- 21 Dec 202318:42Article
CryptoDiffer has announced a partnership with DragonDAO
The CryptoDiffer team will be cooperating with the DragonDAO team on project evaluation for their launchpad. Both teams will share deal flow with each other to pick up the best startups from the market.
About CryptoDifferCryptoDiffer is a unique tool for every Crypto investor. We unite all up-to-date altcoin news, analytics, in-depth reviews, and engaging AMAs with startup teams in one platform.
About The DragonDAOThe DragonDAO is an investment DAO, a next-generation launchpad that provides an opportunity to invest in early-stage crypto projects along with influencers and VCs. They redefine the investing experience, offering exclusive early access, a DragonDAO shield, and a refund policy to minimize investor risks. Its approach goes beyond traditional investments, providing a dynamic narrative of growth and development
Source - 10 Nov 202115:00Article
Suddenly, Bitcoin hits new all-time high after $2K gains in minutes
Ether follows suit as Bitcoin price action abandons its correction to reach its highest-ever levels.
Bitcoin (BTC) surprised everyone on Nov. 10 as BTC price action abruptly hit new all-time highs. The BTC price jump also coincided with news that U.S. inflation hit a 30-year high in October, reported the Wall Street Journal.
BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingViewSource - 10 Nov 202114:58Article
Crypto has gone from ‘weird’ to ‘cool’ thanks to NFTs, says Visa executive
Visa head of crypto Cuy Sheffield said that investing in cryptocurrency has become a lot cooler thanks to an influx of creative types drawn in by the booming nonfungible token (NFT) sector.
Sheffield was speaking on day one of the Singapore FinTech Festival on Monday. He said that a “whole new class” of mainstream users are flocking to crypto and that NFTs are attracting people with a broad range of interests, such as music, art and culture, who are “setting up crypto wallets in waves.”
“Crypto is becoming cultural, it’s becoming cool,” Sheffield said, and added that:
“It used to be that if you were investing in crypto, you were kind of weird.”Source - 10 Nov 202114:01Article
University of Cambridge to launch decentralized carbon credit marketplace on the Tezos blockchain
The university hopes the move will raise funding for large-scale conservation and restoration initiatives.
In an announcement Friday morning, the University of Cambridge announced it would be building a novel decentralized carbon credit marketplace to support global reforestation efforts. Its ultimate goal would be to increase the adoption of nature-based conservation solutions, or NbS, such as reforestation, through financial instruments. The institution envisions that purchasers of carbon credits will be able to securely and directly fund NbS projects through the platform.
The initiative, known as the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits, or 4C, is based in the Department of Computer Science and Technology and the Conservation Research Institute. Scientists and researchers will build the marketplace on the Tezos (XTZ) blockchain. Tezos is a smart contract blockchain that enables users to vote on governance protocols put forth by developers. The network is known for its eco-friendly nature.
Earlier in the year, Tezos developers tweeted that minting three nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, on the Tezos blockchain produces .00054 lbs of carbon dioxide, compared to 915 lbs of CO2 for the same NFTs minted on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain.Source - 10 Nov 202113:02Article
Huobi Global exits Singapore to form new local entity
All Huobi Global clients in Singapore should close active positions and withdraw their digital assets before March 31, 2022.
Huobi Global, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volumes, is winding down operations in Singapore shortly after exiting China.
The exchange will have shut down accounts of all Singapore-based users by the end of March next year, the company officially announced late Tuesday.
All Huobi Global clients based in Singapore should close active positions and withdraw their digital assets before March 31, 2022, Huobi said. The exchange will also gradually halt access to Huobi services in Singapore before March, the announcement notes.Source - 10 Nov 202106:58Article
Robinhood COO praises Shiba Inu as crypto wallet waitlist grows to 1.6M
Pressure is mounting for Robinhood to list one of the most popular memecoins on the market, and the waitlist for the platform’s crypto wallet has grown to 1.6 million users.
Robinhood chief operating officer Christine Brown has praised the Shiba Inu community but said safety was the platform’s priority over the “short-term gain” of listing new tokens.
Brown made the comments in an interview for the Crypto Goes Mainstream event streamed live on YouTube on Tuesday. When asked about Shiba Inu (SHIB) she said:
“One of my favorite things is seeing the community around these coins really engage with us and let us know what they want.”Source - 10 Nov 202104:59Article
Coinbase shares to open lower after 75% drop in net income in Q3
Coinbase posted total net revenue of $1.235 billion in Q3 falling 30% short of FactSet estimates of $1.614 billion.
Coinbase (COIN) shares have taken a hit after the firm posted a 75% decrease in net income during the third quarter.
COIN closed Tuesday with a 0.98% gain at a price of $357.39. However, the release of the leading United States exchange’s Q3 report after market close has coincided with a dip of around 13.10% (at the time of this writing) in after-hours trading.
Coinbase posted revenue of $1.235 billion in Q3 falling well below analyst estimates of $1.614 billion, according to FactSet. The firm’s profits totaled $406 million, marking a 74.7% decrease in profit compared to the previous quarter, although it was above analyst expectations of $380 million. Coinbase also reported earnings of $1.62 per share, which came in 10% short of the FactSet consensus estimate.Source - 10 Nov 202104:00Article
SEC Commissioner: DeFi must address transparency and pseudonymity
Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw wants DeFi projects to cooperate with the SEC in order to find solutions for compliance with existing regulations.
United States Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw has highlighted the benefits of decentralized finance (DeFi) while warning of the dangers of failing to embrace a protective regulatory framework in a Tuesday opinion piece.
The article, “DeFi Risks, Regulations, and Opportunities,” is the first in the inaugural issue of “The International Journal of Blockchain Law.” In it, Crenshaw outlines her belief that the DeFi community must address issues with transparency and pseudonymity while coming into compliance with SEC rules:
“In the brave new DeFi world, to date there has not been broad adoption of regulatory frameworks that deliver important protections in other markets.”Source - 02 May 201923:26Article
Trias Review by Midgard Research
“Trias Politica is a system of government where a country’s government is divided into branches, each with separate and independent powers and areas of responsibility so that the powers of one branch are not in conflict with the powers associated with the other branches.”
PROBLEM & SOLUTIONTrias is a new public blockchain that supports the execution of native applications for all platforms.
The main features of the platform are as following:-Effective consensus mechanism with the ability to process more than 100,000 TPS-Effective consensus mechanism with the ability to process more than 100,000 TPS-High security-Unlimited scalability-No cost for data migration-Support for complex smart contracts
The entire infrastructure is divided into three subsystems, which are acting the same way as a legislative, executive, judicial branches of government.
– Leviatom (Executive), a network of Trusted Execution Environments. Leviatom uses a unique Heterogeneous Consensus Graph algorithm. This consensus combines heterogeneous TEE technologies (TPM, TXT, Intel SGX, ARM TrustZone) and graph computing algorithms (similar to Hashgraph or DAGs) to increase the speed of network drastically.– Prometh (Legislative), a development environment responsible for the correctness of application development and the absence of errors and vulnerabilities.– Magcarta (Forensic) is an ecosystem connecting providers of computing resources and applications.
A Check-and-Balance system is built into the infrastructure to limit the level of influence of each of the named branches.
Trias is developing its infrastructure in order to enable a wide range of usage scenarios such as:-Acceleration of existing blockchains. Leviatom is able to help the third-party chains to achieve more than 100,000 TPS for a single shard while remaining significant security.-Consensus-oriented Enterprise Programming. MagCarta allows the applications to adopt the consensus to their needs.-An ecosystem of reliable operating systems and applications. Trias removes malware and vulnerabilities and can build trustworthy App stores for PCs, enterprise servers, mobile or IoT devices.-Multi-Party Computation. Trias provides Multi-Party Computation by exchanging trusted applications instead of exchanging private data.-Reliable cloud calculations.
MVP & ROADMAPTrias has a quite extensive roadmap. A lot has been done already, at this moment Trias delivered working MVP, Testnet and Wallet. The constant progress of development can be monitored through Weekly Reports. Mainnet is scheduled for Q2 2019
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP
TEAM and ADVISORSDr. Anbang Ruan, Co-Founder and CEO at Trias, has received a Ph.D. at Computer Science at the University of Oxford. He has more than 10-years research experience in Trusted Computing, Trusted Cloud Platform, Cloud Computing Security and Virtualized Platform Security. He is also a Founder and CEO of Octa Innovations, company that develops network security applications using artificial intelligence and trusted computing technology.
Dr. Ming Wei, Co-Founder and CTO at Trias, is a former China Aerospace Software R&D Center Senior Architect, Siemens Academy Engineer. He is also a Co-Founder and CTO at Octa Innovations where he hosted and developed DASO private chain and consortium blockchain. It achieves 100,000 TPS data storage applications’ scenario requirements.
Sun Jiahao, CSO at Trias, is a chief AI Scientist of RBC, a well-known international bank. He has founded several AI and Fintech companies in London, invested by major investment institutions in Europe.
The rest of the team consists of solid developers with years of experience in programming and computer science. The core members come from Oxford University and Peking University, and have experience at top tech companies such as Microsoft, Alibaba, and DiDi.
Advisory board consists of four persons: Prof. Andrew Martin, Prof. Hanqing Jin, Dr. Ning Wang, and well-known Roger Lim. The first three advisors are strong researchers and data scientists from prominent universities.
Roger Lim is the founding partner of Neo Global Capital (NGC). Roger is an advisor to many successful blockchain projects like Bluzelle, Selfkey, QLC Chain, TomoChain, Switcheo, BlockCloud, Aergo, MultiVAC and Top Networks helping them to successfully raise over USD 500 million.
PARTNERSHIPSTrias has not announced any notable partnership that will help the project in implementation or integration of its technologies. We can observe only well-known funds mentioned as early investors:
NEO Global Capital, one of the largest institutional investor of blockchain technologies and has been a key contributor to a number of leading projects including Zilliqa, Ontology, NKN, Oasis, Mainframe, Certik, Bluzelle, and IoTeX.
DHVC, a VC fund that invests in early stage and growth stage technology startups including Ontology, FCoin, Hashgraph, NEO, Mainframe, Zilliqa, QuarkChain, Cosmos, DFinity, MobileCoin, Telegram, Cohesity, HeadSpin, Zenreach, Wish, Optimizely, Branch Metrics, Barefoot Networks, Survios, Limebike.
KOSMOS, a leading investment firm, focused on helping blockchain startups scale and integrate their products into enterprises
Reflexion, a digital money investment fund created by a senior team, specializing high-growth industry standard setters and portal-level projects, tapping global leaders with innovative underlying public-chain technology capabilities, in-depth incubation of quality projects and expansion of global markets and other series of post-investment services.
Funds and VCs mentioned above have a lot of experience in blockchain space, they probably may assist Trias with business development.
TOKENOMICS AND TOKEN SALEThe Trias token (TRY) is a native currency in Trias network. TRY will be used to facilitate the transactions and as a reward mechanism for nodes.
There will be three roles that nodes can act:–Verifiers, who continuously and repeatedly examining the trustworthiness of the surrounding nodes by initiating TEE-oriented verifications to them.–Routers: who collect the verification data from the verifiers and disseminate it to other peers.–Executors: who execute the Prometh applications as scheduled by the MagCarta.
Trias will conduct an IEO on both KuCoin Spotlight and ChainX.kr on 14th of May.
Token Sale Details:Token Name: Trias (TRY)Total Token Supply: 10,000,000,000 TRY
KucoinSpotlight Allocation: 400,000,000 TRY (4% of total token supply)Public Sale Allocation On ChainX.kr: 200,000,000 TRY (2% of total token supply)
Price Ratio: 1 TRY = 0.004 USDPrivate Sale Allocation: 0% of the total token supplySeed Sale Allocation: 8% of the total token supplySeed Sale Token Price: 1 TRY = 0.004 USD
Seed Sale Monthly Unlock Program: 3% of seed sale (24,000,000 TRY) will be unlocked before listing, and the remainder will be released over the next 9 months on a month to month basis.
Total Hardcap: $5,600,000
Initial Circulating Supply: $2,500,000 (6.24% of Total Token Supply)
Overall, tokenomics looks solid. The hard cap is reasonable and the initial circulating supply is low. Lock-up/vesting terms for seed round investors will prevent the token price from a dump.
VERDICT: 9 out of 10Trias is a very techy project that is pretty hard to understand for a regular investor but that is what makes it outstanding. It is clearly visible that a lot of time was allocated by the team to conduct the research which is already a good sign. We see documentation being clear and logical. The team definitely has all the skills to deliver the product they are promising. The Testnet is up and running with the Mainnet being around the corner. The tokenomics clearly benefits IEO investors with most of the private sale tokens vested during the year, such an anti-dump mechanism is vital at the current market conditions. - 13 Feb 201917:57Article
Most Cryptocurrencies are actually Centralized; 3 coins leads the way.
The blockchain and cryptocurrency industry rides on the surfboards of decentralization as much as that of its cryptographic security. However, by the end of 2017, the world had a different view on the ‘decentralized’ nature of projects in this space as XRP gained the media spotlight due to Ripple Inc.’s massive ownership (60%) of the total supply of the token.
This raised the question of whether the blockchains and the associated cryptocurrencies are decentralized. A research carried out by Cryptocompare on over 100 cryptocurrencies across the field showed that only 18% of the projects were truly decentralized.
Centralized vs Decentralized systemsMore critics doubt the actual use of blockchains in today’s global economy in providing decentralization to various sectors of the economy. In this article, we focus on the features that make blockchains centralized and the top five most centralized cryptocurrencies in the industry today.
Reasons leading to a centralized cryptocurrencyThis section explains the degree of centralization of existing cryptocurrencies and the reasons leading to it.
A. Mining CentralizationOne of the most common ways cryptocurrencies are centralized arises from the mining constraints faced by the user base.
Despite the ability for any participant to validate the blocks, your channel may not be able to download the created blocks fast enough. This causes the available nodes on any blockchain to be centralized to those who can afford the expensive mining rigs and equipment.
This is a clear barrier to total decentralization of the blockchain.
Proof of Stake mechanisms also have centralization problems as the cost of maintaining a node is unprofitable. This leads to users to delegate their hash power to selected nodes.
B. Governance (Development) Centralization:The governance of most blockchain is left to the community as “no-one actually controls” blockchains. However, the development of these protocols is dependent on a few core developers as they are able to accept the code changes or understand the development protocols on the blockchain.
The development structure also ignores some opinions from external parties on the blockchain which may end up being useful.
Furthermore, the industry is currently filled with stans of “blockchain celebrities,” such as Vitalik Buterin (ETH) and Justin Sun (Tron), who easily lead change on platforms once they push an agenda. This limits the decentralization and independence of the platforms as well.
C. Centralization of Blockchain ServicesGiven the work-intensive nature of processing a block, most users prefer a trusted centralized institution to carry out the process. Block explorers are centralized between two or three trusted services such as Myetherwallet.com and blockchain.info.
The problem arises if any of these centralized services were to be hacked or compromised. The users will go on their businesses without a clue of the happening as they represent the truth to the investors.
Top cryptocurrencies that are Centralized in 2019The three reasons stated above are the most common among most centralized coins and digital assets. We list below the 5 biggest cryptocurrencies that exhibit centralization and how each is working (or not) on becoming more decentralized.
1. XRPThe king of centralized cryptocurrencies.
Ripple Inc. owns 60% of the total XRP supply. There is no better example across the big cap cryptocurrencies that shows centralized properties than XRP. As mentioned before, Ripple Inc., XRP’s custodian, holds 60% of the pre-mined coins. Furthermore, Ripple Labs, controls a large share of the development on the XRP protocol given the huge interest the company has in XRP.
While decentralization may be a key factor in most crypto projects, XRP is controlled by the Ripple Inc. team. The team has scheduled periods in the future to release the pre-mined assets to investors in a bid to reduce their holdings and raise capital.
2. NEOThe sept of centralized nodes.
While XRP’s centralization arises from developmental issues, NEO’s centralization problem is hugely influenced by governance procedures.
The blockchain is known as the Ethereum of China has grown in ranks since inception, and currently places as number 16 on CoinMarketCap.
NEO is governed by seven fixed nodes that are chosen by the NEO Foundation and, in case one node fails, then the blockchain fails as well. Current efforts by the team to push for decentralization have born fruit as two nodes have been left to the community to run. The Foundation is working towards having a completely decentralized platform by the end of the year.
The NEO Global Development team released a guideline on “How to Become a NEO Consensus Node” to increase awareness of decentralization on the NEO platform.
3. EOSOnly 21 block producing nodes on the platform.
EOS blockchain suffers the same problem as NEO since it too has a limited number of selected nodes that control the system.
“EOS runs on only 21 nodes that check and validate new transactions. Every 126 blocks, 21 new nodes get elected by the stakeholders, which means every round an elected node ‘mines’ 6 new blocks. Blocks get produced every 0.5s, which makes 1 round last ~63s.”
However, the system remains centralized as these 21 nodes are usually voted in through and through, increasing their power and position in the system.
Despite Satoshi having a vision of a decentralized and public network on blockchains, centralization has taken root in most major projects. This has caused a rumble in various communities with some supporting the motive and others criticizing it.
There are, however, some benefits to having a centralized community running the development, governance and services provided on the blockchain, but we’ll leave that topic for a future article.