blockchain

Introducing the Callisto Network

July 8, 2021 by naomi

As many recent hacks have made painfully obvious, the (or the lack of) security of smart contracts is still a pressing issue in the world of Blockchain. After Mark Cuban lost thousands in an algorithmic stablecoin protocol promising a very high yield, he cried out for regulation.

Sure, indeed, customer protection in DeFi doesn’t exist as it does in traditional finance, but it’s also on investors to do their own research, and often when something is too good to be true, it’s worth digging a little deeper.

Instead of stifling innovation with regulation, another approach is to increase the security of existing networks and smart contracts. While there are many renowned security auditing firms, most of those are run by centralized teams and charge projects, hiring them at quite a high fee. Therefore, for smaller developers, it’s simply not feasible to upfront such a cost.

Another challenge in the blockchain is scalability. Ethereum Classic, just like its originator chain, is still figuring out how to increase scalability without sacrificing security or decentralization.

Callisto Network aims to solve both challenges with its open-source, decentralized platform. It’s essentially a sidechain that will help scale and introduce the process of cold staking. The platform’s native coin, CLO, if the main purpose is to pay for the blockchain’s gas fees. It also allows investors to earn passive income when placed Cold Staking, and it is planned to give holders voting rights in governance decisions.

Proposed by the leaders of the Ethereum Commonwealth, Callisto was introduced as a way to boost the platform and community growth of the Ethereum Classic blockchain.

Over time Callisto Network evolved to become a project in its own right and is now a reference in smart contract security.

Auditing

As the team believes that security is the true catalyst for the adoption of any technology, they have created Callisto’s Security Department, a team of decentralized auditors, and a trusted audit process.

Everyone can submit an auditing request that a full-time team of smart-contract auditors will then review.

It’s interesting to note that the team relies on real auditors to conduct their audits. In fact, they believe that automated tools and formal verification cannot provide sufficient security for mission-critical systems and DApps.

Since 2018, Callisto Network’s security experts have made numerous contributions to improve, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, EOS and have audited more than 350 smart contracts.

Cold Staking

Cold staking is a feature that encourages users to hold their coins for a longer period of time to enhance the store of the value property of CLO. It’s implemented through solidity smart contracts and enables holders to receive a percentage of mining rewards constantly.

The RoI is dynamic and depends on the amount of CLO engaged in cold staking, but there is no minimum amount for stakers. As real-time on-chain computations are impossible, staking rewards are only calculated when stakers claim them.

Governance

Cold stakers can participate in governance. The treasury governance system will allow community members to manage the distribution of treasury funds. The community will go through various stages to get initiatives funded, including an initial proposal with a request for funding and voting. Each holder has a vote with a weight equal to their cold staking deposits. They can only cast for, against, or abstain.

Callisto is providing much-needed security for the blockchain space. With increasing awareness of security breaches, such networks might just become more important in the future.

CLO is now trading with BTC, ETH, and USDT pairs on our exchange.

Filed Under: Exchange Tagged With: audit, blockchain, callisto, Security

Redd: The Social Currency

June 4, 2021 by naomi

Many cryptocurrency developers are focused on solving problems encountered in the traditional financial system. Issues like unfair lending practices and lack of access to financial services have inspired a wide array of digital projects in the Decentralized Finance space. Redd, formerly known as Reddcoin was inspired to optimize any area of the digital landscape that has experienced exponential growth over the past decade: Social Media.

Redd makes it easy for anyone to get paid for social media posts and content across the web. Dubbed “The Social Coin”, Redd facilitates quick and easy transactions between users, perfect for fee-free tipping on social media posts.

Driven by a dedicated team of volunteers, Redd was released in 2014, and has been compared to multiplatform, blockchain-based Patreon in the past. Users can already be paid in Redd on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Twitch and YouTube.

The team also runs the independent Social Media platform, Reddcoin Talk, which hosts a community of over 60,000 members spread across 50 countries worldwide.

Proof of Stake Velocity

One interesting feature of the Reddcoin blockchain is its unique consensus algorithm: Proof-of-Stake-Velocity. When Bitcoin was created, the Proof-of-Work algorithm solved the problem of double spending elegantly and efficiently. As mining hardware has advanced though, individual miners have been replaced by large mining operations the world over.

As Bitcoin’s energy consumption has come under fire over recent months, blockchain projects have to employ different algorithms to achieve consensus. As a fork of the Litecoin blockchain, Redd switched from Proof of Work to a proprietary algorithm that combines Proof of Stake and the velocity of the currency to achieve consensus.

Proof-of-Stake has been criticized for encouraging accumulation rather than spending in the past, but the Reddcoin team skirted this pitfall by introducing the concept of velocity into the equation. A currency’s velocity is the number of times a unit of currency changes hands within a specified period of time. As a rule of thumb, the higher the velocity, the more likely it is that an economy is flourishing and members are doing well.

This unique algorithm encourages users to mine, spend and tip Reddcoin, rather than simply accumulating the currency. By connecting Reddcoin wallets to the internet, everyday users can participate in the mining of the cryptocurrency. Additionally, a penalty is levied on inactive nodes, which again incentivizes active participation in the network.

PoSV v2

Since moving from Proof of work to PoSV, the Redd team has been continuously working on bringing further improvements to the network. One of them was implementing a second version of the PoSV algorithm in 2020, which enhances stake rewards for actively participating users and provides a revenue stream for developers to fund operational costs and provide further financial support.

We’re excited to announce that Reddcoin has joined Bitcoin.com Exchange. You can trade RDD today with BTC.

Filed Under: Exchange, Listing Tagged With: blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Listings, Reddcoin, social media

Origin Protocol is bringing NFTs and DeFi To The Masses

June 1, 2021 by naomi

Remember that YouTube video “Charlie bit my finger”? It was the one where a boy sitting on the sofa is repeatedly bitten by his baby brother, who’s sitting on his lap. If you haven’t seen it before May 23rd, we’re sorry to say that it’s not available anymore. Charlie, who is now 14 years old, converted the Youtube video into a Non-Fungible-Token and auctioned it on the Origin Protocol.

After intense bidding by several parties, the video sold for $760,990, making Charlie quite a rich 14-year-old.

The platform facilitating this auction, Origin Protocol, made it its mission to bring NFTs and DeFi to the masses. With a vision to bring change to the sharing economy, the team lead by Josh Fraser and Matthew Liu has launched a comprehensive platform that enables anyone to trade digital goods and services without any third-party involvement.

The main commerce platform that Origin Protocol built is called DShop and is already used by hundreds of merchants, including Brave or Kyber network. It’s supported by various partnerships, including Big Tech names like Amazon and Google Clouds. The DShop is powered by the Ethereum blockchain and uses the InterPlanetary File System (IFPS), which stores data like pictures, descriptions of products, and reviews while creating a cryptographic hash to them, which is stored on the blockchain. This reduces the load on the main chain, contributing to lower listing fees.

Sellers looking to start selling items on the Origin marketplace should first download the Origin dApp. This is the Front-end dApp that anyone can use to create their first listing on the Origin Platform. It connects to the Ethereum IFPS and the indexing network to create readable listings with images, descriptions, prices, and reviews. All of the steps are executed through smart contracts that communicate with different nodes on the platform.

For businesses, Origin offers proprietary software enabling them to create their own dApp with the origin software.

The third component and the Ethereum blockchain and IFPS that keeps the platform running is an indexing server. This server is an open-source server that researches and responds to queries. The server prevents users of the platform from having to search the entire Ethereum blockchain for their listings but have them readily available. The indexing server makes it possible for dApps on Origin to function similarly to centralized apps.

Unlike other blockchain marketplaces that require payments only in their native currency, Origin Protocol enables buyers and sellers to list items in fiat currencies. Therefore, the booking contracts and indexing servers rely on Oracles to reflect prices correctly according to the exchange rates outside of Origin. On the backend, the appropriate amount of digital tokens will be calculated and transferred, making it easy for non-crypto users to get started.

OGN Token

The native token of the Origin protocol blockchain goes under the Ticker: OGN and has various use-cases. The team behind OGN emphasizes that the coin was built to provide secure transnationality through various uses:

Deposit-challenge: users deposit OGN in escrow whenever they create a new listing, file a complaint, or do other tasks. If they provide valid data, they receive their deposit back. When submitting fraudulent data, the deposit will be taken from the user.
Token-verified accounts: buyers and sellers that stake OGN can increase their trustworthiness on Origin Protocol
Rewards: small amounts of OGN are given to participants contributing to the network by buying, selling, rating, and reviewing products on Origin.
Referrals: entrepreneurs, developers, and businesses are major contributors to the Origin ecosystem. Therefore, OGN will be given as rewards to those who built dApps and add-ons. Providers of new add-ons or dApps can also require users to pay in OGN for usage either on a subscription base or with a pay-per-use model.
Governance: every holder of OGN has a chance to contribute to the future direction of the platform by casting votes.

The Origin team is constantly upgrading the platform and has already onboarded hundreds of merchants. To facilitate the entry for non-crypto knowledgeable peers, Origin has also launched the OUSD, a USD-backed stablecoin that makes it easy for anyone to start earning yields between 20% — 150% at any given time.

In a low-interest-rate environment with a lack of trust in centralized e-commerce platforms grows, Origin Protocol is well-positioned to capture more demand from buyers and savers looking for higher yields at stable base currency.

OGN is now trading on Bitcoin.com Exchange with BTC and USDT pairs.

Filed Under: Exchange, Listing Tagged With: blockchain, DeFi, Listings, NFT, Origin Protocol

What is Siacoin, and how does it provide a better storage solution?

June 1, 2021 by naomi

The sudden surge of remote workers in 2020 puts a huge strain on the existing cloud infrastructure. With companies relying increasingly on a limited number of cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, these centralized systems also became even more enticing targets for hackers. Regardless of many resources centralized services can dedicate to increasing their security, centralized structures only need a single point of failure to be compromised. Many times, its social engineering and not technology that provides the best opportunity for bad actors to infiltrate.

Social engineering is a manipulation technique that involves exploiting human error and misjudgment to gain information or access to a service. Despite training employees to be wary of social engineering, it isn’t easy to mitigate it altogether.

Siacoin proposes a solution to centralized cloud storage security risks with the Sia Server and Hosting Network. Siacoin offers similar services to the big cloud companies you’re already familiar with, but with the key difference of running on a decentralized blockchain infrastructure.

Clients can rent storage space on the Sia platform and pay in the native currency SIA for services. A central entity does not provide resources, but anyone with spare storage space can rent it out in return for Sia. With this in mind, some have compared Sia to the “Airbnb” of hard drives since it’s bringing the sharing economy to cloud storage.

File Contracts

On Siacoin, transactions aren’t overseen by a third party but governed through so-called file contracts. Whenever a user wants to store files on Sia, a contract is drawn that defines the terms of their storage, such as the duration, security, pay-out, and how many times a provider must provide proof of storage.

Users on Siacoin govern their own choice of provider; it’s up to them who they want to trust based on the reputation and reviews of a provider; it’s also completely up to them to define the terms of an agreement. If they want to pay extra for higher uptime, there’s an option to do so, which incentivizes providers to provide high-quality storage.

Whenever a file contract is created, the client will deposit Siacoin into it for future use. Throughout the agreement, the token will automatically be transferred to the provider according to specified pay-out terms. If at the end of the contract coins are still in the contract, they will be returned to the client.

Proof of Storage

Proof of storage is essential in protecting clients from malicious or fraudulent providers who would take the payment but not store their data. Providers must prove that they have stored what the client wanted to have stored in specified regular intervals to prevent this from happening. If a provider fails to prove that they stored the data, they will not receive any payments and might even be hit with a penalty.

Benefits of Siacoin

Privacy: all data on Sia is encrypted. Unless the provider has the data’s private key, they won’t be able to see what is stored in their space. Therefore, the client has ownership and control over their data at all times.

Affordability: Sia can be a lot cheaper than alternative cloud storage like Dropbox or AWS. Prices are mostly market-driven without one-size-fits-all pricing. Storing one terra byte of data on Sia might just cost $2 while you pay 10 times that price for storing it on AWS.
Security: since everything is encrypted, no one other than the rightful owner of data can access it. Additionally, all files are decomposed into 30 parts before storing them. This maintains the stability of the network, ensures that data processing doesn’t fail.

Sia is a project by Nebulous inc and was launched in 2015 by the computer scientists David Vorvick and Luke Champine. The name is a reference to the Egyptian God of Perception.

Unlike many other projects in the earlier crypto days, Siacoin didn’t raise funds through an ICO but sold tokens in a private sale to investors like First Star Ventures and Fenbushi capital.

Considering that the importance of cloud storage is probably going to increase, there is a good chance that Siacoin’s network will gain further traction as a more secure and cost-efficient alternative to storing data.

Considering that all data remains encrypted, it is even an attractive option for businesses having to stay compliant with data protection laws.

Siacoin (SC) is now trading on Bitcoin.com Exchange with BTC and USDT pairs.

Filed Under: Exchange, Listing Tagged With: blockchain, Cloud Storage, Data Security, Listings, Siacoin

How Theta Network makes it easier to stream video content

May 31, 2021 by naomi

Since the beginning of the pandemic, video streaming content and platforms have expanded exponentially. Though the big names of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime account for much of the content people are consuming these days, social media platforms like TikTok have also experienced an explosion of users and content streamed through the platform. While video streaming has become an integral part of many of our lives, have you ever stopped to think about where the videos you watch actually come from?

All of the content we watch on a daily basis is stored on massive servers located around the world.

Storing large video files on one server can cause long load times and delays for people accessing the content from afar, so streaming businesses rely on systems called Content Delivery Networks. These networks store content on various servers around the world and provide a greatly improved viewing experience, but can be very costly, with costs increasing as viewers increase.

Theta Network offers streaming businesses a better platform to host video content. Backed by Sony and Samsung, the global peer-to-peer mesh network raised $20 million during token sale in 2017 with the aim of bringing a decentralized streaming infrastructure into fruition.

Theta network doesn’t target end-users, but rather helps businesses deliver seamless viewing experiences to global audiences. By leveraging a decentralized network of nodes sharing bandwidth and data, Theta allows businesses to cut costs and reduce the load on existing CDNs.

In a sense, Theta works similarly to BitTorrent, where people share video content via a decentralized network of servers around the world. The network isn’t looking to replace streaming services like youtube or twitch, but offers a way for companies to reduce operating costs and secure streaming networks. When businesses decide to use Theta, the data isn’t completely delivered by the streaming website, but is delivered by local peers providing computing resources to the network.

When users offer computing power to the Theta Network, they’re not required to stream entire videos. Like a BitTorrent, fragments of video files are broadcast from multiple users, and then re-assembled at the recipient’s end.

To encourage network participants to offer resources, Theta rewards users with the Theta Token. In the end, those who pay for streaming are the video sites and not the end-users, and payments by streaming are made through the platform’s second token, TFUEL.

The Theta token has recently debuted, and is the governance token at the core of the network. Still in its infancy, the blockchain’s development is still largely directed by Theta Labs, the development team behind the network. In order to support a truly decentralized ecosystem though, the team plans to give up governance of the coin to the network as the platform matures.

The total supply of Theta is fixed to 1 billion tokens without any inflation, while TFUEL has a maximum supply of 2.5 billion tokens with a fixed rate of 5% inflation.

Theta token holders can stake Tfuel.

Theta Blockchain

Upon launch, Theta was built on Ethereum but has since migrated to run a Proof-of-Stake chain on Tendermint. This enables the network to pay users in near real-time and pay contributors for their computing power.

2 different sets of validators run the Theta Blockchain:

Validator nodes: these are powerful computing machines that process transactions quickly and verify blocks. There is only a handful of them, and they’re mostly run by bigger corporations — such as Samsung and Sony — who can afford to stake 1 million Theta tokens.
Community nodes: these are run by network participants who want to help run the Theta network. To start running a community node, users need to stake 1000 Theta. All community nodes work together to verify that validator nodes are only confirming valid transactions. Even if all validator nodes together decided to validate a malicious block, the community nodes would reject it, which keeps the system in check.

To ensure that participants don’t try to stream to themselves, Theta has features in place that don’t allow users to specify whom they stream to and disallow streaming from the same IP address. Video streaming platforms can put further restrictions in place to comply with their internal policies.

Theta Labs is also hosting their own streaming site Theta.tv, with their blockchain solution, which makes it a working product rather than just working in theory. The company has received 3 patents from the US patent and trademark office related to video streaming and keeps expanding from the US to opening an office in Korea.

In 47 days, the Theta mainnet 3.0 will go live, which will introduce new features to the infrastructure, including more professional nodes and the ability for TFUEL holders to stake their tokens.

Exciting times for Theta with demand for video and VR content streaming certainly increasing in the future.

The Theta Token is now trading with BTC on our exchange.

Filed Under: Exchange Tagged With: blockchain, Cdn, Listings, Theta Network, Video Streaming Service

What’s Illuvium?

May 5, 2021 by naomi

While NFTs saw a huge boom in adoption earlier this year, the non-fungible token phenomenon has actually been around for some time. With the earliest well-known example of their use being cryptokitties, digital collectibles have been a rapidly expanding sector of the crypto space.

One community that’s been at the forefront of digital collectibles has been the gaming sector. Even before cryptocurrencies existed, gamers have created, battled, and traded digital items, assets, and characters.

World of Warcraft, one of the most popular online games of all time, provided an early use-case of in-game currencies when they required players to use the game’s “Gold” currency to purchase in-game items. Thus, in the gaming space, digital currencies have been around since before the advent of the crypto space.

While blockchain has brought great benefits to the gaming sector, running games off of the blockchain has proven more difficult. With the introduction of Illuvium, the first community governed AAA blockchain-based video game, the era of blockchain gaming may finally be upon us.

Illuvium is an open-world fantasy battle game built entirely on top of the Ethereum blockchain. It’s often referred to as the first actual AAA game on Ethereum.

AAA Game: usually used to describe the title developed by a large studio. It’s comparable to blockbusters in the world of movies. While the development of AAA games can be very expensive, the rewards make it worth it. Some examples of AAA games in traditional videogames include Halo, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and Zelda.

The world of Illivuim is a world full of beauty and wonder inhabited by creatures known as Illuvial. From a visual perspective, Illuvials go way beyond crypto kitties. They’re designed as high-quality 3D art made by some of the leading artists in the space.

While venturing through the vast landscape of Illivum, players can capture Illuvials by beating them in battle and then nurse them back to health. The Illuvials will become part of a player’s loyal following and can be used in fights or other adventures. Some of the Illuvials are already introduced on the Illuvium blog, such as the one below named Archeolon. Each Illuvial is also an NFT, with all of them having a strictly finite supply.

Archeleon

Unlike other blockchain games that are pretty limited in the actual playing aspect, players on Illuvium can spend time simply exploring the landscape consisting of 7 unique and stylised regions, building up a team of powerful Illuvials or a combination of both. Additionally, players can also earn Ether by selling their Illivuials on the Illivum exchange.

Illuvium has been in development since 2020 and was created by more than 40 professionals with vast experience across the gaming and cryptocurrency sector, and has been backed by well-known names in the industry, including Quantstamp, Moonwhale, Bitcoin.com and more.

The in-game currency of Illivuim is ILV. ILV is used to reward players for in-game achievements, entitles players to a share of the vault and is used for governance in the Illuvium DAO. The maximum supply of ILV is set to 10 Million, allocated across Flash Pools, In-Game rewards, Liquidity Pools, Treasury, the Team, Launchpad Seed and Pre-Seed capital. The allocation is visualised in the image below:

Source

For their launchpad, Illuvium chose to use a Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (BLBP) to allocate 1,000,000 tokens without a lock-up period to be sold to investors. This would allow a healthy price discovery mechanism. All participants in the BLBP are eligible to receive promo NFTs.

One notable partnership Illuvium has entered with immutable X. With the recent boom in NFTs, the Ethereum network has become very congested, which led to miners increasing Gas fees. Additionally, Ethereum is still not scaling with enough transactions per second to guarantee that the entirety of dApps running on the network can offer players a smooth user experience.

Well aware of those challenges, the Illuvium team decided to work together with immutable X. immutable X is the first layer-2 solution for NFTs that offers 0 gas fees, provides instant trades while providing the scalability necessary for gaming. This collaboration empowers Illuvium with L1 scalability but all the benefits of a Layer-2 solution. Gamers on the platform will have the added benefit that zero-knowledge proof is employed; therefore, they will always be in control over their funds — they can verify and withdraw assets at any time.

Why did Illuvium choose Immutable X?

Ownership is vital to collection games. If you don’t own your collection, the entire value proposition falls apart…illuvium.medium.com

To ensure fair distribution of very rare, valuable Promo NFTs, Illuvium entered into a collaboration with the well-known Blockchain Oracle: ChainLink. Once ILV tokens are released, users will be able to start staking them and participate in yield farming. On top of earning $ILV, liquidity providers get the chance to win rare promo NFTs. ChainLink is plugged in to guarantee on-chain randomness, hence a fair distribution.

Illuvium

We are excited to announce that we will be integrating Chainlink’s Verifiable Randomness Function (VRF) to fairly…chainlinkecosystem.com

All in all, Illuvium is addressing some of the most pressing challenges existing games on blockchain face, including scalability or a lack of detailed artwork. As the first AAA blockchain video game, Illivuim targets an audience that’s not just the usual crypto-crowd, making its launch planned for Q3 this year a highly-anticipated event.

Filed Under: Exchange, Listing Tagged With: blockchain, Gaming, Illuvium, NFT

Introducing LINA Network

May 5, 2021 by naomi

2017 was the year of the crypto ICO boom, when hundreds of projects appeared on the market. Though many questionable projects were birthed in this timeframe, the era also delivered genuine gems to the crypto space. Lina Network is one of those gems. The Vietnamese Startup was established in late 2017 and has headquarters in both Vietnam and Switzerland. The initial mission of the project was to leverage blockchain technology to Vietnams’ agricultural sector in order to increase competitiveness on the world stage.

Supply Chain has been one of the first applications of blockchain at the enterprise level, and Lina Network was able to capture some of that demand early on in the South East Asian market. While Lina focuses on several areas including digital identity, lina review, healthcare and supply chain, they’ve seen the most traction in the supply chain sector by partnering with eight major Tahi agricultural corporations.

Why Lina Network for Supply Chain?

Lina network is built on Ethereum, like many other projects that launched in 2017. However, well aware of network congestion and potentially high transaction fees on Ethereum, the team deployed a hybrid infrastructure which involved bridging the Ethereum Main Net and to Lina CORE.

Lina CORE is a highly scalable private blockchain that records transactions from Lina applications and stores them on a decentralized ledger. With this structure, Lina Apps can avoid high network fees and reach higher scalability than if they were operating on the Ethereum network alone.

When corporations use the Lina Network for supply chain management, they benefit from increased security, transparency and efficiency. Traditional supply chains are often scattered. Every supplier or storage facility that forms part of the chain can have different methods or processes to report on what was done with a product.

With blockchain technology, anyone can trace products on an immutable ledger, which removes the ability for data to be tampered with. This means that when all involved parties of a supply chain are working on the same blockchain platform, inefficiencies from a lack of standardization are removed from every stage of the supply chain.

By storing all data on the blockchain, enterprise users can reduce costs, avoid commercial fraud, and increase traceability. This also helps companies detect errors at every stage of the supply chain. This also benefits consumers, as the immutable ledger allows anyone to track products from each stage of production.

Other services

Lina also has several other applications, such as Lina.Review which aims at providing users with genuine reviews for a multitude of different products. This eliminates the issue of fake reviews and reviews paid for by manufacturers.

Another promising service is Lina eGovernment which is designed to help governments create electronic identification systems to increase efficiency in bureaucratic processes and ease of use for citizens. A sampling of apps that form of the Lina network can be seen in the below image.

LINA token

LINA token, an ERC-20 token fuels the entire LINA ecosystem. With a maximum supply set to 900 million LINA, 33.33% of the supply were sold in a public sale in 2017. The remaining 66.66% of the supply are locked into a smart contract to be released over a time horizon of 10 years.

Tokens on the Lina core sidechain and the Lina network on Ethereum are connected through the Lina bridge, which allows Lina core to synch with the Lina token smart contract on Ethereum making the tokens interchangeable.

To learn more about Lina Network, head to their website or follow them on Twitter.

https://exchange.bitcoin.com/lina-to-usdtLINA is now trading on Bitcoin.com Exchange against BTC and USDT.

Filed Under: Exchange Tagged With: blockchain, Digital ID, LINA, Listings, Supply Chain

How BAT fuels a fairer advertising ecosystem

April 20, 2021 by naomi

Digital advertising is broken. What started as a promising industry allowing marketers to provide value by targeting customers in better ways has turned into an industry of intermediaries controlling the most significant chunk of the market. Today, If you’re a marketer wanting to advertise a product or service, what are your options? If you’re running a digital campaign, you’d be hard pressed to reach your prospects without going through Google or Facebook.

Both of these companies were started by visionaries that wanted to deepen people’s connections through the internet. However, as Google dropped their initial “Don’t do evil” motto, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal illuminated Facebook’s darker side, we’ve been forced to reckon with digital behemoths who may not always have our best interest at heart.

The key factor that is lost on these platforms is privacy. Google has more data about you than you could ever gather about yourself. Their wide array of products and services track your every movement, and even incognito mode does not prevent you from being tracked completely. .

“Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn’t be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet.”
Gary Kovacs

While the plethora of data available to marketers these days is very enticing, the entire digital marketing industry has come to rely upon Facebook and Google, with no other options. On top of this unprecedented level of centralization, a 2018 study found the advertising industry to be racked with fraud. According to Juniper Research, in 2018 alone, advertisers lost $19 billion to fraud as they paid for non-existent results.

Brave

Well aware of all the challenges digital advertising was facing, Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, created an alternative: Brave. Brave leverages blockchain technology to improve the security, fairness and efficiency of digital advertising.

Brave is a privacy-focused browser that blocks trackers and invasive cookies, as well as all kinds of malware. Instead of keeping personal information from users, Brave tracks the way users interact with advertising content to improve their experience by serving better-suited ads. All the engagement data is anonymously and securely stored on the blockchain. This creates a win-win situation for advertisers and users alike. Advertisers have an opportunity to tailor ads more precisely, increasing the likelihood of conversions while users receive fewer, more targeted ads.

Basic Attention Token

The Basic Attention Token fuels the Brave Browser. As the name suggests, for Brave, it’s all about users attention. Attention is defined as mental engagement with digital content. BAT as the native currency of the browser is an ERC-20 token and designed to be exchanged between advertisers, publishers and users. As a utility token, BAT can be used to purchase premium content and access advertising services. Additionally, Brave rewards users with BAT for using the browser with monthly pay-outs. It’s not much, but which Browser will reward you for using it?

On top of that, the team indicates that user data is only be stored locally on their device, making it impossible for others to access that data. Lastly, Brave users can also use their BAT to tip content they enjoy. Once you start using the Brave browser, you’ll see a symbol below digital content where you can tip the content creator in BAT.

Source

Allowing users to tip to digital content creators in BAT eliminates third-party involvement, maximising the amount creators receive in tips.

The idea of creating a user experience with fewer ads better targeted to users interests without sacrificing their privacy is in stark contrast with the paradigm exercised by the big platforms, Google and Facebook. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the Brave team decided to block the recent Google FLoC update in the browser. Google introduces this update to collect users’ internet browsing history and combine it into cohorts. While Google claims that this would improve users privacy, the initial rollout has proven otherwise. While some data collected is not unique to you as a person, they’re still collecting personal data and this shouldn’t be shared without your consent.

Another issue the Brave team sees with the newest Google Update is that by default, it’s activated for all users:

We suspect that Google has made FLoC opt-out (for sites and users) because Google knows that an opt-in, privacy harming system would likely never reach the scale needed to induce advertisers to use it.”
Brave Executive (Source)

With an increasing number of users dissatisfied with big tech firms’ disregard for our privacy, it’s no surprise that the Brave Browser has been growing its active user base tremendously over the last few years. In June 2020, monthly active users were at 15 million, and in February this year, the number of monthly active users surpassed 25 million. This benefits the BAT token, which is directly tied to the success of the Browser.

With advertisers frustrated with the big monopolies and users more aware of privacy and the security of their data, Brave is well-positioned to continue its ongoing growth trajectory.

If you’re currently using Google Chrome and thinking of switching to Brave, you’ll be pleasantly surprised as the interface is very similar to your Chrome and you can use all the same ad-ons while escaping all the third-party invasive trackers and keeping your data safe.

To learn more about BAT, visit their website and download the browser to give it a try.

BAT is now trading on the Bitcoin.com Exchange with USDT, BTC and ETH pairs.

Filed Under: Exchange, Listing Tagged With: BAT, blockchain, Brave, Digital Advertising

IQONIQ AMA Summary

April 14, 2021 by naomi

On Tuesday, April 13th, we welcomed the team behind IQONIQ to our telegram channel for an AMA.

We were joined by the COO of IQONIQ, Kazim Atilla and their COO, Meirav Harel, to answer all the community’s questions.

IQONIQ is a fan ecosystem that’s bringing sports and events organizations together with their fans, allowing them to engage in more meaningful ways. Since its inception, the team has already secured partnerships with famous organizations such as the McLaren racing team and FC Valencia.

Read on to learn what we’ve covered during our session with the IQONIQ team.

Question: What is the vision for IQONIQ?

Answered by Kazim: “Sports clubs, companies, and athletes find all the billions of individual engagements daily incredibly frustrating. They don’t know who is liking their posts; they don’t learn what fans really want. They don’t know how to leverage all this information to bring more revenue, and more importantly, to do even more for their fans.

So IQONIQ provides a game-changing solution for fans on the one hand while enabling sports clubs to monetize the value of their global fragmented fan base and assets.

The idea is that IQONIQ is revolutionizing this multi-billion-dollar Sport & Entertainment industry by introducing a best-of-its-kind social engagement platform that enables sports clubs, athletes and entertainers to manage and monetize the value of their global fragmented fan base and social media assets better.

We are aiming to provide fans with a richer, rewarding and more personal relationship with their idols and clubs, on a universal, seamless, and gamified App that includes a great loyalty platform with a complete fan-centric ecosystem, that is bridged to the blockchain world.

IQONIQ also provides a digital sports-focused marketplace and a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) platform. “

Question: IQONIQ has quite a substantial and growing community; how will Bitcoin.com Exchange provide their community with all they need to trade, hold and acquire IQQ?

Answer by Danish: “We’re super excited to be partnering with IQONIQ for the aforementioned vision. Our platform is extremely robust, offers great tech and security, and a brand and name to match.

We are constantly engaging the community and creating new ways to engage with the tokens we list. We hope to bring quite a lot of activities relating to IQQ for our existing users as well as for IQONIQ’s community.”

Question: What are IQONIQ’s plans related to NFTs?

Answer by Meirav: “ IQONIQ also includes a digital sports-focused marketplace and a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) platform, that will hold both Traditional and digital collectibles from teams and idols, memorabilia and also special experiences — and all of these will be underwritten via NFTs.

We are looking to work with different NFT issuers and find the best possible ones to streamline the NFT issuance process. Our objective is to enable teams, idols and brands to issue NFTs seamlessly, without any prior knowledge of how blockchain technology works, because Issuing NFTs should be a simple 1–2–3: 1. identify an object (digital or real-life collectible), 2. create the NFT peg, 3. trade it. That’s what we’re aiming for. “

Question: Crypto and blockchain are finding many use cases in the entertainment world, via sports, celebrities and so forth. What’s your forecast for the future of both industries combining efforts in 5–10 years?

Answer by Danish: “I think the outlook is extremely positive. It’s a natural progression and marriage. All the things that IQONIQ is doing are spot on — fan engagement actually bringing together sports and entertainment closer to their audience, combing that with NFT’s, is just amazing and is really the future.

Think of Twitter allowing people to interact and get that one step closer to their idols. I’d say Iqoniq is on that footpath and will be a force to reckon with in the next few years.“

Addition by Kazim: ”First of all, it seems that Covid has required the entertainment and sports worlds to rethink their revenue streams and digital presence. So technology will be expected to be more widely used in these fields to create better experiences.

For instance, with NFTs — An interesting step would be to connect the digital and physical world in an established way. The connection between Non-Fungible Tokens and Real-life assets is an important direction that can enable interesting developments. From day one, we always had collectibles in our vision, and the NFT technology has added much value to the physical collectibles.

One of the problems with the uptake of blockchain-based apps was that projects constantly tried to find problems to fit into their solution instead of the other way around. For IQONIQ, the longstanding problem had always been to capture the massive lost value of fan engagement.”

Question: How do IQQs work in regards to the APP?

Answer by Meirav: “We have built a comprehensive ecosystem that is an all-in-one fan engagement platform that gives fans the unlimited ability to experience their favourite sports and personalities in more meaningful ways that were not possible before. (…) Every like, comment, share, and the view will be tracked by the IQONIQ gamified app to fairly reward every interaction with an appropriate amount of IQONIQ Loyalty points anon in some occasions of IQQs.

Think of the entire system as a gamified social network, where interactions are encouraged and rewarded. Instead of static rewards that expire, IQQs can be used for many things: accessing exclusive merchandise, discounts on products, priority access to matches and many more.”

Question: Why did you choose the sports theme for IQONIQ? How can you describe and dеmоnstrate the uniquеnеss and vаlue of thе IQONIQ platform to a fооtball fаn?

Answer by Kazim: “When I was 6-years old I had a terrible “shopping bus” accident and was almost dead. The accident left me bed ripped for 4 months, and I was handicapped in a wheelchair for another 5 months, whereby I had to learn to walk again. After I could walk again, sport gave me my passion and strength to become stronger. From the age of 8, I got addicted to sport, and from the age of 10, I tried every sport I could. As you can see, sport gave me a lot, and still, it gives me happiness, and my passion doesn’t stop, and I don’t think it will ever stop.

As a huge sports fan, I was frustrated with how to find the content on many different sites, social media, dedicated apps, then for tickets, and you had to go to another app, the same thing for webshop, merchandise etc. whereby you would never be really rewarded being a loyal fan. The rightsholders have their own problems and the brands also, and I believed that this could be much better, so started IQONIQ.”

Question: Do you plan to create a channel, for example, YouTube, to create content about LaLiga?

Answer by Meirav: “On IQONIQ, each league and each club will have their own profile and environment on the App. The whole idea is that fans will not need to scrape the various social media platforms to see and read all they want to know about their favourite league or club.

That means that LaLiga, for instance, will have its own page with its content, including videos and special content on the IQONIQ app itself. Besides, for the clubs that have partnered with us (over 100 already), each club will be able to create and share content and create and share Digital and real-world collectables and memorabilia straight from IQONIQ.

It’s a lot more than just content — We have statistics, scores, AR, VR, QR-ticketing, games, competitions, and much, much more.”

Question: Adoption is one of the most important factors that all sustainable blockchain projects should focus on to be more attractive in the invertors Eyes. Can you tell me what IQONIQ has done and plan to do to achieve adoption in reality, real use cases, our real society?

Answer by Kazim: “We have now over 120 partners and are in discussions with over 200 rightsholders which are all interested, so this shows a strong belief in our vision. We use many different technologies, and blockchain is one of them, and we have made sure to use this where it only adds value, and if it doesn’t, then we don’t.

The other point is that as a user of our App, you won’t need to understand anything about blockchain nor crypto, which is the same that many people don’t understand how Android and IOS works but still use the apps which are built on them!

You also don’t need to own the IQQ tokens to be able to use the app. Still, if you do, it will give you additional benefits, and it also accelerates the different benefits in the IQONIQ ecosystem.”

Question: First of all, as a sports fan, I liked your project very much. Is there a partnership study on Nba?

Kazim answered: “We are in negotiations with over 200 rightsholders, including clubs from many different sports. We have been swamped in the US and have been talking to every sports league and are in far advanced negotiations with all of them. We already have several partners onboarded from the US and hope that we can announce some inspiring new partnerships, and maybe one of them will be the NBA 😊.”

Thanks to all our participants and the IQONIQ team for taking the time to answer the community questions. We could deepen our understanding of the IQONIQ app and the IQQ token, making us even more excited for the future.

If you want to see more of IQONIQ, head over to their website or follow them on Twitter.

The IQQ token can be traded with BTC, USDT and ETH on our exchange.

Filed Under: Exchange Tagged With: AMA, blockchain, Fans, IQONIQ, Sports

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