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Crypto Guides

Introduction To ‘Cryptohopper’ – A Reliable Crypto Trading Expert Advisor

Introduction

Cryptocurrencies are intensively volatile. The volatility of the currency is a matter of concern, but in the case of trading with cryptocurrency, it’s quite advantageous. In the crypto trade, you can invest when the market value is declining, and you can retrieve your amount when prices are on hike.

However, it requires experience to become an expert in reading and analyzing this market’s up-down trends, so that you can invest at the perfect time to expect maximum returns. To predict this market flow for investors, trading bots are introduced with automated algorithms in the industry. Today in this article, we will be discussing one such trading bot- Cryptohopper.

Understanding Crypto Trading Bot

Crypto bots are cloud-based computer programs to host cryptocurrency trading. It provides idle tools to beginner and advanced traders. At the right time, it can automatically buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Users can simply connect the bot with their cryptocurrency exchange, and then it can smoothly trade on their behalf. For successful trading, it is necessary to rely upon complicated probability estimation for predicting the market trends, and a bot can calculate this much faster than a human brain. 

What is Cryptohopper?

The cryptocurrency industry is offering various services and tools to traders to elevate their success rate. Cryptohopper is one such tool that can simplify the crypto-trading ecosystem. It’s a trading bot that has been customized as per the requirements of users and can also provide market technical detail.

Earlier, a user would have to spend a lot of time in front of the computer screen to trace market flow all day, but now the fully automated bot can monitor the trade 24/7 on behalf of the users. To ensure high output, it can perform backtest for each iteration and can optimize decisions based on the current situation. 

Why do you need a bot like Cryptohopper?

In the cryptocurrency trading world, every second matters a lot. So, to make life easy and to earn more, traders can make use of a crypto trading bot like Cryptohopper to make every second count. Let’s have a look at how Cryptohopper can help in various domains of crypto-trading.

Objective trading 

The trade will be executed entirely based upon the data analysis. You don’t need to panic about the buying or selling process because the trade activities shall be evidenced without any involvement of stress or emotion.

Social trading 

Cryptohopper directly subscribes to market signalers who analyze the trade and suggest how to raise the value of your coin. As a result, you can get appropriate information for trade optimization.

Simultaneous trading 

It operates and manages all your coins simultaneously. It can keep track of all price details and sell your coin exactly at the target profit scale that you have set.

Intuitive tools 

This bot has the potential to keep the users at the top market position. It notifies with alert in advance about the trade opportunity to sell the declining coins and to repurchase the coins at a lower price.

Cloud-based platform 

It remains 24/7 online in the cloud. It means you don’t need to keep your device ‘on’ always to track your coins. You can log in to your bot account anytime, and you will get a notification about the latest market updates. 

Conclusion

The ability of Cryptohopper to provide users with high returns in cryptocurrency trading is something to look at. The traders won’t feel the need to rely on a computer screen as this bot can automatically trace the trends and take the necessary steps that have been fed. It can be easily used without any coding background and can also be connected to any global crypto exchange without incurring any trading fees.

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Crypto Guides

What Should You Know About BitDegree & Its Usage?

Introduction

Cryptocurrency projects mostly start with Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Through ICOs, companies in the cryptocurrency industry raise funds to launch new coins or services in the industry. The trio of Arnas Stuopelis, Andrius Putna, and Roberto Santana was previously serving web hosting company “Hostinger” presented BitDegree ICO to the world. This ICO managed to convince over 12 thousand contributors and raised 32 thousand ETH. In this system, students are offered with the study course and paid with a BitDegree token in return for studying. 

What is BitDegree?

BitDegree is the world’s first e-learning platform powered by Ethereum blockchain. The goal of BitDegree is to gamify the learning process with fun and rewards. Here, gamification in academics means students will be awarded cryptocurrency for completing any study course. Every academic activity performed by the student will be saved in their BDG account and can be accessed anytime and anywhere.

The BitDegree platform not only gives incentives but also provides study material for easy understanding. The official portal is available in English, Russian, and Portuguese language. Is there any other better platform for study, where you are paid with cryptocurrency tokens for studying? No, It’s only possible with the BitDegree platform.  

You can also earn tokens by referring BitDegree to your friends. At every level, you need to qualify an online test to enter the next stage, and qualifying students are rewarded with “BitDegree” tradable tokens. To offer merit students with employment opportunities, BitDegree recently collaborated with companies like Huffpost, Marketwatch, Mogul, etc. After you complete your studies, you can trade with the currency earned, or you can also ask for a cash-out.  

How to Use BitDegree?

BitDegree is a utility token, which means the holder can use it for payments but doesn’t have any voting rights in the company. All community members like teachers, learners, and employers work together and pay each other with BDG token for their efforts. BitDegree accounts can be operated on mobile and desktop as well. Almost all courses are free except for a few professional courses which are available at a subsidized fee. 

Some of the important highlights of the BitDegree portal are: 

  • Learners will be rewarded with tokens for course completion.
  • Learners will pay teachers and for courses via BDG tokens.
  • Donors and employers will issue a token to learners for specific courses.

The payment system is handled through a smart contract system. Once a specific task is completed automatically without any error or delay, the reward is delivered through a smart contract. In computer, conditions are entered in the code like:

IF John completes 6 lessons THEN send John 300 BDG Tokens

BitDegree is classified as an ERC-20 token, and you don’t need an ETH wallet to store your earned token as it will be stored in your BitDegree account itself. To earn from BDG, you can convert it to blockchain for cryptocurrency trading and get them stored in an Ethereum wallet. 

Conclusion

Bitdegree brought huge transparency to the education system and is the first e-learning platform integrated with blockchain technology. It has introduced innovations and developments in the landscape of education. BitDegree’s global education revolution is offering everyone a common platform to learn and share skills to grow together.

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Crypto Guides

Hyperledger Technology – The Enterprise Blockchain Solution

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.

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Crypto Guides

What Is SegWit & Why Is It Required?

Introduction

There are over two thousand cryptocurrencies and tokens in the market, and all of them have a set of rules to ensure they work properly. These rules are also referred to as protocols, and they are continuously in progress. Similarly to any computer code, mobile phones, and apps, the cryptocurrency protocols must be updated and improved, which means teams of programmers work every day to detect code errors, improve their performance and add new functionality. And SegWit is one of the updates that has been implemented in the Bitcoin protocol.

What is SegWit? 

Pieter Wuille was the man who came up with the idea of SegWit at a Bitcoin conference in 2015. Wuille claimed that SegWit was a possible solution to the flaw in the Bitcoin protocol. SegWit was a proposed solution to the problem of transaction malleability. Transaction malleability is a way of saying that coins can be stolen from the user just by changing tiny pieces of transaction information.

How does transaction malleability work?

Let’s say Bob sends 10BTC to Billy. But, with transaction malleability, Billy can trick Bob into sending him 20BTC instead of 10. The transaction malleability flaw in Bitcoin’s code enables Billy to tamper Bob’s witness before the transaction is confirmed on the blockchain network.

In this case, the transaction ID changes, but the transaction does not (10BTC were still sent from Bob to Billy). Now, Billy contacts Bob, saying that he hasn’t received 10BTC, though he actually has. Since the transaction id was altered, Bob checks and sees that the original transaction hasn’t been confirmed. So, seeing this, Bob sends 10BTC again to Billy. And Billy now receives 10 BTC more and 20 BTC in total.

The patch to transaction malleability

As mentioned earlier, a patch is a solution to this glitch in the Bitcoin protocol. SegWit is a patch designed by Pieter Wuille to bring a stop to transaction malleability. To prevent witness data from being used to alter the transaction ID, Peiter suggested removing it from the transaction. Hence, it is given the SegWit, which is the abbreviation for segregated witnesses, means to remove or separate the witness data.

A segregated witness creates something called as sidechain where witness data is stored aside from the main blockchain. This method efficiently prevents transaction IDs from being changed by dishonest users. Also, a smart thing about SigWit is that it’s backward compatible. So the nodes that are updated with the SegWit protocol can still work with nodes that are not updated yet. Such an update is called a soft fork, as opposed to updates that are not backward compatible, which are called hard forks.

Wuille wanted SegWit to be backward compatible so that the witness data was still recorded on the main blockchain. To solve this problem, he encrypted all the witness data of a block on the SegWit sidechain and then stored this root code on the main blockchain. Hence, transaction malleability was successfully patched without a hard-fork update.

The Pros on SegWit

💡 Patch to the transaction malleability – The problem of the malleability of transactions was solved by SegWit.

💡 Faster Blockchain transactions – SegWit makes the network much lighter. More transactions can be performed without increasing the overall block size.

💡 Room for more development – Things don’t end just at transaction malleability. If the use of blockchain increases drastically, the issue of scalability must be figured. And SegWit helped lightning network technology come to reality.

Conclusion

The problem of transaction malleability was a real concern to Bitcoin. A patch to it was really in need. Hence, Pieter Wuille came up with a successful patch to it. And this brought talks about the bright future of the Bitcoin platform. We hope you understood the concept of segregated witness (SegWit). If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below. Cheers!

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What Is Adaptive Scaling In Cryptocurrency & How Is It Achieved?

Introduction

One of the most important motives behind the invention of cryptocurrencies is that they should have the ability to be an alternative financial system. That is, we, the users, should be able to use them just like how the fiat currencies are being used today, but with many more features and ease. While this thought is very ambitious, the journey has already begun with Bitcoin. The total market capitalization of all the cryptocurrencies combined is around $200 BN as of Dec 2019. 66.4% of this comes from Bitcoin alone.

No matter how many cryptocurrencies have come, the craze for Bitcoin didn’t decrease. As this craze was not anticipated during the inception of Bitcoin, the network had to endure scaling issues, i.e., the number of transactions processed per second. New age cryptos are handling scaling issues by incorporating advanced consensus algorithms. But the Bitcoin network wants to stick to the POW as 18 million Bitcoins are already mined out of the permissible 21 million.

Hence it is essential to make some changes to the Bitcoin network to increase its scalability. In this article, let’s see a couple of techniques that have been incorporated in the Bitcoin network to tackle this issue.

SegWit

SegWit stands for the segregation of witnesses. It is a protocol upgrade that changes the way data is stored in the blockchain network. SegWit was first implemented in Litecoin in May 2017, and later, very shortly, it is also implemented in the Bitcoin network by August 2017. Although the primary intention of this protocol is to fix a bug, the side benefit has taken much more significant importance. When the Bitcoin network started, each block size was limited to only 1 MB. As a result, only seven transactions were processed per second, which limits the potential of Bitcoin in the day to day transactions.

The signatures alone occupy 70% of this 1 MB data in the block. Hence it was proposed to eliminate the signature in the block and increase the number of transactions. By doing this, the number of transactions processed per second is increased while keeping the block size constant. This upgrade also enabled technologists to develop a second layer on the Bitcoin network, which allows smart contract functionality. It is named as the lightning network; let’s understand this concept in detail.

Lightning Network

Lightning network is essentially a system of smart contracts built as a second layer on top of the Bitcoin network. This network allows people to send/receive payments instantaneously with way lower transaction fees by keeping them off the main network.

Working

First and foremost, a payment channel must be set up using a multi-signature wallet. All the involved parties can access this wallet with their respective Private keys. The wallet address is then saved in the public blockchain network. The corresponding parties can make Bitcoin deposits to this wallet.

Once this is done, the parties involved can conduct an unlimited number of transactions without ever touching the main blockchain network. Every time the parties involved conduct a transaction, the balance sheet gets updated with the amounts each party holding.

Though the block size of the Bitcoin network has been increased to further cope up with the scaling issues, these were the two most favorable measures taken at the time when needed to make Bitcoin desirable for day to day transactions. We hope you understood the concept of adaptive scaling in a blockchain network. Stay tuned for more interesting crypto content. Cheers!

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Crypto Guides

A Simple Guide To Cryptocurrency Wallet & Its Different Types

What is a crypto wallet?

Crypto wallets are software programs that store a user’s public and private keys. These wallets interact with different blockchain networks to send and receive cryptocurrencies. Many have a misconception that crypto wallets literally store digital currencies, but that is not the case. Cryptocurrencies always reside in the native blockchain network, and their ownership is just signed off to others based on their public keys to the address of the crypto wallet. If the owner of the crypto wants to spend the money, they spend the currency using their private key in the wallet. So when we say, the cryptos are stored in the crypto wallet, essentially, we are storing the corresponding public and private keys in them.

Types of crypto wallets

There are different types of crypto wallets, and they are differentiated based on how they can be accessed. The fundamental classification is online and offline wallets. Online wallets are those wallets that can be accessed by connecting them to the internet. Contrarily, offline wallets are those that can never be connected to the internet. Let’s understand each of the types below.

Online Wallets   

Desktop Wallets 

These wallets are installable software packs for operating systems like Windows, MAC, and Linux. Any crypto company which is serious about their outreach would start a desktop wallet on day one of their ICO. Since these are accessible only from the installed device, they are considered to be secure, but there is always a risk of virus attacks on a user’s device. Hence it is advisable to always keep up with the security patches of the device to safeguard cryptos. These wallets stand in third place in terms of security.

Exodus, Bitcoin Core, Electrum are few examples of desktop wallets.

Mobile Wallets

Mobile wallets for different cryptos are the most used digital wallets because of the ease and agility they provide. Most of the mobile wallets available in the market support both Android and IOS. The least famous ones at least support the Android version. One needs to seriously consider the security provided by the application while choosing a mobile wallet. These wallets occupy fourth place when it comes to safety.

Mycelium, Coinomi are examples of mobile wallets.

Web Wallets

These wallets run on the cloud and are accessible through any device which has browser access. These are very convenient but also prone to theft, thus needs multiple layers of security. There are hosted and non-hosted wallets when it comes to online wallets, and it is always recommended to use non-hosted wallets. These wallets occupy fifth, which is the last place in the wallet types available, thus making them the least secure.

MyEther Wallet and Coinbase are examples of online wallets.

Offline Wallets

Hardware Wallets

As the name suggests, these wallets are hardware devices that store public addresses and private keys. It is a USB kind of equipment that can be connected to any computing device, and they come with their native apps. These are the most secure as these are not connected to the internet all the time, making them resistant to hacking. Most hardware wallets allow us to store more than 22 cryptocurrencies.

Ledger Nano S, Ledger Nano X, and Trezor are some of the best examples of hardware wallets available in the market.

Paper Wallets

In paper wallets, one must print the public address and private keys of the user on a paper and store them securely. Not all the cryptos offer paper wallets, but most of the famous cryptos do. These are the second safest option after hardware wallets as these are offline as well.

Security is not the only thing one must consider while choosing a wallet. Because convenience also plays a critical role. It is often advisable to select hardware wallets if a crypto trader wants to store huge quantities of crypto for a long term use. Online or mobile wallets can be used to store smaller amounts of cryptos for short term usage.

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Monero – One Of Those Cryptocurrencies That Ensure 100% Privacy!

Introduction

We have seen the in-depth analysis of different cryptos so far and understood that new coins keep coming up, improvising the shortcomings of the previous ones. Monero is such cryptocurrency.

Monero was launched in 2014 as an open-source, privacy-oriented crypto, operating on the concept of blockchain technology to completely anonymize the transactions in the network. Monero literally means coin in Esperanto. This crypto was initially named BitMonero, forked from the codebase of Bytecoin. Later it was renamed as Monero after a different group led by Johnny Mnemonic took over the project.

Objective

Monero aims to make the platform opaque for outside observers completely. The transactions are made entirely obscured by anonymizing the sender and receiver details. This is done by disguising the addresses used by the users transacting on the platform. While all the cryptocurrencies promise the future of privacy, the degree of confidentiality varies. But Monero achieves the full level of privacy, making it a widely used currency in the dark web.

Mining process

Mining Monero doesn’t need any specialized hardware; hence, there is no need for any significant initial investments in mining the coin. Anyone with a computer can mine the coin and earn rewards.  The founders believe that everyone is equal, and they didn’t even allocate any percentage of coins for them during its inception. They have just used the funds volunteered by the community to develop the currency.

How is the complete privacy ensured?

To ensure complete privacy, Monero uses features such as ring signatures, stealth addresses, and ring confidential transactions. Let us look at the below briefly.

Ring Signatures: While making a transaction in the blockchain network, one must sign the transaction using his private key. In the case of ring signatures, the private sign of the user transacting is combined with the signatures of the other ten users in the network, thus making a ring signature genuinely anonymous.

Stealth Addresses: These are randomly generated one time used addresses for a transaction using the public key of the user making a transaction. Since these are only used one time, the outside observers will have no idea about the transactions.

Ring Confidential Transactions: Ring CT was introduced in January 2017 to conceal the number of coins being transacted in a transaction. They stopped using Ring CT in October 2018.

Market Cap

Monero stands at 13th place in the world of cryptocurrencies, with the market value of around $1.06 Billion, while the value of each coin is at $61.60 as on 03/11/2019. The 24-hour trading volume is approximately $191 Million, with ~17 Million coins circulating in the market. Monero is traded with the ticker symbol ‘XMR’ in all of the cryptocurrency exchanges.

Challenges faced by Monero

Since Monero ensures complete privacy for the transactions, the usage of the currency is particularly popular in the dark web. While, still Bitcoin holds prominence in both the legitimate and illegitimate transactions across the world, owing to its knowledge amongst the people, there is a slow shift towards Monero with the people who wants to cover their tracks. Certain ransomware attackers demand the money exclusively in Monero to decrypt the encrypted files.

The rich privacy feature has made Monero a popular coin shortly after its inception, while its usage in the dark web markets is widely questioned. That’s about Monero. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below. Cheers!

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Knowing About the EOS Cryptocurrency & Its Blockchain

Introduction

EOS is the native cryptocurrency of the EOS blockchain. EOS blockchain is a decentralized open-source platform built to support the development of decentralized apps (DApps) with core functionalities helping to develop industrial-scale applications.

The EOS blockchain platform was announced its white paper in 2017 by a private company called block.one. The platform came into the market as an open-source platform in June 2018. The EOS is informally called the ‘Ethereum Killer’ in the crypto community. That is because this platform offers almost all the features of the original Ethereum platform but with a lot of improvements. These improvements enable DApp developers to build industrial level applications with ease.

Objective

While there are many blockchain platforms in action now, we can say each one has its unique features suitable to different industries in the market. Each platform is developed to overcome the shortcomings of its predecessor. EOS platform has been introduced to improve functionalities offered by Bitcoin and Ethereum platforms. EOS whitepaper says it is possible to run 1000 transactions per second during the initial stages, and later it aims to run a million transactions per second. Thus enabling industrial level applications to be run on the platform without scaling issues. Moreover, the platform has made transaction fees-free, making people choose EOS over other cryptos.

Consensus

So how does the EOS work to hit a million transactions per second? EOS uses the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) as its consensus algorithm. There will be only 21 block producing nodes in the network. These blocking producing nodes are chosen by the people in the network who hold EOS cryptocurrency on a voting process, which happens continuously. Thus, maintaining the integrity of the users in the system is of utmost importance to the block producing nodes. Hence the transaction should be validated by only these 21 nodes to get confirmed in a block, and it is a relatively straightforward process. The block producing nodes are rewarded with EOS for validating the nodes.

EOS ICO

To ensure the native currency of the platform (EOS) is widely available, a billion coins were sold on the Ethereum platform as ERC 20 tokens. The ICO was held for an entire year. 10% of these tokens are reserved for Block.one, the founding company. EOS raised a record amount of $4 billion in its ICO, although the working product wasn’t available in the market then.

Market Cap

EOS stands at seventh place in the crypto world with close to $3 Billion in value. The price of each coin is $3.25 as of 30/10/2019. The 24-hour trading volume is around $2.5 billion, with 938 Million coins circulating in the market.

Price History

EOS began trading with a price of $1.03 in July 2017. The coin didn’t get much attention for the first four months, and the price started slumping. By November 2017, it was trading at $1.21, and by January 2018, it is traded at $18.06. Then from a peak of $18.06, it fell to $4.08 by March 2019. It slowly increased and decreased from then without a very drastic change, and the price as on 30th October 2019 is $3.25.

Conclusion

There has been a lot of negative talk about EOS, but crypto enthusiasts see high potential in the EOS platform because of the promising features it offers. Applications can be written in any language on EOS, unlike the Ethereum platform, which allows only its native programming language, Solidity. Hence not only crypto enthusiasts but also industry experts believe that the EOS platform is revolutionary due to its scaling and flexibility options.

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Understanding The Basics Of Binance Coin

Introduction

For crypto enthusiasts, Binance is a well-known word as it is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges. The word Binance is a portmanteau of Binary and Finance. Binance coin was initially launched on the Ethereum platform and later was moved on to the Binance’s proprietary blockchain (Binance Chain).

Binance was founded by its CEO Changpeng Zhao who is known as CZ in the world of cryptocurrency, with co-founder & CTO Roger Wang.

Objective

The objective of the Binance coin creation was to serve as a medium for transaction fees, which includes trading fees, exchange fees, and listing fees on the Binance exchange. Just like Ether fuels the Ethereum blockchain platform, Binance coin fuels the Binance exchange. Like any other cryptocurrency, this coin can be traded as well in many of the cryptocurrency exchanges. Binance initially had its headquarters in China, and then in Japan, because of local government regulations. Finally, it had to move its headquarters to Malta.

Binance Coin ICO

Binance coin had its Initial Coin Offering from June 14th to June 27th in 2017. Before the  ICO happened, the network minted a total of 200 million tokens. 50% of the total tokens mined (100 million) were reserved for the ICO, and they raised approximately $15 million. The funds raised are used in three different ways; 35% of the funds raised were used to build and maintain the platform. 50% of the funds were used for branding and marketing the platform. The remaining 15% are reserved for emergency contingencies.

Fee model of the exchange

As mentioned earlier, in Binance exchange, BNB acts as a token for transaction fees. There is a benefit for using BNB token for transaction fees in the exchange. At present, Binance charges 0.1% on each trade, but if we use BNB token for transacting, the exchange offers a discount. For the first year, the concession stands at 50%, and from there on, it will be halved till the 4th year. That means, for the second year the discount would be at 25%, the third year it is 12.5% and 6.75% for the fourth year. From the fifth year onwards there wouldn’t be any discounts. Hence, there are high chances of the coin value to get depreciated as the discount decreases for each passing year. Therefore to combat the depreciation, Binance plans to burn 50% of its coins, i.e., a total of 100 million coins overtime to stabilize the currency.

Consensus 

Binance Chain uses the Tendermint Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism. The network uses different types of nodes in the system to validate and broadcast the transactions to other nodes. Validator nodes, as the name suggests, validate the transactions in the network. Witness nodes act as a witness for the consensus process and broadcast transactions to all the nodes involved in the network. Finally, the accelerator nodes are owned by the organization to speed up the validation process.

Market Cap

Binance coin stands in eighth place in terms of market cap with a value of approximately 3 billion dollars. Each coin is traded at $19.91 as of 28/10/2019. The 24-hour trading volume is $353 million, while a total of 155 million BNB’s are available in the market as of now.

Conclusion

Binance coin is one of the most innovative cryptos out there in terms of its consensus and usage. As discussed, the founders plan to burn 50% of their coins to stabilize the value of the currency. 20% of the profits are to be burnt every quarter, eventually burning 100 million of the existing tokens. By looking at the history of the coin, the industry experts believe that the currency will sustain the market and emerge as one of the leading cryptocurrencies due to its strong backing and security.

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Understanding The Basics Of Bitcoin Cash

Introduction 

As the name suggests, one can easily conclude that Bitcoin Cash is forked from the original Bitcoin protocol. It is also called as Bcash and is created in 2017. A Mining pool known as ‘ViaBTC’ proposed the name Bitcoin Cash for this cryptocurrency. In 2018, Bcash was further split into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision). This coin is traded in the cryptocurrency exchanges with BCH as the symbol.

Objective

The central vision of Satoshi Nakamoto to invent cryptocurrency is to enable the usage of the cryptos in day to day transactions. That, too, without any central authority having control over the same. As Bitcoin gained traction, the transaction fees, and the validation of the transaction started taking longer than usual. This unusual time to validate the transaction didn’t make it suitable for the day to day transactions. Hence the industry experts, after much deliberation, decided to fork the original Bitcoin protocol and create a new coin.

How is the BCH different from Bitcoin?

The block time, i.e., the time take for the generation of each block by validating the transactions, is 10 minutes, which is typically the same as Bitcoin protocol. But the block size, i.e., the number of transactions that a block can hold is around 1 MB for the Bitcoin network at the time in 2017 (when the network was forked to create BCH), but the block size of a block in BCH is designed to be 8 MB to 32 MB. The number of transactions that the BCH protocol can hold during a test in September 2018 surged to more than 25,000 transactions per second, giving fierce competition to traditional operations performed by VISA and Mastercard per second. Bitcoin Cash also doesn’t incorporate Segregated Witness (SegWit), a protocol in which the Bitcoin network used to increase the number of transactions per block. (Segregated Witness is an implementation in the system to remove metadata of the block to increase the block size)

Consensus

BCH also uses a POW consensus algorithm, just like Bitcoin protocol. Both Bitcoin and BCH are capped at 21 million coins. The complexity of the challenge proposed by the network changes for every 2016 blocks as they both use an algorithm with similar complexity for mining the coins.

Market Capitalization

Bitcoin Cash stands at the fifth place in terms of market cap with $3.8 Billion in value while the price of each coin being $210.51 (as on 23/10/2019). The 24-hour trading volume is $1.6 Billion, with a supply of ~18 Million BCH coins in the market.

Price History

In August 2017, the coin started trading for the first time at $294.60. By January 1st, 2018, it was trading at $2534.82, which is around 760% increase compared with the initial inception. The surge in pricing is due to the crypto boom between November and December 2017. By January 16th, it saw a decline of 26% and traded at $1,772. From then on, this coin had a continuous decrease till November 2018, when the currency split into two medals.

BCH had a tremendous growth as the block size started at 8 MB and reached 32 MB at present as per the plan during its inception. This makes this crypto, a viable currency for day to day transactions.