for the tech-savvy traders. Well, that isn’t the case! In fact, Cryptohopper is among the first trading bots to integrate external trading signaller that allows novice traders to run the bot on autopilot. Experienced traders also have the freedom to configure their own trading signals based on multiple technical indicators. 

One of the most unique features of this trading bot is its backtesting capabilities that allow you to reconstruct trades that could have occurred in the past, using historical data and rules of a given trading strategy. The results allows you to determine the effectiveness of the strategy, saving you potential losses. Other handy features include trailing stops, intuitive templates, and technical analysis. The bot can also be configured to only sell with profit.

In addition to its features, Cryptohopper is compatible with major exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitfinex, Kraken, Bittrex, and even less popular ones like KuCoin, Poloniex, and Cryptopia. 

Cryptohopper charges a relatively affordable fee for using the bot. But first, you’re offered a 7-day free trial, so you can familiarize yourself with the features as you test out its profitability.  Once you are ready to use it, you can subscribe to the basic monthly plan dubbed “Explorer’ for just $16.58/month or upgrade to the “Adventurer” package for $41.58/month. The premium plan goes for $83.25 and comes with more functionalities compared to the other subscription plans. 

2. 3Commas

3Commas is a web-based trading bot that’s compatible with numerous exchanges. Recently, the company behind this bot collaborated with Binance exchange, a partnership aimed at ensuring convenient trading conditions. 

The bot has a user-friendly interface that allows you to replicate the trading strategies of other successful traders, as well as customize your own. Its best capabilities are the stop loss and take profit targets, which can be set simultaneously. You can also trade various cryptocurrencies at the same time to maximize your profits. 

To guarantee reliability, 3Commas can run both on Android and iOS devices, allowing you to monitor your trading progress on the go. The best part is that the bot runs 24/7 regardless of the device you are using. You can access all your trades across various exchanges conveniently from the trader’s diary that comes with the bot. This comes in handy in tracking your profits and other transactions. 

The bot’s monthly plan will set you back $29/month, the ‘Advanced Package’ gives you access to long and short algorithms as well as view and copy functionalities, for $49/month. The ‘Pro Package’ gives you access to all premium features such as margin trading bot, composite bots, and ability to use Bitmex, Binance Futures, and Bybit bots.

3. Gunbot 

Gunbot has been around for quite some time and not even once in its long history had the bot fallen victim to hacks or security breaches of users’ wallets. Professional and beginner traders will certainly have it easy using the bot due to its simple layout. If you encounter any problem when using the bot, you can seek help from the vast community of Gunbot users on their social media platforms. 

Nonetheless, even with its basic interface, the bot houses configuration abilities based on technical indicators used that are used by manual traders.

The unique selling point of this bot is that it charges a one-time, flat rate for using it. The fee is paid in terms of Bitcoins, usually 0.1BTC or 0.3 BTC, depending on the features you would like in your bot. Upon purchase, you’ll be offered the company’s digital coin known as Gunthy coin. With this coin, you can easily sell your bot, should there come a time you want to quit trading. 

Its only downside is that the bot cannot efficiently stop losses on a highly volatile market.

4. Gekko

Although it is user-friendly to traders regardless of their skill level, traders with advanced tech knowledge will get the most out of this free trading bot.

To start with, Gekko can be downloaded for free on GitHub – a platform designed for tech gurus. You don’t need any technical knowledge to navigate the platform and download the bot. However, being open-source software, a great deal of configurations and improvements require a good grasp of coding. 

Nonetheless, even without any tech skills, you can still use the bot to perform basic trading functions such as backtesting and set it on autopilot.  

The bot is designed to run on virtually all operating systems, including Linux, MacOS, and Windows, in addition to being compatible with major exchanges such as Bitfinex, Kraken, and Bitstamp. 

Conclusion

Trading bots offer the much-needed efficiency to stay on top of the dynamic cryptocurrency market trends. Compared to brick and mortar type of trading, trading bots make more rational trading decisions since they aren’t subject to emotional waves that come with the market fluctuations. 

To an extent, the lack of emotions can be a flaw since they aren’t attached to the money, and so, the bots can continue trading even when making losses. It’s for this reason that bots require periodic monitoring just to ensure they are trading in accordance with your overall trading goals. Most importantly, ensure you are familiar with all the trading basics before using any trading bot. 

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 17 – Altcoins take a dive as Bitcoin drops under $10,000; Craig Wright suing BTC and BCH?

The crypto market suffered some losses over the weekend as BTC could not break the $10,500 mark. However, BTC held up nicely compared to altcoins, which took a dive. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,796, which represents a 1.53% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 6.65% on the day, while XRP lost 9.6%.

The crypto market suffered some losses over the weekend as BTC could not break the $10,500 mark. However, BTC held up nicely compared to altcoins, which took a dive. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,796, which represents a 1.53% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 6.65% on the day, while XRP lost 9.6%.

The crypto market suffered some losses over the weekend as BTC could not break the $10,500 mark. However, BTC held up nicely compared to altcoins, which took a dive. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,796, which represents a 1.53% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 6.65% on the day, while XRP lost 9.6%.

MaidSafeCoin took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 9.29%. On the other side, HyperCash lost 20.93% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance increased slightly over the weekend as altcoins dropped more than the largest crypto by market cap. It is now at 63.58%, which represents an increase of 1.5% when compared to the value it had on Friday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization lost quite a bit of value over the weekend. It is currently valued at $280.57 billion, which represents a decrease of $19.69 billion when compared to the value it had on Friday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

Craig Wright, the person claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin better known as Satoshi Nakamoto, sent out a warning to BTC and BCH to stop using the Bitcoin database as they will face lawsuits if they continue to use it. He claims that both these networks might be violating the laws under the terms of Bitcoin’s original EULA as well as MIT License.

Wright, which is also the person behind Bitcoin SV, added that he will take control of his creation in his personal blog.

Honorable mention

NEO 

Major and well-known cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced that it will launch a new financial product: futures that track the crypto-asset NEO.

They made an announcement on Feb 16, which stated that the NEO/USDT futures will be available starting Feb 17. Traders will be able to select their leverage between 1x-50x. The exchange will pose fees on these trades, namely: 2% base initial margin rate, 0.5% liquidation fee and 1% base maintenance margin rate.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s price failed to go above $10,500 due to the lack of bull pressure, which was a great time for bears to take over. The largest cryptocurrency spent the weekend falling price-wise, and even touched the $$9,580 support line. However, that price point was quickly rejected and its price is now consolidating above the $9,735 support line.


Bitcoin’s volume is a tad bit lower than over the past week. Its RSI is now on the lower side of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,870                                           1: $9,735

2: $10,015                                         2: $9,580

3: $10,360                                          3: $9,375

Ethereum

Ethereum had a bad weekend as well, even worse than Bitcoin. Its price fell down from its highs of $287 all the way down to $237. However, the price got rejected, and bulls pushed it up to the $251.3 level. After some time spent deciding whether it will consolidate above or below this level, Ethereum fell below it. Its price is now right under the $251.3 resistance level.


Ethereum’s volume is on the level it was at during the bullish trend, while its RSI is currently hovering around the value of 40.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $251.3                                             1: $240

2: $259.5                                            2: $225.4 

3: $279                                              3: $217.7

Ripple

XRP performed the worst out of the top3 cryptocurrencies over the weekend. Even in the past 24 hours, its price dropped by almost 10%. The $0.345 price got rejected as the bears took over the market, and XRP moved down to $0.27. However, the bulls did not agree with this bottom and took the price back up a bit. XRP is now consolidating around the $0.28 line. It is bound by the $0.285 resistance and the $0.266 support.


XRP’s volume is on the same levels it was at during the past week, while its RSI is around the 35 level.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.285                                            1: $0.266

2: $0.31                                              2: $0.2454

3: $0.324                                             3: $0.235

 

Categories
Cryptocurrencies

What are Bitcoin Futures? 

Futures markets have, for long, been in existence in more established asset classes such as securities and bonds. However, it was not until late December of 2017 that Bitcoin futures were introduced on regulated trading avenues. Although it is the only one of their kind in the digital currency space, Bitcoin Futures is regarded as a significant milestone in bringing cryptocurrencies closer to mainstream investing. 

Futures markets have, for long, been in existence in more established asset classes such as securities and bonds. However, it was not until late December of 2017 that Bitcoin futures were introduced on regulated trading avenues. Although it is the only one of their kind in the digital currency space, Bitcoin Futures is regarded as a significant milestone in bringing cryptocurrencies closer to mainstream investing. 

Futures markets have, for long, been in existence in more established asset classes such as securities and bonds. However, it was not until late December of 2017 that Bitcoin futures were introduced on regulated trading avenues. Although it is the only one of their kind in the digital currency space, Bitcoin Futures is regarded as a significant milestone in bringing cryptocurrencies closer to mainstream investing. 

Similar to any commodity/asset futures, Bitcoin futures are not necessarily for maximizing profits but rather serve as a risk management tool to hedge against the risk of the volatile crypto market.  

To understand what exactly are Bitcoin futures, it demands we explore how typical futures contracts work in the first place. 

What are Futures Contracts?

Futures contracts are basically an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an underlying asset at a predetermined price on a precise future date. Once the contract expires, both parties are obligated to fulfill the terms of the contract at the agreed price, regardless of the actual price at the time of contract execution.

The parties involved usually take one of the two positions of a futures contract; long or short. If you take the long position, it means that you agree to buy the underlying asset/commodity at a specific price in the future, while the short position means the other party agrees to sell the asset at a specific price once the contract expires. 

The idea here is to hedge risks associated with adverse price movements of the commodity. If, for instance, you expect the price of a commodity to rise, you can take the long position in a futures contract at the current market price. Upon the expiration of the contract, if the price rose, you’ll have saved some money since the contract will be executed at the lower market price as agreed.   

In the same vein, futures can also be used to speculate price movements to realize profits. For instance, if the buying party anticipates that the price of the asset will rise leading up to the expiration date of the contract. They can profit off the price difference, if indeed the price rises, by selling the contract at a higher price to another party, before the expiration date. 

How do bitcoin futures contracts work?

Bitcoin futures are similar to traditional financial futures, in that they allow you to speculate the Bitcoin’s price without having to own any Bitcoin. 

Investors can either take the long position on Bitcoin futures contract, if expecting prices to increase or short position if they own Bitcoins and want to mitigate potential losses from the anticipated drop in BTC prices. 

For instance, say, you own 10 Bitcoins at a market value of $5,000 for each coin, and you anticipate the price will drop to $4,000 in two months. You can take a short position, and agree to sell your Bitcoins at the prevailing market price. Close to the expiration date of the contract, you can decide to buy back (long position) the futures at the now low BTC price, thus earning you $10,000 while saving you the losses caused by the drop in price. 

Bitcoin futures unique advantages

I. Regulation

The crypto universe is torn between two major groups; those that want the coin to remain unregulated and those that believe regulation of BTC is an essential step towards mass adoption. 

Bitcoin futures are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This places BTC on a path to mass adoption. It should be noted that CFTC is not as strict as its alternative, Security Exchange Commission (SEC). So, Bitcoin maintains a good deal of its liberal nature. 

II. Enhanced Liquidity

Thanks to the regulatory rules imposed by CFTC, Bitcoin futures are becoming more appealing to professional traders and big money Wall Street investors. With their more dollar volume input, BTC futures may become even more liquid than Bitcoin itself. 

III. Price Transparency

Bitcoin futures contracts are settled each trading day using a transparent reference price, which is written into all Bitcoin contracts in other markets. This will make it easy to use Bitcoin as a payment method since transparency creates a unified price that is essential in mitigating the volatility of spot prices. 

Getting started with Bitcoin futures trading

Now that you understand how to place and execute a Bitcoin futures contract, there are a few crucial things you need to know for profitable trading. 

Get Familiar with the Trading Rules

Trading Bitcoin futures is a bit different from trading typical equities and bond futures. This is due to the fact that they have a significantly higher margin requirement compared to a regular futures contract. 

Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and Chicago Board of Exchange (Cboe), the main Bitcoin futures trading avenues, requires one to put up a 35% and 44% margin, respectively, of the futures contract value. Although this margin can be achieved by trading other financial products on the exchange, the products aren’t offered to new traders. 

Margin is basically the amount of money a trader must pay first as collateral when taking a futures position. Usually, for most traded assets, the margin is under 10%. 

So, this is to say that if a contract was trading at $10,000 on CME, a trader wishing to take a long or short position, will have to pay $3,500. The trader can also be subjected to additional margin calls if the account falls below a certain level. 

Understanding Price Limits

Price limits are the maximum price ranges allowed for a futures contract in a trading session. Bitcoin futures are subject to limits on how far the price can move before triggering a temporary or permanent halt. 

In the case of Cboe, a contract will be halted for two minutes if the best bid, leading to the contract expiration date, moves 10% up or down the previous day’s prices. 

Build a Trading Strategy

Developing a trading strategy is fundamental when trading any type of financing product, including Bitcoin futures. 

Your trading strategy should revolve around what you want to achieve – prevent loss or make a profit- while paying attention to your risk appetite. For this reason, consulting an experienced futures broker is recommended, so as to design a personalized strategy that is aligned to your objectives. 

Besides, trading directly on CME is almost out of reach due to the high cost a trader is required to pay before they can trade on the platform. As an individual investor, you, therefore, need to find a broker who trades on CME. 

Takeaways

One of the best things about Bitcoin futures is that you don’t need a wallet nor BTC coins to participate in the trade. Bitcoin futures, like most futures contracts, are settled in cash equivalents, so no tangible coins are exchanged between parties, saving you the hassle of owning or storing digital coins. Traders collect their gains once the other party honors their contract obligation. Also, you can conveniently place a short without necessarily borrowing the underlying asset ( Bitcoins), meaning you don’t have to own any coins. 

As lucrative as it may sound, it is important to keep in mind that Bitcoin futures are a highly risky investment instrument. As such, it is advised to only invest that amount you can afford to lose, should the contract go opposite of what you initially speculated. However, there is always the option to close out a position before the expiration date, in an effort to minimize or entirely avoid losses. 

Categories
Crypto Videos

eToro Platform Review Part 3 – Copy Trading Pros!

https://youtu.be/HTq3z2brk7k

https://youtu.be/HTq3z2brk7k

eToro platform review – part 3/3

The last part of the eToro platform review will cover the social aspect of the platform as well as deposit and withdrawal methods.

eToro usability

eToro offers some essential features that make life much easier for novice traders. The platform provides a Virtual Portfolio, which basically is a ‘demo mode’ that lets users play a game of trading without actually trading and without staking any real money. This mode allows you to buy as much ‘virtual’ Bitcoin or any other crypto as you like and watch how each cryptocurrency performs. This is also a great way to test trading strategies.

eToro also provides a feature called copy trading. This feature is excellent for traders that aren’t confident in their ability to select winning trades consistently. This feature allows you to copy the best-performing traders in any asset market. You choose the trade amount, and the platform will mirror every single action the trader takes. Users, however, can make adjustments such as copying only new trades and not all currently open positions.

The layout of eToro’s platform is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and suited for casual investors. The control panel is located on the left-hand side of the screen, while the right-hand side shows charts, data, as well as profiles you’ll need to trade properly. eToro’s also has a mobile application mobile that allows you to do everything you can do on your desktop. The platform app is available for both Android and iOS devices.

eToro social trading

eToro’s copy trading, as mentioned before, enables you to copy the actions of profitable traders of your choosing. This feature makes you trade like any seasoned trader you want. You can follow specific traders, monitor their actions as they happen, and opt-in to copy everything they do if you want.

This feature makes eToro the social media platform that bridges the gap between new and seasoned traders and their favorite markets.

eToro deposit and withdrawal methods

Users can deposit funds on eToro by transferring fiat currency into their eToro account. You can use your credit or debit cards as well as a variety of other options, such as wire transfer and PayPal. However, one thing to note is that all fiat funds held by eToro are held in US dollars. If you deposit funds in EUR or GBP, eToro will convert it to USD, which will incur a conversion fee. If we are speaking about crypto, getting funds on the platform is much simpler. eToro wallet has the option to store cryptos that will be traded on the platform, so all you need to do is send the cryptos to that wallet.

Withdrawals work almost exactly the same as deposits. To withdraw fiat currencies, you can use credit and debit cards, bank transfer, and PayPal. However, there is a flat withdrawal fee of $25 for every withdrawal. As this is a pretty steep fee, make sure to plan your withdrawals to avoid extra costs. Withdrawing cryptocurrencies is as simple as transferring them out of the eToro wallet and onto another wallet.

Final thoughts

eToro is quite a unique social investment platform that offers a diverse variety of investment products to people that want to trade on the go. Although it does have much higher fees compared to regular crypto trading services, the benefits may justify the costs. All in all, eToro is an excellent place to get used to trading and learn the basics.

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic Crypto Guides

Is Crypto Money Laundering A Real Problem?

What is Money Laundering?

What is Money Laundering?

What is Money Laundering?

Money Laundering is the legitimization of money earned through illegal means. Generally, it is the separation of money obtained through illegal activities and mixed with the money made from legal sources like small businesses that accepts cash as the primary mode of payment. The legitimized money is again funneled to the criminal enterprises to fund illegal activities.

Different Ways of Money laundering

Money laundering is prevailing for many decades in our financial history. Governments have been continuously upgrading the technology to avoid the money laundering cases, especially to reduce the funding of illegal activities. Cash still occupies the first place when it comes to laundering the money. Because it is difficult to trace the money that is transacted in cash. Hence selling/buying drugs, trafficking, and theft are mostly dealt with cash.

Gold is another popular form of laundering money. Other than these, we have large banks that don’t question with the source of the wealth when the cash is deposited in their vaults, casinos, tax havens, etc. But ever since the revolution of Cryptocurrency has begun, this asset is paving new ways for money laundering. Let’s discuss more about this below.

Is Money Laundering Using Cryptos A Real Problem? 

There are significant concerns across most of the governments with regard to money laundering using cryptocurrencies. But most of them are not true when it comes to reality. It is estimated that since 2009 approximately $2.5 billion worth of Bitcoins are laundered, whereas ~ $100-$300 billion dollars are being laundered every year in different ways.

Hence, if we compare the stats, the amount of money laundered using Cryptocurrency is very sparse. Moreover, it is not advisable to launder money using Cryptocurrency as all the crypto networks are permissionless and transparent for literally anyone to check. It is easy to put together the Bitcoin transactions as the transactions are only pseudo-anonymous.

How are cryptocurrencies used to launder money?

These are some of the ways how Cryptocurrency is used for money laundering:

₿ While most of the cryptocurrencies are regulated there are some exchanges that aren’t. This means they don’t perform KYC procedures and none of the details of their customers is collected while they perform crypto transactions. This makes it challenging to match the transactions made by their customers to their id’s. When several such transactions are made using unregulated crypto exchanges, a degree of privacy is added which may eventually result in using that money for illegal activities.

₿ Exchanging the Cryptocurrency with different altcoins, thus making it difficult to know the origins of the actual cryptos. This can also quickly be done by participating in an ICO.

₿ Using Bitcoin ATM’s, we can deposit fiat cash and take Cryptocurrency at any place where a crypto ATM is available.

₿ As the cryptocurrency market is too volatile, it is easy to show that the illicit income is a result of some profitable venture or some other currency appreciation.

₿ With ever-increasing online payments using Cryptocurrency, we can easily create an online company which accepts Bitcoin and convert black money into clean Bitcoin.

How are the governments controlling the crypto money laundering?

Governments are taking various measures by developing multiple tools to link the transactions to the ids of the users using KYC details. Anti-laundering laws are amended to include cryptocurrencies. The US, Canadian, and European governments have made changes to the rules already. Some governments are, in turn, taking measures by legalizing cryptos so that the transactions would be made through regulated exchanges instead of fraudulent ones.

Finally, it can be said that, since the usage of digital cash is going to be inevitable, all measures are being taken to curb the negativities that we see in today’s world with fiat cash. If you have any questions, shoot them in the comments below. Cheers!

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 14 – Cryptos consolidating as BTC fails to break $10,500

The crypto market is slowing down to catch a breath from all the explosive growth it experienced lately. Most of the cryptos are stagnating or moving slightly down. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,186, which represents a 2.59% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 3.1% on the day, while XRP lost 2.46%.

The crypto market is slowing down to catch a breath from all the explosive growth it experienced lately. Most of the cryptos are stagnating or moving slightly down. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,186, which represents a 2.59% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 3.1% on the day, while XRP lost 2.46%.

The crypto market is slowing down to catch a breath from all the explosive growth it experienced lately. Most of the cryptos are stagnating or moving slightly down. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,186, which represents a 2.59% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 3.1% on the day, while XRP lost 2.46%.

THETA took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 21.06%. On the other side, Hedera Hashgraph lost 30.44% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance increased slightly in the past 24 hours. It is now at 62.08%, which represents an increase of 0.26% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization lost quite a bit of value in the past 24 hours but managed to stay above the $300 billion mark. It is currently valued at $300.26 billion, which represents a decrease of $7.2 billion when compared to yesterday’s value.

What happened in the past 24 hours

Coinbase Commerce, a platform that specializes in supporting cryptocurrency payments for internet retailers, added MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin to the list of available supported payment methods this week.

This integration will allow merchants all around the world to accept the DAI stablecoin as payment for goods and services. Coinbase Commerce will not be taking any extra fees.

Honorable mention

IOTA 

The IOTA Foundation warned its user base regarding the IOTA coin wallet Trinity. The reason for the warning is that the Trinity wallet is associated with some stolen funds.

After many IOTA holders reported their coins to be missing, the IOTA Foundation made an announcement stating that they will suspend its network node, called the Coordinator. The suspension will last until the entity explores the situation.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin fell down slightly as its price failed to go above $10,500. The move down was quite sharp and brought Bitcoin all the way down to $10,060. However, the price has recovered and is now consolidating at the $10,180 mark.


Bitcoin’s volume is at almost the same level since the start of the bullish trend. Its RSI dropped from the overbought territory line and is now at around the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $10,360                                         1: $10,015

2: $10,505                                         2: $9,870

3: $10,855                                          3: $9,735

Ethereum

Ethereum had a great week, as its price kept increasing day by day. The past 24 hours were a bit slower for Ethereum, though. Its price could not gain enough momentum to push for the $279 resistance level, so it started to consolidate at the $263 level. It is currently bound by the closest resistance point at $279 and the closest support sitting at $259.5.


Ethereum’s volume dropped quite a bit after it started consolidating. Its RSI dropped below the overbought territory recently and looks like it’s on its way down.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $279                                                1: $259.5

2: $289                                              2: $251.3 

3: $302                                              3: $240

Ripple

XRP has spent the last 24 hours testing its support levels. The third-largest cryptocurrency tried and failed to get above $0.324 level, which caused bears to take over and bring the price down a bit. XRP’s price fell to the $0.31 support level, which held up quite nicely. The cryptocurrency is now consolidating in the middle of the range, bound by $0.31 to the downside and $0.324 to the upside.


XRP’s volume fell to the average levels, while its RSI level is just below the overbought territory line.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.324                                            1: $0.31

2: $0.3328                                          2: $0.285

                                                            3: $0.266

 

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 13 – Altcoin season finally here? BTC right under $10,500

The crypto market is reaching new highs but is slowing down from the explosive growth. Some cryptos, however, are still charging straight ahead to the new highs. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,461, which represents a 1.03% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained a staggering 10% on the day, while XRP skyrocketed as well, with its 12.91%.

The crypto market is reaching new highs but is slowing down from the explosive growth. Some cryptos, however, are still charging straight ahead to the new highs. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,461, which represents a 1.03% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained a staggering 10% on the day, while XRP skyrocketed as well, with its 12.91%.

The crypto market is reaching new highs but is slowing down from the explosive growth. Some cryptos, however, are still charging straight ahead to the new highs. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,461, which represents a 1.03% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained a staggering 10% on the day, while XRP skyrocketed as well, with its 12.91%.

Hedera Hashgraph took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer yet again, with gains of 47.35%. On the other side, Synthetix Network lost 7.5% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance fell by almost a full one percent in the past 24 hours as most of the market moved up more than Bitcoin itself. It is now at 61.82%, which represents a decrease of 0.97% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization gained a great amount of value on the day and managed to pass the $300 billion mark. It is currently valued at $307.46 billion, which represents an increase of $8.01 billion when compared to yesterday’s value.

What happened in the past 24 hours

The cryptocurrency market passed the mark of $300 billion market capitalization as of today. Over the past month, this figure slowly and steadily increased from $218.4 billion to $303.1 billion. This represents a total market cap gain of 65.92% from the start of 2020.

Ever since the beginning of the year, the market cap was slowly rising, while Bitcoin’s dominance was slowly falling. Bitcoin’s dominance rate dropped from 68% to 62% as many altcoins managed to score double and even triple-digit percentage gains.

Honorable mention

Tezos 

Tezos (XTZ) is outperforming almost every single cryptocurrency in 2020 and is testing all-time highs. This wave of enthusiasm began in January and continues to this day.

The data from Coin360 and Cointelegraph Markets shows us that Tezos’ XTZ token managed to hit $3.24 on Feb. 12. This represents a 25% increase in the past twenty-four hours alone. Tezos also managed to gain over 54% in the past week alone, while it gained 150% in the year-to-date.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin managed to score yet another day of steady gains. Its price recently rose above $10,000 and stayed above it for a while. Now, Bitcoin is establishing its position above the line and even pushed up slightly to the highs of $10,500. Its price is currently right below this line. This push managed to get Bitcoin above the $10,360 and $10,460 resistances without any problem.


Bitcoin’s volume is at almost the same level ever since the start of the bullish trend. Its RSI is on the edge of the overbought territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $10,855                                         1: $10,460

2: $11,090                                         2: $10,360

                                                           3: $10,010

Ethereum

Ethereum is having a great day, as its price keeps going up. The second-largest cryptocurrency managed to score a two-digit gain in the past 24 hours. Its price moved from $217.5 on Feb 11 to $273 where it is now. The price is now approaching the resistance of $279, which might have trouble passing.


Ethereum’s volume extremely high at the moment, while its RSI level is deep into the overbought territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $279                                                1: $259.5

2: $289                                              2: $251.3 

3: $302                                              3: $240

Ripple

XRP finally joined other top cryptocurrencies in the bull season yesterday. However, it is quickly catching up what it lost over the past few days it was stagnating. XRP managed to score double-digit gains on the day, just like Ethereum. Its price moved up sharply but got stopped at the $0.324 resistance, where the bears rallied. It has tried to break this resistance a couple of times since but has not yet succeeded.


XRP’s volume increased over the past couple of hours, while its RSI level is deep in the overbought area.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.324                                            1: $0.31

2: $0.3328                                          2: $0.285

                                                            3: $0.266

 

Categories
Crypto Videos

eToro Platform Review – part 2

https://youtu.be/jlhHdGuXjuw

https://youtu.be/jlhHdGuXjuw

eToro platform review – part 2/3

This part of the platform review will take a look at the fees eToro charges to its customers. It will also take a closer look at the crypto security of the platform.

eToro fees

Compared to the ‘standard’ crypto platforms (such as Coinbase or Binance), eToro’s fee structure differs a bit.
As eToro is a brokerage service rather than an exchange, it doesn’t charge trading fees the same way regular crypto exchanges do. eToro users will have to pay something called ‘spread fees‘ when selling crypto, and when buying cryptocurrencies using leverage. To sum it up, if you want to sell (or margin trade) a cryptocurrency, you will have to pay a percentage of the sale price. This percentage fee derives from the ‘spread’ of the asset itself, which constitutes the difference between its ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ price.

As an example, selling one Bitcoin at a market price of $10,000, you’ll also have to pay 0.75% of the Bitcoin’s value (0.75% being the current BTC spread value). Assuming that 1 BTC equals $10,000, you’ll have to pay $75.
Also, traders that are taking out a leveraged position on a cryptocurrency will have to pay ‘overnight fees,’ which are also referred to as ‘rollover fees.’ As the trader is borrowing money from the company to hold a trading position, eToro charges them interest.
eToro Spread/overnight fees
The table below will show the spread and overnight fees of the platform:
Cryptocurrency

eToro Spread Fee


As shown above, the overnight fees for Bitcoin are pretty steep. As a comparison, traditional crypto platforms are much cheaper. Kraken charges 0.01% every four hours of holding a leveraged BTC/EUR or BTC/USD position. So, if someone would hold a position of 1 BTC for 24 hours, they would have to pay around 0.00056 BTC on Kraken, while eToro users would pay $0.0075 BTC.

Similarly, the spread fees on eToro make it more expensive than trading on traditional exchanges and platforms. Binance and Bitstamp each charge only 0.1% for every trade a user makes. On the other hand, eToro’s spread fee of 0.75% for BTC is noticeably more expensive.
On top of all this, eToro also charges withdrawal fees as well as inactivity fees. The withdrawal fee is a flat $25, with users being allowed to withdraw amounts of $50 or more. The inactivity fee is $10 per month and is charged to users whose account hasn’t been used for 4 or 12 months, depending on whether they have deposited any funds.

Security of the platform

Unlike many centralized, traditional exchanges, eToro has experienced no significant scandals in the past. However, security isn’t eToro’s major selling point. Up until 2017 and 2018, cryptocurrencies weren’t directly traded using eToro. Instead, users held and traded a contract for difference (CFD), which allowed eToro to hold no crypto whatsoever.
There was no need for any additional security measures which competing crypto platforms had to have.

Today, when it does offer direct cryptocurrency trading, the additional security layers are unknown to the public. The website doesn’t specify the crypto security measures it uses to protect customers’ assets.
One thing to note is that the eToro wallet, just like other major exchanges, keeps your private key. This means that you have to trust the platform to protect your funds. That being said, eToro is one of the most secure platforms when it comes to general compliance with financial regulation. The platform is being regulated by CySEC in Europe, FinCEN in the US, and the FCA in the UK.

Make sure to check out the third part of our eToro platform review, where we will talk about the platform usability, social trading as well as withdrawal and deposit methods.

Categories
Crypto Videos

Crypto Exchanges VS Crypto Brokerages Part 2 – Are You Getting The Best Deal?

https://youtu.be/b7e8dz6eDgk

https://youtu.be/b7e8dz6eDgk

 

Crypto exchanges VS. Crypto brokerages – part 2/2

 

Trading Exchanges

Trading on a crypto exchange is quite straightforward. All you need to do is select the desired trading instrument and then open your trade. As the chart unveils, you will watch your position. You can place buy as well as sell orders. Most exchanges try to offer some form of different orders, such as limit orders.
One of the advantages that exchanges have over brokerages is that you can pick among a lot of different cryptocurrencies to trade.


Brokers

Brokerage platforms will usually have more analysis tools that will benefit traders to achieve their goals. Most of them have advanced analysis tools, as well as several variations of orders. However, the brokerage platforms will not offer you as many cryptos to trade as an exchange. Brokers have different cryptocurrency pairs available, but they mostly offer only the most popular cryptos.

Brokers also tend to have quite tight spreads, unlike some of the less liquid exchanges. This feature prevents slippage from happening.
Another great advantage is that the brokerage platforms have many more features to offer in general. Unlike most exchanges, brokerages offer the option to put multiple charts in your view-window, track the quote flow, use sets of indicators, etc. Some brokerages even offer the option to create automatic trading strategies without any previous knowledge of coding.


Safety & Security Exchanges
Crypto exchanges can be divided into two:
Centralized exchanges! Decentralized exchanges!
Centralized exchanges are considered relatively unsafe. You can create a very strong password as well as enable 2-factor authentication. However, this does not guarantee 100% safety of funds. The main thing is that the account owner is not the owner of the keys that hold the funds. As the exchange holds all these keys, hackers only need to hack one account – the exchanges, rather than each account individually. Many exchanges got hacked, and most of these funds never got back in the hands of the original owners. While exchanges are increasing their security levels as well as introducing forms of insurance, this is far from what brokers have.
Decentralized exchanges are considered the safest way to trade cryptocurrencies, as you hold your own wallet keys. However, these exchanges are not yet big enough to have good liquidity, which creates large spreads and slippage.


Brokers

Trading cryptocurrencies with a regulated broker will guarantee some degree of safety to the clients. First of all, most brokers are regulated with a reliable authority, such as CySEC, FCA, SEC, etc. If a broker is regulated, its business is strictly audited. Regulated brokers are also members of investor compensation schemes, which ensures claims of clients and against brokerages that are unable to meet obligations due to financial downfall or bankruptcy.
However, one thing to note is that almost no brokers trade with real cryptocurrencies, but rather with derivates. While this is not necessarily bad, traders should know that using brokers will often result in trading with contracts that derive their value from cryptocurrencies, rather than with cryptos.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while cryptocurrency trading is considered high risk and due to their volatility, people can choose safer ways to ensure that their funds are always in the right hands. Exchanges and brokers have their advantages and disadvantages, and traders should pick very carefully based on their goals while trading.

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 12 – Bitcoin pushing to $11,000? Coronavirus affecting Crypto Mining

Cryptocurrency bulls returned to make another push towards new yearly highs. Bitcoin went back above $10,000. It was not the only crypto to gain, as almost every single cryptocurrency in the top100 is green on the day. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,344, which represents a 5.74% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained an astonishing 12.03% on the day, while XRP gained 7.28%.

Cryptocurrency bulls returned to make another push towards new yearly highs. Bitcoin went back above $10,000. It was not the only crypto to gain, as almost every single cryptocurrency in the top100 is green on the day. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,344, which represents a 5.74% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained an astonishing 12.03% on the day, while XRP gained 7.28%.

Cryptocurrency bulls returned to make another push towards new yearly highs. Bitcoin went back above $10,000. It was not the only crypto to gain, as almost every single cryptocurrency in the top100 is green on the day. Bitcoin is currently trading for $10,344, which represents a 5.74% increase on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained an astonishing 12.03% on the day, while XRP gained 7.28%.

Hedera Hashgraph took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 151.1%. On the other side, Kick Token lost 35.99% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser. Kick Token is holding this position for the second day in a row.

Bitcoin’s dominance fell in the past 24 hours as most of the market moved up more than Bitcoin itself. It is now at 62.79%, which represents a decrease of 0.74% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization gained a great amount of value on the day. It is currently valued at $299.45 billion, which represents an increase of $19.03 billion when compared to yesterday’s value.

What happened in the past 24 hours

Mainstream financial entities are starting to look at Bitcoin as a non-correlated asset that could be used as a hedge. Morgan Creek Digital Co-founder Anthony Pompliano promoted this concept/viewpoint on Bitcoin for over a year.

If Bitcoin is unlikely to correlate to economic factors, or other traditional equities and fixed income securities, then it (Bitcoin) could serve as a tool for portfolio diversification,” said Bluford Putnam, the chief economist at the CME.

Honorable mention

Bitcoin (And how Coronavirus affects mining) 

The slowdown in the growth of mining difficulty shows that miners had to pause upgrading their equipment as the epidemic prompted Chinese authorities to put certain areas into quarantine. This caused mining equipment makers to delay production as well as shipments.

Mining difficulty is adjusted on Feb. 11 to a level of 0.52% higher than 14 days earlier. While still an increase, this is a significant drop from the growth rates of 4.67% and 7.08%, which were recorded during the 2 adjustments prior to the ones listed.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

The first bull wave that took Bitcoin over $10,000 failed after the bulls couldn’t push the price above $10,200. After some time spent in a downwards trend, Bitcoin spiked up yet again. This time, the price broke $10,200 and went all the way to the $10,360 resistance. Bitcoin bulls and bears are currently fighting to push the largest crypto above this resistance level or to keep it under.


Bitcoin’s volume is currently quite high, while its RSI level is dangerously close to the overbought territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $10,360                                         1: $10,010

2: $10,460                                         2: $9,872

3: $10,855                                         3: $9,732

Ethereum

After a short term downside correction, Ethereum (just like Bitcoin) found support near the $217.5 area. Bulls came to the market aggressively and pushed the price above the $240 resistance. It is currently stabilizing between the $240 support and the $251 resistance level.


Ethereum’s volume is on nearly the same level it was at over the whole uptrend that started on Feb 4. Its RSI on the 4-hour time frame has entered the overbought territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $251.3                                             1: $240

2: $259.5                                            2: $225.5 

3: $279                                               3: $217.5

Ripple

XRP finally joined other top cryptocurrencies and went into the bull mode, at least for a short while. Its price, after many failed attempts, broke the $0.285 resistance and is now consolidating right above it. The upwards price move was not steep, but rather gradual and strong. It was not accompanied by a big volume increase.


XRP’s volume is average at best, while its RSI level is approaching the overbought territory.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.31                                              1: $0.285

2: $0.324                                            2: $0.266

3: $0.3328                                          3: $0.2454

 

Categories
Cryptocurrencies

How to Choose and Accept Cryptocurrency for Your Business

As with any other technology, the digital currencies have revolutionized not just the tech world but also the health, finance, and manufacturing industries. 

As with any other technology, the digital currencies have revolutionized not just the tech world but also the health, finance, and manufacturing industries. 

As with any other technology, the digital currencies have revolutionized not just the tech world but also the health, finance, and manufacturing industries. 

Their disruptive aspect can be linked to the underlying protocol, blockchain, which most cryptos run on. 

This technology delivers faster and more secure transactions compared to using fiat currencies. Moreover, there are no central authorities such as banks or government, involved in the transaction. As a result, this lowers the transaction fees saving you money in the long haul.

But, ever since the Bitcoin craze back in 2017, there has been an influx of cryptos in the market. For any business owner, the overwhelming number of cryptocurrency choices can be daunting, especially with reports that some coins are a Ponzi scheme. 

Criteria used to choose the right crypto for your business

So, which criteria should business owners use to choose the right cryptocurrency for their enterprise?

☑️Value of the Coin

Choosing a coin that has high value shields your business from losses caused by the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies. This is especially true since highly valued coins tend to be more stable, meaning their prices don’t change radically. 

The value of a crypto is directly related to its demand. The higher the demand, the higher the value of the coin. 

☑️Usability

The usability of a coin can be viewed in different spectrums, but it all boils down to how users interact with a coin. 

The most basic usability aspect of a coin is in terms of the number of people using the coin. A popular digital coin certainly has a more significant number of users compared to a less popular coin. The idea here is to choose a digital coin that has a good number of users. This way, you can be assured that most of your customers have access to the coin of your choice. 

Also, usability entails the user-friendliness of a cryptocurrency. A coin with a complex interface can be intimidating to a particular demographic of your customer base, thus limiting your products or services to the tech-savvy clientele. 

A coin with an intuitive interface should be easy to perform simple functions such as opening and funding the wallet as well as sending and receiving funds. 

☑️Transfers

One of the primary reasons behind businesses accepting payments in cryptocurrencies is due to the fast transaction associated with the payment process. 

It’s common for business owners to wait for days or even weeks for payments made using a debit card, to reflect in their bank accounts. This can be frustrating, especially if you have urgent bills to pay or need to make a payroll.

While cryptocurrencies offer faster transactions than conventional currency, some aren’t as fast as you would wish. Take bitcoin, for instance. The network on which it operates has a scalability problem, which translates to slower transactions due to its limited blockchain size and frequency. 

Of course, there are altcoins such as Monero, and Litecoin that offer faster transactions and even charge less than bitcoin for sending and receiving funds. These coins take less time to confirm a block, amping up the transaction process. 

How to Accept Cryptocurrency for your Business

There are three main ways of accepting cryptocurrency as a form of tender for products and services. 

Direct Deposit

If you only have a small number of customers using cryptocurrency, direct deposit works best. All you need is to create a wallet and share its address with your customers. 

Ideally, you should partner with an exchange platform to help you create a wallet. This way, it will be easy for you to link your wallet to your bank account, so as to withdraw funds in fiat currency. 

Besides crypto exchanges, you may consider creating a versatile digital wallet with popular providers such as Exodus and Jaxx. With one of these wallets, you can accept any type of cryptocurrency for efficient conversion to conventional currency. 

To make the transactions easier for your customers, you should present your wallet in the form of a QR-code. Customers will just scan the code with their phones, and transfer the agreed amount directly to your wallet. You can request a wallet QR-code from the exchange site you’ve partnered with or use an independent app dedicated to creating one for streamlined cryptocurrency payments. 

Point of Sale (PoS) Equipment

A cryptocurrency PoS equipment is accompanied by a piece of software that automatically links your wallet to your bank account, for a seamless payment experience. The equipment also supports cryptocurrency-based debit cards and even offers withdrawal services in the form of fiat currency. 

Alternatively, instead of buying a cryptocurrency  PoS terminal, you can create a merchant digital wallet and link it to your existing PoS system. Unlike the traditional digital wallet, a merchant wallet comes with unique functionalities that make it compatible with your accounting systems for easy bookkeeping. 

Once you’ve created a merchant digital wallet with your preferred provider, you’ll then receive a public address, private key, and a QR-code. Now, using the instructional manual, integrate these details to your existing PoS system, invoices, and shopping cart. 

Plug-ins and Cash Out

Exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase offer plug-ins that are installed into your online store. It becomes easier to integrate these plug-ins if your store is on popular platforms such as Shopify, WordPress, or eBay. 

Customers can, therefore, shop from your store and check out using crypto, which is then deposited to your wallet address or bank account. 

Boost Your Business by Accepting Cryptocurrency Payments

Accepting cryptocurrency payments gives your business a competitive edge, as technology becomes more integrated into all business operations. Being an international currency, cryptos are also a gateway to broadening your market outreach. 

Of course, there are a few drawbacks with this payment method. Volatility remains the biggest downside to cryptocurrency payment for business services. With such unprecedented price swings, the most viable solution is to convert any cryptos to fiat currency, immediately upon receipt to protect yourself from loss of value. 

In addition to volatility, you should also maintain compliance with regulatory tax schemes that are subject to your jurisdiction. 

Nonetheless, business owners are advised to keep an eye out for cryptocurrency trends and consult experts in the field, to understand every aspect of digital currencies before integrating them into payment systems. 

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic

Bitcoin’s Path to $1 Million: A Mere Speculation or Inevitable Reality? 

nEver since Bitcoin hit an all-time high bull run in 2017, there has been speculation about its potential to hit the $1 million mark. 

nEver since Bitcoin hit an all-time high bull run in 2017, there has been speculation about its potential to hit the $1 million mark. 

nEver since Bitcoin hit an all-time high bull run in 2017, there has been speculation about its potential to hit the $1 million mark. 

John McAfee, with all his controversial personality and expertise in the tech world, has been at the front-seat, fuelling the $ 1 million BTC price speculation. In fact, he’s part of the reason why bitcoin reached $20,000 in December 2017, thanks to his bold prediction on Twitter in November of the same year.

Well, he didn’t exactly predict that it would be worth the $20,000 but instead claimed that the coin would be worth as much as $500,000 by the end of 2020. Although he didn’t get into the specifics of how he had arrived at that number, the prediction spiked a mass adoption of BTC in 2017, resulting in the bull run. 

A few months later, McAfee doubled up the prediction to a $1 million price target. Recently, other notable industry players such as PayPal director & CEO, Wences Caseres, threw in their weight on the prediction, saying it’s possible for BTC to hit $1 million in the next to seven to ten years. 

The Critics

Of course, there are a good number of respectable individuals opposed to the idea that bitcoin is a sound investment, leave alone the price prediction. Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, describes Bitcoin as a store of fear, not a store of value. Others who doubt bitcoins potential include JP Morgan and Chase Bank CEO Jamie Dimon and Paul Krugman, an esteemed economist and columnist for The New York Times. 

Despite the harsh skepticism facing Bitcoin’s future, it doesn’t mean it is entirely impossible for the cryptocurrency to grow in value, and even surpass the $1 million mark. 

But before that, there are several hurdles the digital currency must overcome to place itself on a path to the highly anticipated price target. 

Scaling Problem

For Bitcoin to experience any massive growth, its market capitalization has to grow first. Case in point, since the first real Bitcoin transaction back in 2010, the infamous Pizza purchase, the crypto’s market cap rose by a whopping 2,300%. This happened after a few weeks of increased adoption/transactions by the general public, who were eager to get a piece of this new digital currency. The increased market cap resulted in an increased BTC price from just $0.0025 to $0.06. 

Unfortunately, Bitcoin’s block size is insufficient to support the high number of transactions required to boost its market cap and eventually achieve the $1 million target. The actual block size is 1 MB, which often causes sluggish transactions even with the current of $178 billion. Keep in mind that the $1 million BTC argument dictates that the market cap must amount to approximately $16 trillion, an equivalent of 13% of global GDP! 

There have been attempts to solve this problem, but its success hasn’t materialized. Two Bitcoin developers created a two-layer solution dubbed the Lightning Network (LN). This off-chain payment tool makes the transfer of BTC funds faster, except that the payment information doesn’t touch the main blockchain unless the transaction link is closed. 

Besides, LN doesn’t completely solve the high bitcoin transaction fee problem, which could jeopardize the network’s adoption among the BTC community. 

Regulation from External Authorities

In line with the idea that there has to be a massive adoption of BTC to propel it to high price points, the current regulatory environment hasn’t been doing any good to the Bitcoin community. As such, more people are finding it hard to fully invest in Bitcoin, considering the negative reviews from government institutions. 

To put into perspective, consider the BitLicense law imposed by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS). According to the law, any start-up centered around bitcoin will have to pay an exorbitant fee of about $5,000 to acquire a business permit/license. The worst bit is that it’s not guaranteed that the NYDFS will approve their license request. 

On top of that, there are states with varying bitcoin taxation laws, some of which are unfair. In such states, BTC is treated as an asset, thus subject to capital gain tax. The idea behind this is due to the unpredictable volatility of BTC, which. in an ideal case, would result in a bitcoin holder’s net worth increasing if the coins price were to increase in the first place. Consequently, this discourages business owners who would like to accept Bitcoin payments for their products or services. 

While the government’s interference is aimed at creating a sound atmosphere in the cryptocurrency space, it doesn’t come out well for people who loved Bitcoin’s decentralized nature. That said, there needs to be a bilateral trust between the Bitcoin community and the government, for the digital currency to reach $1 million in value. 

Banking Support

Probably, the major hurdle standing on the way to 1$ million BTC value is the lack of dependable liquidity. If the currency is to be accepted by the masses, they need a reliable option to change their fiat currency to BTC and vice versa. 

Unfortunately, in many countries, the central bank bars the subsidiary banks from offering liquidity options to BTC users. Some credit card companies even probit their users from purchasing cryptocurrencies. There have also been numerous cases of frozen accounts for those trading cryptocurrencies. 

Such strict laws not only discourage new investors but also causes panic selling among the existing Bitcoin holders, resulting in a bearish run in the crypto market. 

The Rationale Behind $ 1 Million BTC Price Prediction

Regardless of the seemingly impossible hurdles to overcome, Bitcoin still stands a chance to come close if not reach the ambitious price target. 

Let’s objectively look at some underlying factors that make the price target more of a reality than a speculation

Technological Growth

In the theoretical stages of technological growth and adoption, every new tech solution or tool starts out with an innovator as the pioneer and first user. Gradually, the tool/solution grows and becomes adopted by the first group of people known as early adopters. The early adopters aren’t big in numbers, but the subsequent mid and late adopters are often in large numbers, thus giving the tech solution in the mainstream attention and usage. 

Bitcoin by itself is a technological solution which in this case, the majority of the coins are held by the early adopters. These are a small group of people who invested in Bitcoin when it was worth pennies. As such, it’s quite safe to say that Bitcoin hasn’t yet achieved mainstream usage and adoption as spelled out in the developmental stages of technology solutions. 

More so, big corporations and the government have realized the importance of blockchain, the underlying cryptocurrency technology, as evident from the launch of Libra ( a digital currency expected to be launched by Facebook, soon). 

The cryptocurrency industry as a whole will, therefore, gain public acceptance placing BTC on its path to $1 million. 

Cushion Against Financial Crisis

Financial recession often results in loss of wealth among the citizens of the affected country. Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency, therefore, stands as a cushion against unpredicted financial crisis since it lacks a central authority controlling it. 

This idea is even more practical in countries such as Zimbabwe and the Philippines, where the local currency has lost much of its value. Bitcoin and other cryptos are an alternative store of value medium, to citizens in such countries. 

The higher the number of people safeguarding their wealth in cryptos, the more likely bitcoin will grow market cap and finally achieve a $1 million valuation. 

Conclusion

Judging from the past bull run, it’s easy to see why Bitcoin’s future cannot be accurately predicted. There are factors beyond the rational market principles that have and could influence Bitcoin prices, making the coin’s price growth subject to speculations. 

Nonetheless, for a stable growth towards high price points, Bitcoins must overcome the setbacks stated above. Only this way, and in combination with factors favoring its growth, will Bitcoin hit and surpass the $1 million price target with little volatility. 

Categories
Crypto Education

eToro Platform Review – Part 1

https://youtu.be/3PB4917lntM

https://youtu.be/3PB4917lntM

eToro platform review – part 1/3


eToro is one of the most popular trading platforms in the world. It lets users trade various assets, such as traditional stocks, shares, as well as major cryptocurrencies. When compared to other crypto trading services, it is a fully regulated exchange with a user-base of more than 10 million registered users.

eToro in a nutshell


eToro is aimed at investors who are new to the investment world, as their interface does not consist of many analysis tools. They are rather a simple platform that gives people the option to buy or sell assets on the go. It is a great one-stop-shop as it offers a variety of assets. However, advanced traders may also benefit from eToro by using margin trading. Less experienced traders have the option to use eToro’s social trading where they can follow seasoned investors, their research, as well as insights.

eToro offers various instruments, including:
16 cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, BCH, XRP, DASH, LTC, ETC, ADA, EOS, NEO, XLM, IOTA, TRX, ZEC, BNB. XTZ).

47 currency pairs (including EUR, USD, CAD, GBP, AUD, PLN, SGD, SEK, JPY, and many others).

13 stock index CFDs (SPX 500, UK100, NSDQ100, China50, AUS200 and others).
Over 1300 stock CFDs.
83 commodity CFDs (including oil, gold, silver, copper, natural gas, and platinum).
The U.S. customers are allowed to trade cryptocurrencies only for now.

eToro background

The company was founded in 2006 by Yoni Assia (Chief Executive Officer and Founder) and Ronen Assia (Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder). eToro can be proud to say that it has a history stretching further back than the whole crypto industry itself. It started its life as an online FOREX brokerage.

It made its first move towards crypto in January 2014, when it started to offer Bitcoin trading to their user base of three million. At the time, the crypto trading they offered was trading CFD’s, which meant that traders didn’t purchase the underlying asset. However, eToro (slowly but surely) switched to offering direct crypto trades in September 2018. When buying crypto on eToro, you actually own it as well as withdraw the cryptocurrencies you buy into your eToro wallet.
eToro boasts over ten million users today, with its growth primarily driven by the smart marketing moves and the crypto industry. On top of that, its accessibility and great customer support make eToro expand even further.
Check out part 2 of our eToro platform guide, where we will talk about the fees, spreads, and security of the platform.

Categories
Crypto Guides

Hyperledger Technology – The Enterprise Blockchain Solution

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

Blockchain is proving to be ubiquitous in a short period from its invention, with the first significant application being a cryptocurrency. Just like how we use HTML while browsing the internet today, blockchain is going to be the hidden layer in many applications, soon making users not even know that blockchain is implemented in the software we are using. Hyperledger technology is an open-source umbrella project of different blockchain platforms and related tools developed by the Linux Foundation to address enterprise-level issues with blockchain technology.

Since blockchain is the underlying technology of the Hyperledger project, it has been made open source so that anyone can contribute to the code, thus making the development faster to meet the enterprise-grade requirements. IBM, Intel, and SAP Ariba are other significant contributors to the Hyperledger project. There are different platforms available in Hyperledger Technology, prominent ones being Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, and Hyperledger Indy. Let us have a look at these platforms in detail below:

🧬 Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is the first project proposed to Linux’s Hyperledger project, where IBM has made a significant contribution. This platform is best suitable for healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and capital markets. The Fabric project can bring transparency and clarity to the real world. Tuna fish is a 40-billion-dollar market plagued with a lot of illegal activities right from the source to the consumer plate.

Using the Hyperledger Fabric project ‘Supply Chain of Tuna fish’, we can track each part of the process. While there will be many actors playing their role in the network, not every actor is know about the entire process. Only the fisher and say the owner of the restaurant, which uses the tuna, will be updated with the whole process as requires so that they can transact privately. Hyperledger Fabric V2.0 is the latest standard release in Jan 2020.

🧬 Hyperledger Sawtooth

Intel made most of the contributions to the Hyperledger Sawtooth project. The Sawtooth platform supports the dynamic change of the consensus algorithm, which is very helpful at the enterprise level. This enables the enterprises and consortia to make transactions, consensus algorithms that support their business needs.

Also, another unique characteristic of Sawtooth is that it supports both permissioned and permissionless blockchain networks. Like Fabric, Sawtooth is also used in the Supply chain. Sawtooth Marketplace is used for trading digital assets in specified amounts, whereas Sawtooth Private UTXO is used for digital asset creation and trading. Version 1.2 is the latest release of Sawtooth.

🧬 Hyperledger Indy

Hyperledger Indy is a unique platform that stores digital identities of different blockchains and distributed ledgers. The stored digital identities are interoperable across various domains and different blockchains. It indeed acts as a decentralized repository of identities, which drastically helps in reducing identity thefts if used across the globe.

To quickly deploy these platforms at the enterprise level, different tools are developed as well where Hyperledger composer is the one used to deploy Hyperledger Fabric, but it is almost dead now. Hyperledger Caliper, Cello, Explorer, Quilt are some other tools that are used.

Conclusion

Hyperledger, as an enterprise-grade platform for blockchain implementations in various industries, is encouraging the adaptation of blockchain widely. This being an opensource project, many people are contributing to the source code, which is, in turn, moderated by the governance board and approves the changes in a very efficient and transparent way. The Hyperledger umbrella has many projects in the pipeline, which will bring more efficiency in the business, thus saving millions in cost.

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 11 – Bear Cycle or just a Bump before the Major Bull Run?

Bitcoin turned away from its $10,200 resistance as bears took over the playing field and the crypto market as a whole. As a result, most of the cryptocurrencies ended up in the red over the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,757, which represents a 3.22% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 2.6% on the day, while XRP lost 3.72%.

Bitcoin turned away from its $10,200 resistance as bears took over the playing field and the crypto market as a whole. As a result, most of the cryptocurrencies ended up in the red over the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,757, which represents a 3.22% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 2.6% on the day, while XRP lost 3.72%.

Bitcoin turned away from its $10,200 resistance as bears took over the playing field and the crypto market as a whole. As a result, most of the cryptocurrencies ended up in the red over the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,757, which represents a 3.22% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 2.6% on the day, while XRP lost 3.72%.

OKB took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 47.04%. On the other side, Kick Token lost 19.27% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance fell down slightly in the past 24 hours. It is now at 63.53%, which represents a decrease of 0.22% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization lost some value as the market turned red. It is currently valued at $280.42 billion, which represents a decrease of $4.62 billion when compared to yesterday’s value.

What happened in the past 24 hours

Italy might be showing a slight degree of hostility towards the crypto industry, as it’s securities regulator ordered a shutdown of six foreign exchange websites as well as two crypto investing and derivative trading sites.

The Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa (CONSOB), which is operating as a securities regulator in Italy, has accused these websites of violating their Mifid2 as well as the Consolidated Law on Finance for providing illegal trading products and services.

Honorable mention

Ethereum – Anonymous? 

A part of the Ethereum network became anonymous on Feb 1. This happened due to the implementation of the Aztec protocol, which was created and launched on the network’s main net by Thomas Walton-Pock and his team.

Aztec protocol is designed to provide a high level of privacy on the ETH network, as well as to, hopefully, significantly reduce transaction costs.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Bitcoin fell under $10,000 as bears took over the market at the $10,200 mark. The move down was quite sharp, and placed Bitcoin below a few key support levels (now resistance levels). After falling below $10,000, Bitcoin dropped all the way to $9,700. It has then been stopped by the bulls and returned above $9,732 support. However, Bitcoin is testing the support level quite hard, and is currently right below it.



Bitcoin’s volume is currently on average levels, while its RSI dropped from the overbought territory sharply. It is currently in the lower portion of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,872                                           1: $9,732

2: $10,010                                         2: $9,585

3: $10,360                                         3: $9,380

Ethereum

Ethereum also stopped moving upwards after a weekend of great gains. After reaching $230, its price started moving sideways or slightly towards the downside. However, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum did not have a major test of its support levels and kept above the $217.5 support.


Ethereum’s volume is on the lower side at the moment, while its RSI is hovering around the middle of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $225.5                                             1: $217.5

2: $240                                              2: $198 

3: $251.3                                           3: $193.6

Ripple

While most cryptos exploded to the upside over the weekend, XRP spent the time mostly by being in consolidation mode. However, it made one (unsuccessful) attempt to break the $0.285 resistance level. The price continued to consolidate at the levels between $0.285 resistance and $0.266 support, which is where it’s at now as well. However, XRP might be testing its closest support level as its price is moving towards the downside and forming a small downtrend.


XRP’s volume is average at the time of writing, while its RSI level is in the lower parts of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.285                                            1: $0.266

2: $0.31                                              2: $0.2454

3: $0.324                                            3: $0.235

 

Categories
Crypto Videos

Crypto Exchanges VS Crypto Brokerages Part 1 – Are You Getting The Best Deal?

https://youtu.be/mic-T4wSX4c

https://youtu.be/mic-T4wSX4c

 

Crypto exchanges VS. Crypto brokerages – part 1/2

There are two ways that people can trade cryptocurrencies:Over an exchange Or With a broker.

This article will touch upon the basic things a trader has to do when trading cryptos over an exchange, as well as by using an online broker.
Extreme volatility and virtually unlimited profit potential that the crypto market brings got people going crazy about it. As a result, a lot of products and services appeared in the market. Trading via a broker or via an exchange has some differences, and they are not completely clear to the general public.


Signing up/Verification

Exchanges
The process of signing up to a crypto exchange is (in most cases) is as simple as registering on their website. Users are required to provide their email, create a password, and confirm the email address. Some exchanges might require a KYC verification, where you would be required to submit a valid ID as well as a proof of residence. The exchanges usually respond to verification requests within a day. There are, however, some cases where you don’t have to get verified once signed up.

Brokers
Signing up with a broker is, just like with exchanges, not a very difficult thing. In fact, the signup process is almost the same as on a regular exchange. On the other hand, in order to deposit funds and start trading, you will need to verify your account. As a rule, you will have to submit scan copies of either one or two documents: A valid ID or Proof of address.
The verification process is done much slower than on exchanges, as the average time of the verification is 15-days.


Deposits and Withdrawals

Exchanges
Depositing fiat to crypto exchanges can often be a hassle. Most exchanges do not accept fiat-to-crypto purchases. While there are many ways to buy cryptocurrencies out there, these transactions often have high fees and commissions.
On the other hand, withdrawing funds from exchanges can go two ways. If you want to withdraw your cryptocurrencies to a non-exchange wallet, this can be done easily and cheaply. However, withdrawing cryptocurrencies to a fiat currency account can be quite a hassle. Withdrawing cryptocurrencies to a bank account can be an issue as quite a lot of banks don’t accept money from crypto exchanges. The reason for this is that they can’t determine the origin of such money and transactions.

Brokers
Unlike cryptocurrency exchanges, depositing with a broker is much easier. A broker’s client offers a large number of ways to make a deposit. This includes credit cards, e-wallets, bank accounts, etc. You can deposit US dollars, euros, and often times, some other currencies. The ease of depositing simplifies the whole process quite a bit. On top of that, there are no deposit fees whatsoever on almost all brokerages.
As for withdrawals, broker terms are often more attractive than the terms that a cryptocurrency exchange has. While many exchanges pride themselves with low trading fees, they earn money on high withdrawal fees. However, brokers usually charge a fee of between 0% and 3%. This number can vary depending on the withdrawal method.

Check out our part 2 of Crypto exchanges VS. Crypto brokerages to find out more about the differences between the two in terms of trading as well as safety protocols.

 

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 10 – Bitcoin fighting to regain $10,000 after a sudden crash occurs

Another green weekend for the crypto industry came as Bitcoin broke the $10,000 mark. Many say that this is only the beginning of a move that can take Bitcoin to $100,000. However, the past couple of hours were quite turbulent. The majority of the cryptocurrency market made gains over the weekend, but they mostly fell down in price in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,963, which represents a 1.7% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 2.86% on the day, while XRP lost 3.65%.

Another green weekend for the crypto industry came as Bitcoin broke the $10,000 mark. Many say that this is only the beginning of a move that can take Bitcoin to $100,000. However, the past couple of hours were quite turbulent. The majority of the cryptocurrency market made gains over the weekend, but they mostly fell down in price in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,963, which represents a 1.7% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 2.86% on the day, while XRP lost 3.65%.

Another green weekend for the crypto industry came as Bitcoin broke the $10,000 mark. Many say that this is only the beginning of a move that can take Bitcoin to $100,000. However, the past couple of hours were quite turbulent. The majority of the cryptocurrency market made gains over the weekend, but they mostly fell down in price in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9,963, which represents a 1.7% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum lost 2.86% on the day, while XRP lost 3.65%.

Kick Token took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 53.88%. On the other side, Synthetix Network lost 12.41% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance fell down slightly over the weekend. It is now at 63.75%, which represents a decrease of 0.72% when compared to the value it had on Friday.

 

The cryptocurrency market capitalization gained quite a bit over the weekend. It is currently valued at $285.04 billion, which represents an increase of $9.9 billion when compared to Friday.

What happened in the past 24 hours

American investment data provider Weiss Ratings updated its ranking for Bitcoin (BTC) to “excellent” by assigning it the A- grade. The rating update came due to strong price performance.

Weiss Ratings posted a tweet published on Feb. 7, saying that: “The Weiss Crypto Rating for BTC is now A- (excellent). This is thanks to improving fundamentals as well as positive price action ahead of Bitcoin’s halving.

Before Bitcoin received the A- rating, it was rated lower than XRP and EOS as they were considered cryptocurrencies with the best combination of tech and adoption. However, Bitcoin has a higher grade than both of them now.

Honorable mention

Binance Coin (BNB) 

Binance Coin (BNB) has shown its strength, mostly due to the changes in the fundamentals. Several fundamental core events happened during the last week. These events were perceived as positive by the traders. Binance launched futures trading for Zcash as well as BNB this week.

The exchange also added support for the Russian ruble. This feature allows users to make cryptocurrency purchases via their Visa banking card. On top of that, Binance hired Iskander Malikov, former COO at TradingView, as the new director of fiat in order to boost its fiat-to-crypto gateways.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

The uptrend that started on Feb 4 continued over the weekend as well, pushing Bitcoin’s price over 10,000. The price slowly approached $9,900 and then spiked up all the way to $10,200. The move was not accompanied by a significant volume increase, but it was rather a slow grind towards the goal. However, the past few hours brought us a massive drop in price, where Bitcoin fell to $9,725 in a matter of minutes. The price recovered and the largest cryptocurrency by market cap is now trading just under $10,000.


Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $10,010                                         1: $9,872

2: $10,360                                         2: $9,732

3: $10,470                                         3: $9,585

Ethereum

Ethereum had quite a bit of a run over the weekend as well. The price steadily went up and rose to $230, but consolidated below the $225.5 level. The past couple of hours brought us a sudden price drop, where Ethereum fell down to the $217.5 support level. However, bears did not manage to break this support level, and Ethereum quickly bounced back.


Ethereum’s volume is elevated at the moment, while its RSI left the overbought territory and is currently in the higher part of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $225.5                                             1: $217.5

2: $240                                              2: $198 

3: $251.3                                           3: $193.6

Ripple

XRP spent the weekend mostly by being in the consolidation mode. However, it made one attempt to break the $0.285 resistance level, which failed. The price continued to consolidate at the levels right below $0.285 ever since the failed spike. However, the past couple of hours brought XRP bears to the game as well. A sudden move made XRP go from $0.282 to $0.27. However, the bulls quickly reacted, and the price went back to the previous levels.


XRP’s volume is still a bit elevated, while its RSI level is moving to the lower portions of the value range.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.285                                            1: $0.266

2: $0.31                                              2: $0.2454

3: $0.324                                            3: $0.235

 

Categories
Cryptocurrencies

What is Token Burning and How Does it Work?

Token burning, a concept unique to the cryptocurrency market, is gradually becoming an intrinsic feature of newer and future cryptocurrency projects. Even more recently, well-established altcoins such as Binance have adopted this concept making it worth the attention of any cryptocurrency investor. 

Token burning, a concept unique to the cryptocurrency market, is gradually becoming an intrinsic feature of newer and future cryptocurrency projects. Even more recently, well-established altcoins such as Binance have adopted this concept making it worth the attention of any cryptocurrency investor. 

Token burning, a concept unique to the cryptocurrency market, is gradually becoming an intrinsic feature of newer and future cryptocurrency projects. Even more recently, well-established altcoins such as Binance have adopted this concept making it worth the attention of any cryptocurrency investor. 

As the name suggests, coin/token burning is the process of ‘burning’ coins, or rather, the irreversible destruction of coins/tokens in an effort to eliminate them from circulation. 

To understand this concept better, let’s delve into how the whole ‘burning’ process works. 

How Does Token Burning Work?

Despite the extreme image the phrase paints, token burning doesn’t involve any kind of token disintegration. In fact, it’s impossible to disintegrate coins since blockchain – the underlying cryptocurrency protocol – is immutable, meaning the protocol’s history and data cannot be altered in any way. 

What actually happens is that the coins/tokens are algorithmically taken out of circulation by sending their signatures to a public address known as an ‘eater address.’ The keys to this public address are private and cannot be obtained by anyone. In essence, it means that once the tokens are sent to this address, they are unrecoverable and can never be used. Ever!

All burnt coins/tokens are then recorded on the blockchain transparent ledger system for all nodes to see and confirm that the coins have been indeed destroyed. 

While token burning serves the same purpose, which is the elimination of coins from distribution, it differs in the scope of execution. For instance, some projects will execute a one-time burn after their Initial Coin Offering (ICO), to help eliminate any unsold tokens. Other projects favor periodic burning of tokens based on the token’s utility and size, among other variables. Binance coin (BNB), for example, burns its tokens quarterly, with an aim to reach a threshold of 100 million BNB burned tokens. Alternatively, project developers can buy back their tokens from exchanges and take them out of circulation by sending them to the ‘eater address.’ 

A few other coins, such as Ripple, burn token progressively with each transaction. When parties transact using the coin, they must incur a transaction fee, pretty much like sending Bitcoin to another BTC wallet. However, in the case of Ripple, the transaction fees aren’t awarded to miners. Instead, these fees are automatically burned. 

Why do we need to burn tokens?

It’s quite startling to understand why crypto projects burn their precious tokens. But the process comes with its own benefits, favoring not only the developers but also the coin users. Here are the main motives behind token burning;

☑️Increase the Value of Coins 

The most common reason behind token burning is to boost and encourage the growth of a coin’s value. Going by the economic laws of demand and supply, reducing the supply of a commodity in the market fuels the demand for that particular project. As such, by burning a token, the supply of a coin reduces in equal measure, prompting a demand of the coin since there is a lesser amount of coins to satisfy the people’s demand. Consequently, the price of the coin appreciates, stabilizing its value. 

To the investors, the growth in value encourages them to hold the coins for longer in anticipation of even better prices as the demand increases. Also, holding the coins for longer helps maintain a sound network bandwidth, which is beneficial to the developers.

☑️Provision of Dividends

The provision of dividends is closely tied to the resultant increase in coin value after burning. However, this benefit works best in security tokens rather than in their utility counterparts. 

A security token is classed as an asset, and thus those holding it are regarded as investors. This is not the case with utility tokens. 

Nonetheless, with the increase in a coin’s price after burning some of them, the developers indirectly reward the coin holders, since the value of the asset has appreciated. This move plays out perfectly in countries such as the USA, where cryptos are discouraged from handing out dividends directly to their token holders. 

☑️Protection Against Spam

All cryptocurrencies are under the computing realm, which makes them vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Having this in mind, it’s easy to understand why tokens can fall victim to Distributed Denial-of-service attack (DDOS), especially with the growing number of cryptocurrency users. 

Basically, DDOS is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to flood a system with an influx of requests, so as to prevent the execution of some or all legitimate requests.

In the same vein, a DDOS attack on token targets at clogging the network, preventing the execution of transactions. By burning tokens, the developers end up reducing the overall transactions to a manageable number, thus safeguarding the network from DDOS attacks and spam transactions. 

Ripple is a perfect demonstration of how coin burning prevents spamming. By automatically burning a portion of the transacted amount, Ripple discourages the need to overload the network to gain a quick profit.

☑️Correct Errors

Although in rare cases, sometimes project developers make serious mistakes that can only be corrected by token burning. 

For instance, a project may issue an excess amount of coins or experience an increase in the number of tokens as a result of technical errors. In other cases, tokens unfit for trading. For example, those meant to support a transaction may end up into public circulation. Theoretically, an increased supply translates to lower demands, plummeting the coin prices. 

As a corrective measure, the excess tokens are burnt to avoid some of the consequences brought by the errors incurred. 

☑️Build Trust and Loyalty

Gaining trust from coin holders is the ultimate goal of any cryptocurrency, particularly one that is new in the market. 

After the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of new crypto, its price is bound to increase. The project developers may decide to make more profits by selling excess coins to exchanges, at the prevailing spiked prices, which is unfair.  More so, by selling the excess coins, it would lead to allegations that the developers are only committed to gaining profits and that their coin has no real value. 

However, burning the excess coins shows that the developers are committed to the long-term growth of the coin. As such, the funds raised from the ICO will be used for business operations. But most importantly, burning excess coins help decentralize the project. 

Conclusion

As hardcore as it may sound, token/coin burning is proving to be an effective method of maintaining a balanced crypto-ecosystem. With time, future cryptocurrencies will certainly adopt this mechanism giving its numerous benefits, especially in a coin’s infancy stage. 

Also, with the hope that cryptocurrency space will stand the test of time, coin burning is arguably the best bet to maintaining the long-term value of a crypto. 

 

Categories
Crypto Daily Topic Cryptocurrencies

Privacy Coins: Here Is Your Complete Guide

Public blockchain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum utilizes cryptography technology to disguise users’ identity. To an extent, this protects users’ privacy, making the cryptos ideal for pseudonymous transactions. However, the transparent nature of these cryptocurrencies’ ledger system compromises users’ complete anonymity. As such, it’s easy for malicious third parties to trace all your transactions […]

Public blockchain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum utilizes cryptography technology to disguise users’ identity. To an extent, this protects users’ privacy, making the cryptos ideal for pseudonymous transactions. However, the transparent nature of these cryptocurrencies’ ledger system compromises users’ complete anonymity. As such, it’s easy for malicious third parties to trace all your transactions […]

Public blockchain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum utilizes cryptography technology to disguise users’ identity. To an extent, this protects users’ privacy, making the cryptos ideal for pseudonymous transactions.

However, the transparent nature of these cryptocurrencies’ ledger system compromises users’ complete anonymity. As such, it’s easy for malicious third parties to trace all your transactions and exploit this information to jeopardize your privacy. Now, this is where privacy coins come into play. 

What Exactly are Privacy Coins?

Unlike public digital currencies, privacy coins offer robust anonymity that works by obfuscating your transaction history and amount, making it impossible for third parties to piece together your identity. To achieve it, privacy coins leverage various innovative technologies, giving them a competitive advantage, as far as users’ privacy is concerned. 

While there are a good number of privacy coins in the market, we’ll be taking a comprehensive look into the best five coins, based on their technology, adoption, and market capitalization. 

Monero – XMR

Started in 2014, Monero has grown to become one of the most popular privacy coins backed by a stable market cap. The coin gives its users complete control of their data and anonymity, allowing them to keep their transaction information away from privy eyes.

In addition to its default private key cryptography, the Monero employs CryptoNote proof-of-work protocol, to obscure all details related to a transaction, including the source of funds. To further enhance users’  privacy, the protocol is complemented by unique technologies such as Ring Signatures, Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT), and Stealth Address. 

As the name suggests, Ring Signature technology works by bringing a group of signers to sign a single transaction. This forms a ring where only the sender can generate and send a one-time-key, while the actual recipient will be the only one who can detect and spend the funds linked to the key. With the technology in place, it becomes difficult for any transaction to be traced back to any user, which in turn secures users’ privacy. 

To guarantee that the coins have not been fraudulently fabricated in the transaction, RingCT creates a cryptographic proof which verifies that the sum of the input and output amounts is equal. The technology does this without disclosing the actual transaction numbers, thereby masking the amount the two parties transacted. 

Stealth Address, on the other hand, is designed to make all transactions untraceable. Basically, a one-time-key is created for each transaction, giving the sender and recipient the freedom to disconnect themselves from a transaction. What’s even better is that the key isn’t linked to the recipient’s wallet address, making it harder for an outside observer to trace the amount sent. 

Dash – DASH

Dash coin is an open-source peer-peer cryptocurrency that was launched after Bitcoin forked in 2014. In fact, the coin borrows heavily from its parent, BTC, in terms of privacy protection. It utilizes a concept known as PrivateSend, which is an improved version of Bitcoin’s CoinJoin, designed to anonymize transactions.

Essentially, the concept works by allowing multiple parties, usually three users, to pre-mix their coins into a single transaction, and then send these coins to new addresses, randomly. The transactions are further taken through a series of such operations, which makes the amount, the sender and destination unknown to third-parties. 

The instant-send feature of the coin facilitates faster transactions, by channeling inputs and outputs along the second tier of the Dash blockchain. 

Although not related to privacy protection, Dash coin also features a management mechanism that oversees future funding and network development through a self-governing community know as Decentralised Governance by Blockchain (DGBB). 

ZCash – ZEC

Being an iteration of Zerocash, ZCash implements it’s predecessor’s protocol that is based on zero-knowledge cryptography known as ZK-SNARKs. As intricate as it may sound, the technology’s functionality is pretty straightforward.

Basically, ZK-SNARKs encrypts all transactional details that are stored on the network, which include information about the sender, the recipient, and the amount transacted. In the process, the technology also verifies that the data being exchanged is authentic, without necessarily broadcasting the said information, besides the fact that it is true.

Keep in mind that using this privacy feature is optional, and thus users can opt to have their transaction recorded publicly. But it’s believed that users who choose the transparent option end up compromising the security of the entire network. 

PIVX – PIVX

Private Instant Verified Transaction (PIVX), which also goes by the same tickle symbol as its acronym, is an open privacy coin with a growing popularity. It was launched as a Dash coin fork but runs on the Proof-of-Stake algorithm rather than Proof-of-Work used by Dash coin. This means that PIVX doesn’t rely on miners to verify transactions and, as such, rewards the coin holders, who are also responsible for validating transactions.

However, to be among the users who are rewarded with coins as well as approve transactions, you must have a stake of at least 10,000 tokens. After achieving the threshold token, you are allowed to own a master node, which gives you the power to on how the development budget will be used and even submit developmental suggestions. 

PIVX also has a near-instant transaction verification feature and can be trusted in safeguarding users’ privacy. 

Verge – XVG

Much of Verge’s popularity can be attributed to the endorsement it received from John McAfee, a reputable businessman in the cyber-space. Although it is quite unstable, the coin has succeeded in providing a fast and decentralized way of making transactions, while maintaining users’ privacy.

By default, Verge integrates the Tor network into its wallet, encrypting your IP address, such that your online transactions can be linked to you. 

Its most privacy protection arsenal is the Wraith protocol that allows users to switch between public and private ledger systems. 

As with Bitcoin, the public ledger system displays your account balance, wallet address, and that of the recipient, in addition to the actual amount you are sending. Choosing the private ledger option keeps these details under wraps, protecting you from third parties who may be trying to trace your transactions. 

Other noteworthy features include 5 Proof-of-work algorithms, which have a limited target block time, improving protection against attacks. 

Takeaway

With the increasing cybersecurity threats, protecting your online privacy becomes a priority, especially when transacting cryptocurrencies. Sure, there is no problem in displaying your transactions history for all to see, since you don’t have anything to hide in the first place. But the idea that third-parties can use your transactions to trace activities should prompt you to keep your cyber-footprints untraceable. 

As such, you may consider investing in some of the digital currencies mentioned above in an effort to protect your personal privacy. 

Categories
Crypto Market Analysis

Daily Crypto Review, Feb 7 – Bitcoin Futures over 10,000; US crypto regulators stalling

Another green day for the crypto industry is on its way, as bullish sentiment rises. Many people are talking about Bitcoin going over $10,000 very soon. The majority of the market made some gains in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9797, which represents a 1.73% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained4.61% on the day, while XRP lost 0.43%.

Another green day for the crypto industry is on its way, as bullish sentiment rises. Many people are talking about Bitcoin going over $10,000 very soon. The majority of the market made some gains in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9797, which represents a 1.73% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained4.61% on the day, while XRP lost 0.43%.

Another green day for the crypto industry is on its way, as bullish sentiment rises. Many people are talking about Bitcoin going over $10,000 very soon. The majority of the market made some gains in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is currently trading for $9797, which represents a 1.73% decrease on the day. Meanwhile, Ethereum gained4.61% on the day, while XRP lost 0.43%.

Kick Token took the position of today’s most prominent daily gainer, with gains of 26.17%. On the other side, Molecular Future lost 15.29% on the day, which made it the most prominent daily loser.

Bitcoin’s dominance increased by quite a lot in the past 24 hours. It is now at 64.23%, which represents an increase of 3.58% when compared to the value it had yesterday.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization gained quite a bit over the past 24 hours as cryptocurrencies gained some more value. It is currently valued at $277.71 billion, which represents an increase of $4.54 billion when compared to yesterday’s value.

What happened in the past 24 hours

The bullish sentiment continues to rise in the crypto market. Numerous altcoins score double-digit gains on a daily basis, while Bitcoin’s price on crypto exchanges also continues to push higher and higher.

Skew Markets has recently published data showing Bitcoin futures that expire in May 2020 and June 2020 rose above $10,000 at more than one exchange. On top of that, Bitcoin futures at BitMEX recently expanded to a new high of $1.5 billion.

Honorable mention

Ripple 

We are mentioning Ripple yet again today, as the company seems like it’s in quite a spotlight with all the partnerships and deals it made. An advocacy group called the Blockchain Association, which is representing many high-profile cryptocurrency firms, launched a working group with the aim to push for a U.S.-wide regulatory framework earlier this month.

This new working group is led by senior employees of Ripple and Coinbase. Its main aim is, as mentioned above, to advise United States regulators on how to approach crypto-friendly policies. However, the congresspeople are too busy preparing for the upcoming elections, so these policies are put to the side. U.S. crypto firms, in the meantime, have to work by complying with state-by-state regulations or avioding specific states in the near future.

_______________________________________________________________________

Technical analysis

_______________________________________________________________________

Bitcoin

Another day, another swing to the upside with Bitcoin trying to climb its way to 10,000. The price slowly moved above the $9,732 resistance level and is currently safe above it. The move was not accompanied by a significant volume increase. While Bitcoin’s outlook is bullish, its 4-hour time frame RSI level is still in the overbought territory.


One thing to note is that Bitcoin returned its dominance after losing 4% yesterday.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $9,872                                           1: $9,732

2: $10,010                                         2: $9,585

                                                         3: $9,251

Ethereum

Ethereum gained quite a bit today as well. Its price continued moving upwards after a brief consolidation and just one 4-hour red candle. While the price is currently broken, the resistance of $217.5, it is unknown whether Ethereum will stay above the price line. However, the outlook is still bullish.


Ethereum’s volume increased massively during yesterday’s upswing, but it has reduced by a lot today. However, it is still elevated. Its RSI level is deep in the overbought territory for a couple of days now. The key level of $217.5 will remain on our left side of key levels until Ethereum spends at least a couple more hours above it.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $217.5                                             1: $198

2: $225.5                                            2: $193.6 

                                                          3: $185

Ripple

XRP spent the day attempting to break the $0.285 resistance. However, all of its attempts were unsuccessful. For that reason, XRP is now just below the resistance line and consolidating. XRP had one 4-hour candle where its price suddenly dropped from $0.2848 all the way down to $0.261. However, the move was quite short, and XRP quickly recovered to the previous levels.


XRP’s volume is still a bit elevated, while its RSI level is moving out from the overbought area.

Key levels to the upside                    Key levels to the downside

1: $0.285                                            1: $0.266

2: $0.31                                              2: $0.2454

3: $0.324                                            3: $0.235

 

Categories
Cryptocurrencies

Exciting Use Cases of Decentralized Finance

Today’s finance landscape is inherently unequal – with millions locked out of opportunities due to their location, being undocumented, or having low economic means.  Few would have foreseen that the technology that brought us Bitcoin could potentially solve this enduring problem.  Decentralized finance (DeFi) is all of these things: an idea, a belief system, a […]

Today’s finance landscape is inherently unequal – with millions locked out of opportunities due to their location, being undocumented, or having low economic means.  Few would have foreseen that the technology that brought us Bitcoin could potentially solve this enduring problem.  Decentralized finance (DeFi) is all of these things: an idea, a belief system, a […]

Today’s finance landscape is inherently unequal – with millions locked out of opportunities due to their location, being undocumented, or having low economic means. 

Few would have foreseen that the technology that brought us Bitcoin could potentially solve this enduring problem. 

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is all of these things: an idea, a belief system, a movement, and a blockchain-based technology that promises to eradicate the aforementioned barriers to financial access, or to put it another way, to democratize finance. Already, decentralized finance is making waves as DeFi platforms and products increase by the day. 

In this guide, we explore some uses cases of this new and exciting technology, as well as some of the real-life applications that are making brave inroads into the space. 

But before we do that, let’s kick off with a primer on what exactly DeFi is, plus why we need it. 

What is Decentralized Finance? 

Decentralized finance is an emerging, blockchain-based ecosystem of finance that seeks to expand finance.  

It aims to make financial services more accessible and inclusive for everyone by making financial markets and products open-source, transparent, and under no particular authority. 

In DeFi world, everyone would have absolute control over their assets and interact with other participants through peer-to-peer (P2P), decentralized applications (DApps). 

What Problems Does DeFi Solve? 

DeFi’s chief goal is to decentralize financial services and make them available to all – an aspect that today’s centralized financial system is sorely lacking. As such, DeFi solves two main problems which we’ll look at in greater detail below: 

Inequality in Finance. Today, millions of people are locked out of access to loans, mortgages, a bank account, savings, insurance, and so on. DeFi aims to eradicate or alleviate this problem by creating a finance system that has no systemic or institutional barriers. All one would need is a smartphone and internet connectivity to access services.  

Financial Censorship. Today’s centralized finance system means that governments, banks, or intermediaries can restrict or prevent an individual’s or a company’s access to their assets. For example, the government could freeze the assets of a company that openly defies it, or an individual that it perceives to be rogue. By contrast, with DeFi, financial products are under no one’s control. Hence no one can arbitrarily restrict an individual’s or company’s assets. 

What Are the Advantages of DeFi?

Why should you care about DeFi? What difference does it propose to the current financial system? These are some of the advantages of DeFi: 

Autonomy: DeFi applications do not need a go-between party in transactions or an arbitrator in case of disputes. All terms are set in the code, and users have complete autonomy over their funds at any time. This eliminates the costs that would go into providing such intermediary services.   

Security: Since DeFi services are set up on decentralized blockchains, single points of failure are eliminated. Data is recorded on the blockchain and distributed across computers all over the world, reducing the chances of services being compromised.

Tradability: Thanks to DeFi, the tokenization of assets is now possible. Tokenization means one can quickly sell an asset that was previously illiquid (not fast-moving), as well as divide an asset into parts that enable many market participants to buy just the portion they can afford, instead of losing out on a whole investment.

Accessibility. The world’s unbanked can access financial services that they previously couldn’t, thanks to DeFi. 

What Are The Use Cases For DeFi? 

The following are some of the potential use cases for DeFi: 

i. Payments

DeFi platforms or applications can be used to create blockchain-based protocols that allow individuals to have wallets via which they can make instant and cheaper payments. 

ii. Borrowing and Lending

DeFi enables open lending structures that have numerous advantages over the traditional borrowing and lending system, including: 

  • Ultrafast transaction settlements 
  • Ability to back up digital assets with real-life assets 
  • Credit checks are not necessary; hence more people can get access to loans
  • Potential standardization and interoperability of financial services, making them frictionless across various providers 
  • Democratizes the borrowing and lending process by providing borrowers with a wider pool of potential lenders.    

iii. Stablecoins

A stablecoin is an asset that attempts to circumvent the price swings in cryptocurrencies, making them suitable as mediums of exchange and stores of value. Stable coins thus provide the stability associated with fiat currencies while maintaining the benefits of cryptocurrency such as security, fast processing speeds, and overall efficiency. 

iv. Tokenization

This is the process of digitizing a real-world asset to increase its liquidity in the marketplace. Tokenization creates asset-backed tokens – which are digital tokens backed by real-world assets. Through tokenization, assets that traditionally have low liquidity, e.g., jewelry, real estate, and art, can quickly move their position in the marketplace. Also, thanks to the ability to divide assets into portions through tokenization, non-high income earners can get a piece of a product or investment that they previously couldn’t afford.  

v. Decentralized Exchanges (DExes)

Decentralized exchanges are platforms where users can exchange digital assets without relying on a third party, as in a centralized exchange. Instead, trades occur between parties in a P2P, automated process. Examples of DExes include Binance DEX, Radar Relay, and EtherDelta. 

vi. Issuance Platforms

An issuance platform is a service that allows people to tokenize their assets by providing them with the tools to create digital tokens. An issuance platform provides the necessary technical and legal infrastructure to ensure a seamless tokenizing process for users.   

Thanks to these platforms, individuals and companies can raise funds without the costs associated with intermediaries such as banks, credit unions, lawyers, etc. They also open up investment opportunities for investors of all net worth levels, origin, or geographical location. 

vii. Open Marketplaces

With open marketplaces, DeFi reimagines the age-old idea of a marketplace by turning it into a decentralized platform where people can exchange things of value. 

People can buy and sell non-fungible tokens (ones that are unique and thus not interchangeable, as opposed to fungible tokens such as Bitcoins that are interchangeable) such as trading cards, collectibles, domain names, game items, and so on. All transactions take place via blockchain-based smart contracts, removing the need for a central authority who would normally dictate the rules of the marketplace.  

viii. Prediction Markets

A prediction market is a group of participants who speculate on the outcome of future events – from elections to games to weather to natural disasters to commodity prices to major political events. 

DeFi provides a decentralized take on traditional betting markets such as casinos. Decentralized prediction markets are censorship-resistant, thus democratizing the betting space. For instance, individuals can participate in betting on their favorite sports events even if they live in jurisdictions where betting is restricted. It also means that anyone can create a bet without the approval of a central authority like, for instance, the administrator of a betting platform.

ix. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

These are organizations that allow individuals to create organizations whose rules and bylaws are encoded on the blockchain. DAOs represent the highest degree of organizational transparency, with every process automated and with minimal to no human input needed. They solve the problems of centralized, hierarchical setups such as corruption, arbitrary decision making, delayed decision making, and so on. 

Real-Life Applications of DeFi

The DeFi world is up and running with applications that are already making their impact felt. The following are some of the most popular DeFi use cases out there today:

☑️MakerDAO. This is a decentralized autonomous organization running atop Ethereum’s blockchain. It has a dual coin system that aims to mitigate the volatility of cryptocurrency. The MakerDao platform has two tokens: Maker – which is volatile and fluctuates like any other crypto and is used to govern the Maker platform, and DAI, a decentralized stablecoin whose value is fixed in a 1DAI = 1USD formula. Makercoin utilizes external market economics to allow DAI to be a stablecoin.  

☑️Dharma Protocol. This is a finance application based on the Ethereum blockchain that democratizes borrowing and lending. As a lending platform, Dharma has all the works of a traditional lending platform – except that it expands finance in that anyone, anywhere, can access the Dharma platform as long as they have an internet connection. 

☑️Uniswap. Uniswap is an Ethereum blockchain-based decentralized exchange that allows individuals to trade ether and ERC-20 tokens. Thanks to its decentralized protocol, there is no need for middlemen – which saves costs, and users have complete autonomy over their crypto holdings.

☑️Bloom. Also, Ethereum-based, Bloom is a credit scoring and identity verification platform that aims to reduce credit fees, increase credit access, make credit histories shareable across countries, and make credit risk assessment fairer. Through Bloom, individuals with little to no credit stand a better chance to get access to loans. 

☑️dYdX This is a DEx that allows traders to exchange cryptocurrency derivatives. Derivatives are financial instruments that derive value from an underlying asset, e.g., Bitcoin futures. Via dYdX, traders can exchange their crypto derivatives of choice in a censorship-free, peer-to-peer, and fairly priced environment. 

Final Thoughts

By creating a financial system that’s open to all, accessible, affordable, and transparent, DeFi promises to wrestle economic power from those at the top and give it back to the people. And it proposes a powerful use of blockchain technology – decentralized financial services ranging from lending to asset issuance, to open marketplaces, to prediction markets, to censorship-free crypto exchanges, and more.