TronWeekly

Crypto World News

You are here: Home / Search for "xrp"

Search Results for: xrp

The best-featured cryptocurrencies as per Forbes experts

by

The choice is a good thing. Options beget freedom and we all like that. Alternatives are especially important when we talk about decentralized technology and blockchain projects. 2017 saw a huge bull run on the cryptocurrency market so the number of projects skyrocketed.

That now makes many investors wonder if such a huge variety of cryptocurrencies is just creating confusion. This is particularly true for investors and observers who don’t know the cryptographic technology in depth.

In this blog, we’ll show you four distinct blockchain projects that have clear goals and we’ll explain to you what they can contribute to the digital assets market and to the technology world. These four projects are Tron, Ethereum, Ripple, and Apollo. And this is based on what Forbes experts believe, not just us.

Tron

Tron is a platform in which you can do everything you can do in Ethereum, except it’s more scalable and costs are way cheaper. So it’s like Ethereum, only without the problems that have been plaguing it recently.

It’s a very young platform as it went independent only about half a year ago. Tron has naturally benefited by Ethereum’s disadvantages. There is a lot of competition among both platforms (and among their leaders, Vitalik Buterin and Justin Sun) but this is not a bad thing, it could turn out to be a good thing for the cryptosphere as a whole in the long run.

Similar as both projects are, Tron offers 2,000 TPS of throughput. Additionally, executing transactions on smart contracts are free of charge, which is a stark contrast with Ethereum in which the gas price has been an issue for months.

Tron is getting ready for an airdrop as part of Project Atlas (which is the way in which Tron will absorb the BitTorrent network into its platform and blockchain). According to Justin Sun, Tron’s CEO and founder, this airdrop will,

“distribute tokens to users in Q1 of 2019. This will be the biggest platform for blockchain with over a hundred million users. The first step in building Project Atlas was to make BitTorrent Speed, which was built in less than 6 months”

And that’s just the beginning as Mr. Sun has more ambitious plans for the way in which BitTorrent and Tron will take off together in this new year: “Our next steps in 2019 would be Project Atlas, DApps, community, and tech support. In particular, support is very important to us as TRON is community oriented and consumer-focused. BitTorrent Web is another step towards more user acquisition, and thus user empowerment. Lastly, we’re looking at a partnership with established companies, such as Swisscom and Oracle to accelerate the decentralization of the Internet”.

Tron’s protocol includes TPOS. That’s the way in which the network reaches consensus. There are 27 super representatives who take turns to produce blocks for the chain, and those 27 nodes are elected by TRX account holders. A little like in Ripple, this compromises decentralization but it boosts scalability.

Another plan for Tron in the near future is to provide a privacy layer for token holders.

But Tron’s most important goal is to decentralize the web in full. Tron wants for content creators to offer their work to end-users autonomously without central authorities such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Youtube so that they can monetize their content directly. It’s incredibly ambitious, but owning the BitTorrent network is certainly a step in the right direction.

Ethereum

Ethereum is the most well-established project in the list. It’s a programmable blockchain platform that’s been around for about three and a half years. Ethereum’s idea is to have a decentralized network that features a programmable layer that is useful for more than just a coin (smart contracts and decentralized applications).

It’s had its share of problems since it came online. A DAO hack created a hard fork which challenged the project’s position in the cryptosphere. But Ethereum managed to recover its place as the world’s second cryptocurrency by market capitalization recently (after losing it to Ripple for a few weeks) which comes to show that the project is backed by a strong community.

Further evidence for this is in the sheer number of Solidity programmers (Ethereum’s native programming language) active in the community. The platforms utility is potentiated by the wide spectrum of tools available and by the way in which the platform is maintained and documented.

But there are issues around Ethereum. Scalability is something of a problem that plagues the platform which could become a significant obstacle for Ethereum to consolidate its position as the world’s second most important cryptocurrency. Ethereum’s fans remain optimistic about the project’s future, but in a very cautious way.

Ethereum was a pioneering project in that it was the first blockchain that featured things other than just a cryptocurrency. Since Ethereum, many other smart contract platforms have been created, but it was Ethereum that started it all.

Many important projects that are now independent (such as Tron or EOS) came to life as Ethereum-based technologies and coins. That’s why, even with all the challenges it faces, Ethereum remains the standard for second-generation blockchains.

If the project’s leadership manages to work around the platform’s current issues (mainly, low speed and high cost) Ethereum will remain a solid project for many years to come.

Ripple

While Ethereum wants to be the most versatile blockchain network in the world, Ripple aims to be a one-trick-pony. Ripple only wants to solve a single problem, but it wants to solve it better than anybody else in the world. That problem is the transfer of value across borders in real-time and at a very low price.

The platform’s users are not average people like you and me but institutional clients like banks, remittance services, and other financial institutions which can use Ripple’s software to eliminate the friction present in the currently available technologies (the SWIFT system, mainly). This value amongst banks and remittances is transferred using Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency.

Also unlike Ethereum, Ripple is quite scalable and that’s one of its main selling points. The network is expected to allow for 50,000 transactions per second. But you have to pay a price for such speeds in the way of reduced decentralization. Ripple’s network has only 55 validators, and each of them has to be “part of an interconnected web of validators who each trust a specific set of validators not to collude”.

A frequent criticism about Ripple is the control the private company has over most of the XRP tokens, which were all pre-mined before the project went online. Ripple releases a billion tokens monthly from an Escrow account through a smart contract. This will remain in place for 55 months in other to ensure the coin’s supply without the company having any undue influence over the coin’s price.

Ripple has been unpopular at times because it wants to help the world’s banks instead of destroying them. But it’s found real use cases, it’s secured many important strategic partnerships and it’s making more progress than any other coin in crypto.

Apollo

Apollo is this list’s new kid on the block. Apollo includes all of the features that you can find in Ripple, Ethereum and Tron, and then some more. It started as a fork from the NXT platform (and not Ethereum, as in Tron’s case).

It stands apart from the other three projects because it privileges privacy and every user’s control over their own data. It features multiple privacy layers for one-to-one transactions which include IP Masking, integrated coin shuffling, and high scalability. The project’s newest update (Hermes 1.0) incorporates 2-second block speeds, which is the fastest block production in crypto.

This project is very much in development still, probably more than other projects, because its core features are still being built. There’s consistency in the development process, and it includes many interesting features such as a decentralized marketplace in which users can list and sell goods worldwide. The point is to avoid regulation through decentralization.

The project’s Director of Business Development is quite optimistic about Apollo’s future:

“The Apollo Foundation has launched the first all-in-one cryptocurrency focused on integrating every useful feature from mainstream cryptocurrencies and combining those with unmatched privacy and is now the fastest, most private and most feature-rich cryptocurrency on the market. Because of recent breakthroughs such as it’s Updater, which updates the blockchain using a transaction, Adaptive Block Generation and it’s two-second blocks, there is a case that could be made that Apollo is also the most advanced cryptocurrency.”

The key point in Apollo is privacy. It guarantees deregulation in a way that no government in the world will be able to control it. But it also has fintech aims, since it promises to make the platform easily available to those users who are currently excluded by the traditional financial system. This means that people who do not own a bank account will be able to profit from the platform’s services to ensure some financial services.

Apollo is not exactly the best-documented project in crypto but it seems that 2020 will be the year in which it will incorporate smart contracts. We still don’t know what programming languages will be supported and how those contracts will be made. Time will tell.
A new bull run will come into the cryptocurrency market sooner or later. Keep an eye out for these four projects because they could lead the way when the bulls arrive.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Tron and Ripple keep finding new partners

by

The new year is here. As every year, it brings about new hopes and expectations, which doesn’t mean we’re going to forget what happened in crypto during 2018. It was a disaster (or a huge opportunity, depending on your point of view). But even in the midst of such terrible times, some blockchain projects managed to keep growing and gaining value, at least relative to the market. Those were Ripple’s XRP and Tron’s TRX.

There’s a simple reason why those to projects kept growing: they have strong fundamentals. These are tokens that have real-life use cases which are driving them forward unlike so many other digital assets that are just subject to speculative market forces.

And the news is: they’re still moving forward. They’re making strategic moves that will ensure that, in the future, they will give Bitcoin a run for its money (fiat or virtual). Let’s start with XRP.

XRP is Ripple Labs’ native token. Ripple is a private company that works on blockchain solutions that eliminate the usual friction in settling international payments. It has a very solid use case among financial institutions and remittance services the world over, and it recently became the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

It’s managed to grow against the current by securing some vital strategic partnerships (like Banco Santander, the world’s best bank which is using Ripple’s technology already at the production level) and it keeps announcing new partnerships.

Ripple has done it again as the new year starts. Twelve new companies have announced they will adopt Ripple’s software (called xRapid) to settle international payments quickly, safely and cheaply. Among those companies are Bittox, which is one of the most important crypto exchanges in the world; Bitso, a Mexican crypto exchange that’s managed to gain the crypto community’s respect; Coins.ph, a crypto exchange based on the Philippines islands and Bitstamp.

While those new partnerships are not use cases, they still mean that XRP will have increased trade volumes and demand from users that were previously unable to get their hands on some XRP tokens. It’s good for the project, and it’s good for the token’s price because that increased demand will drive the coin’s value up.

Then there’s Tron

Tron bought BitTorrent a few months ago. That alone turned Tron into the world’s largest decentralized network.

And now, BitTorrent announced that it would issue its own cryptocurrency called BitTorrent Token (BTT). This will be a new digital asset that will incentivize BitTorrent users to keep seeding the files they have.

The longer you seed your files, the more tokens you will get as a reward. The tokens will be made effective by Binance (which is one of Tron’s most important strategic partners).

The BTT coin is based on TRC10 technology which means that it’s most easily tradable for Tron’s TRX cryptocurrency. Just imagine this: it means that, if you are a BitTorrent user, you’ll get paid in BTT just for sharing your favorite books, music, movies, or any other content you can think of.

There are about a hundred million BitTorrent users in the world, and they are all going to join the Tron community whether they know it, want it, or not.

Tron and Ripple are showing the way to go, keep an eye on them.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

2019: The year many cryptos might struggle to survive

by

2018 had been catastrophic to most of the crypto verse because of continually dropping prices. That will put many blockchain projects between a rock and a hard place because they will lack the resources to fund their businesses. Some are already laying off a lot of people, shutting down projects, and scaling back so they can deal with the current hostile environment.

Anthony Maguire, who previously worked for Facebook and now runs a blockchain advisory and education business for emerging markets had this to say about the elephant in the room:

“I think you definitely will see companies go bust. Tech startups go bust all the time. Sometimes they get swept under the rug in the sense that people just forget about them.”

A tale of ups and downs

2017 was an amazing year for the cryptosphere. Its popularity exploded because of Bitcoin’s rising price and the insane amount of initial coin offerings (ICOs) that happened during the year.

The Bitcoin-USD trading pair kept going up almost all year, and that brought to the market lots of new investors that were not interested otherwise. Most of the newcomers were hoping to make authentic fortunes as BTC kept increasing in price. By December, the price was dancing around the $20,000 level.

Then there were the ICOs. They just went crazy. It happened because startups found ways to issue their own native tokens, modeled on Bitcoin up to a point so that they could fund their projects.

Ethereum was the most popular platform for that, which means that most new projects were selling their assets in an ETH trading pair and that drove demand for Ethereum high and turned it into the world’s second-biggest currency by market capitalization.

But it couldn’t stand its ground against Ripple’s XRP which now holds that second spot. By year’s end, there were more than a thousand new digital assets in the market.

And then, 2018 came along. The thing (you know what thing) hit the fan, and it got splattered all over the place.

Bitcoin was at $17,000 on December 17th, 2017, and it’s trading around $3,800 as we write this. When the price was at its peak, no new investors came into the market hoping to get rich, so the market collapsed. Many Bitcoin holders found out that they had an asset in their hands for which there was very little demand or usefulness aside from speculation.

Not only Bitcoin has gone down, but most of those ICO tokens have also had a catastrophic year because most of their parent projects have failed to deliver their very ambitious promises.

“We’ve got a 90% s***coin marketplace, where people have then lost money because the realization has been there is no utility,” Edd Carlton, the head of OTC trading at BlockEx, told Yahoo Finance UK.

It matters when you have a history

Almost as important as Bitcoin is Ethereum and it’s also been going down all year. From $1,000 to around $130 currently. ETH has also brought down the prices for all the other ETH-20 tokens that saw their coins lose value and their cash piles shrink, whatever care they could have taken to prevent that.

“There’s less propping up poorly managed companies now than there was in January,” Maguire told Yahoo Finance UK. “It’s easier when you have years and years of the runway and huge valuations.”

The market’s failure already has consequences. Steemit, the blockchain-based blogging site, got rid of 70% of its staff after its coin collapsed. SpanChain, an adult entertainment project also based in crypto is losing 60% of its people for the very same reasons.

ConsenSys, which enjoys a rather high profile in the cryptoverse, is going to do away with 13% staff for now, but it could go as high as 60% in the near future.

Crypto miners, which are the companies, or private individuals that give life to networks such as Ethereum and Bitcoin (and yet, not all tokens are minable, like Tron or XRP) are also having a hard time because mining is becoming more expensive as the coin’s value is going down.

So it’s stopped making economic sense for many of them to be involved in the mining process. Gigawatt, a Bitcoin miner, based on the US filed for bankruptcy in November. Bitmain, a company that manufactures Bitcoin mining equipment is already laying people off

“We look at this correction as fairly healthy for the market,” Lucas Friss, head of business development at Cumberland Mining, told Yahoo Finance UK. Cumberland Mining is an over-the-counter cryptocurrency trading businesses owned by Chicago prop trading company DRW.

Friss said,

“There’s a lot of questionable projects and things out there that need to wash out of the system for the intelligent and the strong projects to come out the other side”

He didn’t “attack” any particular project, but spoke about the market as a whole. He also predicted that many investment funds based on crypto would shut down next year (this year, 2019).

“You have a lot of funds that were started that aren’t going to survive,” he told Yahoo Finance UK. “Part of that is confirmation bias. If you bought bitcoin in January 2017, you probably think you’re an investment genius.”

But both Mr. Friss and Mr. Maguire agreed in that this current hostile market situation will ultimately benefit the cryptosphere.

“People who are still going to [crypto] meet-ups right now are people who really care and people who are in it to really solve hard problems,” Maguire said. “I think what we’re going to have in 2019 is less hype, more hard work, and more deliverables.”

As long as the bears run the market, things are going to look fishy. But who really knows? 2019 could also be the year in which the bulls take over the market again, as they did in 2017, and create such a spike that even doubtful blockchain projects could be rescued.

The crypto market has been down many times already. Each time it’s recovered and reached new unsuspected heights, so there’s no reason to believe that this is the end seriously. At least not for every single cryptocurrency especially Tron (TRX) and few others with real vision and potential but, yes, maybe a few are taking their last steps. Only time will tell.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Here’s how the bear market uplifted Tron’s network bloom

by

About a couple of weeks ago, Justin Sun, Tron’s CEO and founder, published a tweet announcing that the Tron foundation is creating a fund to rescue developers on the Ethereum and EOS networks. There’s a catch though. Said developers can only benefit from that fund if they bring their decentralized apps and project to the Tron Network. That’s a fair twist.

The bear market has been causing projects to stop functioning.

Mr. Sun’s tweet could have been prompted by another tweet issued by the ETCDEV team. It’s one of the main development teams working on Ethereum Classic. They had to stop working because of lack of funding. Mr. Sun also wrote that one of the team’s developers contacted the Tron foundation in another tweet:

https://twitter.com/mary_janex1/status/1071276170157613056

Projects are taking Justin’s offer seriously, and they will boost Tron’s development. One developer from ETCDEV officially announced his tie with Tron just a little while ago.

The awful bear market we’ve seen for almost a year now has provided the perfect conditions so that Mr. Sun’s invitation for Ethereum and EOS developers to join the Tron network will make the network flourish.

This month, the Betguild team moved the Bitizens gaming app from Ethereum to Tron. Also, we saw how the Tron foundation launched the Tron Accelerator program which will spend a million dollars to support the creation of new decentralized apps for the platform.

That financial advantage makes it a lot more likely that dApp developers will move their projects to Tron, which is a platform that’s been hailed for many good reasons. It can manage 2,000 transactions per second (worldwide, it charges zero fees for processing smart contracts that are within a certain bandwidth, and the option to use zk-SNARKS to enhance privacy. Very few blockchains can offer comparable advantages. The niTron summit will take place next month, in San Francisco, and, it just so happens that Tron is compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine.

Final Thoughts

The recent market conditions pushed many dApp projects to either settle for less or just shut down completely. Mr. Sun and Tron foundation, on the other hand, are trying to persuade them to leave Ethereum and EOS behind so they join Tron, which could allow them to keep their projects alive even as the market keeps going down and they’re even providing financial incentives for them.

Tron’s dApp catalog remains very small when you compare it to Etherum. But 2019 could be the year in which we see it explode as developers take Mr. Sun at face value and join Tron. And that’s not a longshot. Everdragons has already made a move, and many other projects are expected to do the same just because of simple self-preservation.

As we write this article Tron’s TRX is trading at $0.014275. It’s trading in green numbers against the dollar (up by 8.87% in the last 24 hours).

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Tron (TRX) hits 2.42 million transactions in a single day

by

As it’s been usual throughout the year, the good news keeps flowing for Tron even as the market remains under a strong bearish run and Tron’s token’s price (TRX) is still low because of the Bitcoin pairing it enjoys (or suffers) in most of the world’s exchanges.

This Monday the Tron network processed 2.42 million transactions in a single day. Why does this matter at all? Because Ethereum, which was the platform on which Tron started, has never processed more than 1.349 million transactions in a single day.

This news is interesting for Tron fans, of course, but any conscious neutral observer in crypto should notice this and draw conclusions. In this article, we will explain to you why.

Ethereum, founded by Vitalik Buterin who is still the project’s leader,  was a pioneer. It was the first second-generation blockchain network; it created smart contracts as well as decentralized apps and that allowed for many other projects to use the network to launch ICOs for tokens based on ETH20 technology and to create blockchain networks that, while functioning over the Ethereum network, were not the same entity. That’s how Tron and EOS came to life for instance.

Ethereum was a breakthrough in crypto, but it’s been plagued by problems over the last year or so. Users have been complaining about the network’s lack of scalability which, in turn, makes it slow or unavailable at times. But the gas price has also become a disadvantage for many users because it’s just too high (and this is a network in which gas price gives you priority for your transfers to be included in the next block).

All those disadvantages gave some of the Ethereum-based projects reasons to develop autonomous blockchains so that they could become independent. But not just independent, also scalable, faster, safer, and much cheaper. That’s what Tron did.

Since Tron became independent, releasing its main net in May this year, many experts have considered it could overthrow Ethereum’s dominance in smart contracts and decentralized apps because everything you can do in Ethereum you can also do in Tron. But in Tron is way faster and cheaper. So there’s been a bit of morbid interest in seeing how and when Tron will take over Ethereum as the world’s premier smart contract and ICOs network.

That hasn’t happened so far. Tron’s dApp catalog remains rather limited, and not that many new projects have chosen to use TRC20 instead of ETH20 to create new tokens and issue ICOs.

But that’s exactly why this seemingly sterile statistic matters so much. Tron may not have that many users, apps, contracts or ICOs as Ethereum. But it’s already processing almost twice as many transfers every single day as Ethereum on its best day.

So it’s early to declare Ethereum dead. Even earlier to say it died because Tron killed it. But Tron keeps growing as Ethereum keeps shrinking. Ethereum lost its place as the second largest coin by market capitalization to XRP a couple of weeks ago while Tron went from 13th to 10th last week.

Tron is here to stay and grow. And while Ethereum doesn’t address the problems it’s had for more than a year now; it’s risking that very status.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Tron (TRX) looks strong in the top 10

by

For a little while, it seemed like the crypto bears would go away and hibernate as Bitcoin (BTC) went back up to $4000 and its capitalization reached $130 billion last week. But that was just for a little while as the weekend saw the mother of all coins drop under $3,500.

So the trend is still bearish but even in this nearly catastrophic market, some cryptocurrencies are finding ways to outperform other assets and swim against the current. XRP has been a good example. But so is Tronix (TRX) now.

As we write this article, Tron is trading in green numbers (0.93%) which means it’s the best performing coin right now since everyone stands in red (including Tether) currently. The bears have been hugging Cardano’s Ada and Monero’s XMR quite hard, so Tron has overtaken the 10th spot by market capitalization. The achievement prompted Justin Sun, the project’s CEO and founder to express his joy via Twitter, as usual:

Tron has been reporting great news all year long, and the project has consistently met with every milestone in time. So it’s not such a big surprise to see it gain an advantage over other coins.

The new development will be the Tron Arcade. It will be a blockchain gaming fund meant to enable developers. Tron will spend $100 million during the next three years to incentivize the community’s game developers.

This month, the Tron foundation launched another initiative to quicken the dApp developing environment. It will spend a million dollars to inject some momentum into the app developing community.

Next month, the niTROn summit will be held in San Francisco, and it will feature many interesting guest speakers such as Kobe Bryant, the NBA legend, Sam Harrison, Managing Partner at Blockchain, Taehoon Kim, CEO of nWay, and Brian Wong, CEO of Kiip.

The Tonix/USD pair

The current support level is $0.0135, which the asset last visited about two weeks ago. Resistance is at $0.0152, and it’s moving steadily (with some fluctuations) in that direction. Moderate upward trends have been appearing over the last few hours, but it’s doubtful that it will go into a strong bullish zone any time soon.

Tron is becoming attractive to many investors as the whole market remains very bearish. So it’s gaining steadily as shown by the fact it’s now in the top ten. The RSI increased to 54.9, after being as low as 31.05. TRX’s trading range today is 0.013236 – 0.013634. It’s spent more time so far nearer to the higher level.

The Tron/BTC pair

Bitcoin remains very influential over Tron’s price because most exchanges in the world offer the coin paired against BTC and not against the Dollar or other fiat currencies.

The current Tron price is of 0.00000373 BTC. More importantly, despite Tron’s fluctuations against the dollar, it’s been gaining ground against Bitcoin most of the time for the last week.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Beginners’ Guide to Success in Digital Assets Investments

by

       HOW TO REDUCE RISK WHILE INVESTING IN DIGITAL ASSETS

A quick checklist for beginners’ Investing in any asset class requires an understanding of certain principles and practices to help meet your goals. Digital assets are a new asset class in it of itself, so on that not, here are my Top 11 principals for Digital Asset Investments.

1. Learn: This is fundamentally the most important principle, as without this everything else fails. Make sure before you venture out into investment domain you are well equipped with at least the basics. Learn basic Technical Analysis (TA), how to read charts and follow patterns. Invest some time to learn the tools/indicators for market prediction like RSI, Bollinger Bands, Moving Averages etc. My personal favorite is Elliot Wave (an age-old principle that’s also a favorite of Warren Buffett).Also ensure you DYOR of the project you plan to invest in (Study about – Product Use-case, the team behind the project, the market size, competition available, the strength of the sub-teams i.e  Product development, Marketing, Legal, Advisory, Customer support etc)

2. Set Goals: A lot of people fail in investments as they do not set goals, hence don’t know when to exit.
Set 3 kinds Goals:
A. Short Term – To meet your day to day expenses.
B. Mid Term – To achieve lifestyle goals like Car, Vacation, Luxury products etc.
C. LongTerm – Financial freedom (creating cash flow which can suffice the needs for rest of your life),and enough wealth to purcahse big ticket items such as a dream home or luxury vehicle.

3. Diversify: The basic principle of ‘Never put all your eggs in a single basket’ is essential. Never bank on just 1-2 coins, identify 8-10 good projects and diversify your exposure(thus minimizing your risk of project failure as well).

4. Book Profit: It’s only a gain if you close out the trade. It is Important for short term trades to learn how to ride waves (read Elliot Wave theory. Trading view also provides many charts for the same).

5. Law of Averages: It is important to learn ratios and know that more often than not they work. No strategy will work 100% of the time. For example, if you are using RSI as a tool give it 10-15 trades for the averages to work in your favor. In addition to paying attention to the percentage of times a strategy works, also be attentive to the profit and loss for each trade. If a strategy works 50% of the time, but the wining
50% of trades book $100, and the losing 50% of the trades lose $25, this is a winning strategy. Likewise,there are cases where most trades can be profitable – but the strategy still loses money overall as major losses exceed the dollar value of minor wins.

6. Set StopLoss: Another important step towards risk management is risk mitigation; learning about setting StopLoss triggers can go a long way in that aspect. Take emotion out of trading, and define when you’re willing to exit a trade.

7. Don’t be emotional: After Knowledge this is perhaps the 2nd most important principle to follow. Getting emotional in investing can be disastrous. Avoid FOMO (emotional surge of Fear Of Missing Out), Panic selling. Avoid making the mistake of looking at price charts every hour when you know you are far away from your set goal and then selling at loss in a bear market. Patience is a virtue which is required
especially in a bear market. Remember, you are at a loss only if you sell your assets at a loss, learn to HODL (Hold on to your Dear Life), unless your thesis on a coin changes.

8. Create Residual Income: Digital Assets provides ample opportunities to create Residual income where your money creates a passive cash flow for you. Plan and gradually increase your investment to such a level that the residual income output you get meets your goals. To start with you can park a portion of
your portfolio to POS coins or allocate for rewards (like Freezing TRX for Super Representative rewards).Then you can upgrade to set up a few MasterNodes. Finally, if you gain expertise setup your own mining rigs. Let the power of compounding work on it!

9. Don’t Speculate/Be Greedy: Understand that you are investing here, not gambling ..for gambling you have Casinos 😉 . Thinking of becoming overnight millionaire is the quickest path to failure as you set wrong expectations from yourself and with the market. As the Saying goes ‘Rome was not built in a Day’ the same holds good for investments in Digital assets as well. Have Patience!!

10. Leverage correctly: Leveraging is a powerful tool if utilized correctly and within safe limits, else it can backfire drastically. Leverage Bank’s Money/Trades only to the limit for which you have cash to cover in case of the trade going wrong. Advisable not to use it if you are very new to the market.

11. Trust chart and not your feelings: The digital asset market currently has many manipulators who try to play with your feeling (through media articles, news, pumps&dumps etc), you win if you have a strong hand and rather than going by other’s random advise you believe and follow the charts. Rather try and find a GURU/Coach who can act as your guiding light.
You are in Digital Assets market which is just about 10 years old; hence we all are the early adaptors.Play it by the book, play it safe and smart! There are rich dividends to be reaped in years to come. Happy
trading and investing.

Regards,
Debasish Das.
Telegram – @deba215
Twitter – @deba215
Email – debasish.das215@gmail.com

The Bitcoin Oracle has spoken: Crypto winter is here

by

Vinny Lingham is a cryptocurrency expert, especially when it comes to Bitcoin. He became involved with it five years ago after a long and successful entrepreneurial career in his native South Africa.

He’s been founder and CEO of several projects. Civic, Gyft (sold to First Data Corp), SilconCape (an initiative to turn Cape Town into a tech hub), and incuBeta. He was considered one of the world’s top 500 CEO’s in 2015. And, yes, he’s got credibility when it comes to Bitcoin as he sits in the Bitcoin’s Foundation board.

Fast Money, a CNBC show calls Mr. Lingham “The Bitcoin Oracle” and interviews him occasionally to gain insight into the cryptocurrency market. The latest interview happened just yesterday. The show’s anchor asked Mr. Lingham for his opinion about the current market conditions for Bitcoin and future prospects.

Mr. Lingham was very clear and to the point. He said he expects Bitcoin to remain bouncing between the $3k and $3.5k levels for a few more months. But if no bull run materializes in about six months and the coin remains stuck, then it will break the $3k support level to go downwards.

He explained further that a problem in the current market is that too many investors are guided by price instead of paying attention to the fundamentals, and that’s what’s been driving the price down.

In Mr. Lingham’s view, Bitcoin is not ready to be a means to store wealth. That’s painfully clear to anybody who bought bitcoins when the price was above USD 10,000. On the other hand, Bitcoin is a very successful payment network that is moving almost as much money as MasterCard on a daily basis.

On reasons to be positive, the Bitcoin Oracle was rather scant. He believes Bitcoin to be too much of a risk as things stand. The great risk is the only way to rip great rewards, as he pointed out, but he was very clear in that it would be so much safer to buy bitcoins when the level goes back up to USD 6,000.

While we don’t believe that this, or any other expert, is an actual Oracle, we do agree with some of his points. The cryptocurrency market would surely be better off if the fundamental analysis was used more than technical analysis.

In other words, if crypto enthusiasts were more interested in coins with real value instead of following speculative trends to make quick money. Let’s remember that Bitcoin is still the same whether the price is high or low. The price doesn’t change its usefulness and value, and the same goes for every cryptocurrency.

As we probably mentioned in this site many times already, Bitcoin, XRP, Tron, XLM, ETN, and a few other digital assets are slowly but surely showing the planet that some real-world problems have no better solution than cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. That is making the assets useful in many ways; it’s giving them a competitive advantage which will lead to mass adoption as time keeps progressing.

Adoption will change the game for everybody because those few useful coins will have great demand, and the market price will respond to value in the real world and realistic economic forces instead of sheer speculation, which is the main force behind the current market. But until that happens, winter is here indeed.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Tron (TRX): Predictions in cryptocurrencies for next year

by

The cryptocurrency sector changes very quickly and next year it will be no different. It’s been dominated almost completely by speculative forces but, it’s slowly maturing and at some point in the future, the fundamentals of a crypto coin will become more important in determining value than sheer speculation. Some digital assets will manage this transition better than others. The two factors that will facilitate that will be adoption and usefulness.

In the investor’s view, a business is typically valued in terms of some very time-honored methods such as price to earnings or price to book ratios, PEG calculations, and dividend yields. But you can’t apply these formulas directly to the cryptosphere.

Cryptocurrencies are new assets that are not even ten years old and that, as such, they need new tools to assess their value. But those tools are only starting to come into existence. This has created confusion among investors who don’t know how to estimate a coin’s value. That’s one of the main reasons behind the market’s wild volatility.

In this article, we will explain to you the fundamentals of a rather new blockchain 3.0 project called Tron. It’s barely a year old, but it’s already one of the stars in the cryptoverse. We’ve chosen Tron because it’s solid in its fundamentals, so it has a very good chance to become valuable in the future. We’re not trying to persuade you to invest in Tron or to buy TRX tokens, just to keep it in in your watch list.

The Tron Blockchain: Turning the page

The Tron network includes a native token called Tronix (TRX). It’s one of the most controversial subjects in the crypto world. The fans think that it’s a revolutionary force that will change the internet (especially the web) for good.

Detractors, on the other hand, are quite skeptic and give all the merit in the project’s market value to adept PR and marketing. You’ll have a very hard time finding a balanced, dispassionate analysis of Tron, but that’s what we’ll try to give you.

The protracted bearish run that has plagued the crypto market for more than eleven months now is an opportunity for the new players, like Tron. Tokens like TRX have a chance to drive the market’s next bullish run because of their intrinsic fundamental value instead of speculation.

A viable use case for the Tron foundation is soon to be launched in the forms of the monetized torrent protocol, an eager community that is confident about the project’s future, a brand new smart-contract that allows for the development and deployment of decentralized apps, TRC-20 tokens, and ICOs. Tron’s backers come to the table with a wealth of lessons learned from other blockchain projects and a host of new tools that will make all the difference when the bears in the market finally go to hibernate.

A tale of Tron

Tron’s highest price happened this year, in early January. It’s fallen by about 96% since then and it’s currently trading at $0.014. As it often happens in the market, the fall hasn’t been straightforward but rather sinuous with many highs and lows.

TRX went from $0.028 to $0.045 between 19/03 and 26/03 (60% increment). That rise happened because the project’s final testnet (called Odyssey) was launched and it created lots of excitement and expectations as the community anticipated the Main Net’s arrival in May. The buying pressure we saw during that period ratified the community’s trust in the timely delivery of the new Main Net (which was exactly what happened). When the brand new net came online, the price rose from 0.03 to 0.092 in a single day

By creating an autonomous Main Net, Tron left the Ethereum blockchain and moved to its own which had been on the works for more than a year. It followed Ethereum’s example by adopting the open-source philosophy that is easier to improve by community involvement. It also accumulated a juicy war chest to hire developers and buy decentralized projects that could extend its capacities.

A lot of hype surrounded the launch. The project’s charismatic and maverick leader, Justin Sun did his part to create expectations and several other crypto social media influencers helped as well. They managed to make believers out of many crypto enthusiasts. Suddenly it became clear for some that Tron’s platform could really give Ethereum a run for its money as the cryosphere’s network of choice when it comes to smart contracts and decentralized apps.

Other factors also intensified the hype and speculation. Tron was among the first few well-funded projects that went away from the Ethereum network and the ERC-20 token standard (EOS did the same, more or less at the same time). The lack of precedents for this scenario added interest.

The “The Ethereum killer” thing died out rather quickly. About a week before the main net’s release, the bears visited the TRX market. The price is yet to recover from that.

“Build something great and they will come” is something of an ethos that rings true in the technology industry. Tron’s strategy (and that of many other players in the blockchain) would be better conveyed by a phrase like “make them come, and let them wait while we build something great”

But the market isn’t waiting and it’s been driving TRX market capitalization down since last May.

The case for Tron (TRX) in 2019

Tron’s blockchain is in a transition period. It’s finding its way to become a legitimate cryptographic asset platform, but it’s struggling and it’s not walking very gracefully towards that goal. On the other hand, it boasts a number of formidable projects in the works that hold a potential to be like nothing seen before in crypto.

Project Atlas is one of those projects, probably the most interesting one. It’s about bringing the BitTorrent decentralized network (the planet’s biggest decentralized network with 45 million daily active users, and 170 active users monthly) into Tron’s blockchain. The move became possible after Tron bought BitTorrent last June. Only a few BitTorrent’s users will be aware of or interact directly with the Tron network, but sudden access to such a gargantuan pool of potential users is nothing to sneer at.

The main feature in Project Atlas is expected to be a TRX reward program for BitTorrent seeders. In BitTorrent “seeding” happens when a user that has successfully downloaded a file from the network keeps it available for other users to download. This maintains the network active because, being a P2P protocol, there is no central server from which users can download content.

As things stand right now in BitTorrent, there’s no reason for sacrificing bandwidth by seeding other than altruism or a libertarian sensibility. An incentive system based in TRX, seeders will be literally paid in altcoins to host their content for longer periods of time. Theoretically, that would improve the torrent network functionality as more content will be available and seeders will be happier.

The BitTorrent protocol allows to upload and download of all kinds of files, especially of large media files (audio and video) and it’s already a decentralized network. In this regard, it lines up very well with Tron’s mission which is to use blockchain technology to decentralize the web so a global free content entertainment system substitutes the current central authorities in the online entertainment industry.

BitTorrent includes a brand new web platform that allows for partial video and audio files to be played while they’re still downloading. Yesterday, the company started to accept digital assets (TRX, BTC, and BNB) as a means of payment for their premium software. That boosted the TRX price by around 30% in less than a day.

BitTorrent’s transformation into one of Tron’s decentralized apps that includes token rewards for seeders will be a huge milestone for Tron. But no date has been announced for Project Atlas to come online yet.

A different (and very publicized) use case for TRX is its adoption by PornHub, one of the globe’s largest providers of adult entertainment content. The video platform is now accepting TRX tokens as payment for its premium services. This is another huge pool of potential users as the site was visited 28.5 billion times last year. PornHub’s monthly membership is at 832 TRX which is about $10 USD.

But there’s a catch for both the BitTorrent and the PornHub use cases. Most of the content in both networks is free, so either paying for the premium membership or getting TRX for seeding is hardly going to attract too many users.

Only 1% out of $81.5 million daily users visit PornHub’s premium section, according to the website’s own data. Only a fraction of that one percent are new subscribers and even fewer will be willing (or able) to pay with TRX or Zen (the other crypto payment option supported by Pornhub). That being said, the partnership has brought Tron closer to the mainstream.

Partnerships and community

Tron is attaching itself to well-known brands, organizations, and individuals. Kobe Bryant, the NBA superstar player, will be the keynote speaker at niTRON, the project’s annual conference which will take place next January in San Francisco.

A basketball player is maybe not the most intuitive choice for a blockchain conference, but Byant is not your run-of-the-mill star athlete. He is a partner at Bryant Stibel, a venture capital firm with a strong interest in technology ventures. Among those ventures, there are sports websites, sales platforms, and mobile game publishers, to name just a few.

So Mr. Bryant is indeed experienced in investment strategies and fund management, so chances are that the keynote will be substantial and not just all about PR. And yet, PR will be Tron’s main achievement as it will create buzz and attention from the mainstream (and from crypto) by securing a household name like Kobe Bryant.

Ripple tried something similar at their last Swell conference by having former US President Bill Clinton delivering the event’s keynote last October.

The excitement surrounding the event, together with upgrades to Ripple’s xRapid platform made XRP rise in price. It happened while the cryptocurrency market was relatively quiet, and it made XRP stand out very clearly.

In the cryptocurrency market’s short history (it will be ten years old next January), good marketing and public relations have a proven track record as tools that create buying interest among retail investors. Yes, that’s somehow childish and the market would be better off if most retail investors were experts chasing value. But things are what they are, and retail investors are more important in crypto than in most other industries because institutional investors remain very reluctant to join the cryptosphere. That is why Justin Sun’s masterful marketing tactics have created a lot of noise and had given Tron’s price much of its past momentum.

The retail effect is intensified in the periods of high volatility in which speculative pressure is the main force behind changes in price at the exchanges that support TRX.

Tron’s historical data reveals that the project’s Github activity is not exactly great. On the other hand, it has a very strong presence in all social media where it’s been able to attract lots of followers very easily. The Tron Foundation alone has 353,106 followers alone. It’s grown by almost 30% over the last eight months. Justin Sun, the leader and founder boasts more than 593,000 followers.

Solume.io is a service that provides social volume metrics. It measures the mentions a given token gets on the relevant spaces in Twitter and Reddit, and it analyzes them into positive and negative mentions. Tron’s mentions are mostly on the positive side of the social volume. Even when the token’s price is moving sideways, the project remains able to develop positive social traction. Over the last 90 days, it’s been mainly negative only once, and that happened in a day that saw 15% losses.

Even the latest price drop (which came about some twelve days ago) didn’t change this trend as positive mentions are still considerably more frequent than negative ones. The tweeting activity by community members shows that they support the project with fanatical fervor and that they remain bullish about the token even when the market’s sentiment is the opposite.

This community behavior is in stark contrast with most others in the crypto environment. Monero, for instance. It has basically the same market capitalization as Tron (Monero is 11th, Tron is 12th) but its social media presence is quite scant by any measure available. Also, Monero’s positive social activity is basically flat when the price is flat. Tron’s keeps rising even as the price is stuck, and even when it goes down.

This ability to inspire a community and provide it with HODL fuel is not a random thing. The Tron Foundation and the project’s leaders are constantly reaching out to the community and cultivating their relationship. Advertising of the high production value kind, several yearly events available in live streams, monthly updates in many different languages.

Not the Ethereum Killer after all… so far.

Tron’s network is up and running as you read this. It verifies transactions using an innovative consensus algorithm called Proof of Authority which has the advantage of not being disruptive. In this consensus model, block publishers are selected by community voting.

But there is something that still seems to be missing, namely, the genuine developer activity or use cases for the coin apart of speculative trading.

Tron’s platform includes the TRC-20 technology, which is an alternative to Ethereum’s ETC-20. It allows for Tron users to create their own Tron-based cryptocurrencies and launch ICOs. The most referenced among Tron’s tokens is Tron Market Watch (TWM). It’s meant to be a payment tool for Tron’s own decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that includes all the tradeable TRC-20 tokens such as TRWJ. 14 coins are listed there so far.

The project managed to achieve a soft cap level of $310,000 but it fell very short of the $5,000,000 hard-cap goal and, by the time the raise ended, it was less than $1,000,000. The IGG token, which is the most successful in the TRC-20 family also failed to raise much money ($110,000)

Most of the tokens available at Tron’s DEX seem rather basic, a little too abstract (concrete information is lacking), and they don’t have backing or funds.

Tron’s current state has nothing to do with the way in which Ethereum exploded in 2016 and 2017.

It’s no secret that the current sentiment about crypto is bearish. And it’s even worse when it comes to ICOs. Yet SYLO, which held an ICO over Ethereum is currently valued in more than 10 million dollars. So no, Tron is not about to threaten Ethereum’s position as the king of smart contracts any time soon.

Decentralized applications.

Tron’s dApp store has 14 dApps currently listed. Most of them are gambling games and many have limited transaction volume (or users).

Comparing Tron’s utility and activity with Ethereum’s is very complicated with so few apps available. The latter has a much bigger and manifold dApp catalog that includes decentralized betting, crypto collectibles, and distributed data storage. All in working order and running on the network. Yet both blockchains have similar metrics of volume and activity and Tron’s casino has become very popular very quickly in the last few weeks.

Vulnerability to regulatory risk

The US securities laws leave some room for interpretation as they’re based on philosophical principles rather than in rigid rules. It’s very hard to determine the true usefulness and nature of a fledgling token such as Tron.

Token transactions could easily be considered “investment contracts” as defined by the Howey Test. This would make TRX a security within the United States and not a commodity or a currency. If that should be the case, it would have to comply with the tighter constraints of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

That is something that no cryptocurrency in the market wants because it means enhanced investor protection, and TRX would need to trade on secondary markets. That would bring about fines and would cut some trading channels.

The spectacular value drops of 90% or more that we’ve seen this year in TRX and many other digital assets make it more urgent for SEC to step in and start regulating ICOs and foundations. Projects like Airtoken (AIR) and Paragon (PRG) were already ordered to give their investors their money back as they failed to comply with the securities law.

“Any profit comes from the efforts of a promoter or third party” is the way in which the Howey test fourth rule defines a transaction as an investment contract. Tron is probably not sufficiently decentralized to avoid it.

As things stand today, TRX’s market capitalization, price, and trading interest result mainly from the Tron Foundation’s activities. It was this organization who launched the first ICO and it still provides leadership for the project as a whole. TRX is not really useful yet because user participation is still very limited. But as dApp activity and ICOs keep moving forward, that could change.

It’s anybody’s guess what SEC will decide about Tron. It’s a well-capitalized project that has the resources to challenge any charges so SEC is more likely to go after smaller projects that won’t offer that much resistance. It also happens that Tron and Justing Sun are non-American. They operate out of Beijing, China, so that could also make it difficult for SEC to enforce the law on them in the near future.

Conclusion

Tron is capitalized at almost a billion dollars and it’s supported by many exchanges on the planet. The charismatic maverick and founder, Justin Sun is very famous and respected in Asia. His activity in social media has been impervious to negative market developments during the last year. Through BitTorrent and PornHub they have access to 120 million potential users a year, and it’s now a fully autonomous blockchain that runs its own main net. Those are Tron’s pros.

And now, for the cons. There are too few dApps and ICOs on the platform. And it could be exposed to disruption by regulators if SEC construes TRX as a security instead of a utility token.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Tron making it to the top 3 blockchains by usage was pretty much on the cards

by

How much is a cryptocurrency worth? Which cryptocurrency? Well not just Tron (TRX), any. Before you answer, please read the question carefully, we’re not asking you for a token’s price but for its value. Confused? Ok, let us explain.

Value and price are not the same things at all. The first one is about how much something should cost; the second one tells you what the market is willing to pay for it. There are valuable things that can be underpriced or overpriced, and there is also expensive junk.

The financial world has known this for centuries which is why it’s developed ways to analyze any market from both points of view. There is something called fundamental analysis. This discipline focuses on assessing the real value of any asset, company, or product. It’s not about price, but about potential, usefulness, chances of mass adoption.

This isn’t the most popular way of doing things because it needs an in-depth study and understanding of any market you want to join, but those who do it correctly (this has been Warren Buffet’s strategy all along) make a killing.

It takes discipline, patience, and knowledge. In crypto, there’s an interesting example of this. XRP is trading at 0.363 USD as we write this, which is very cheap.

Yet, a fundamental analysis carried out recently by a crypto think tank concluded that XRP’s actual value is of 1.7 USD. The reason the market is not willing to pay that much for it (yet) is that it hasn’t understood the technology and use cases that support the value. And there’s another reason too.

The other way to see the market is to focus on price only. That’s called technical analysis. This has nothing to do with value; it’s all about using a set of tools and rules, supported by historical data, that will allow you to surf the market. The objective here is to identify trends, and then ride the wave while it’s there. Then, you get out in time before everything goes down and you drown.

The point is to use price information to make money, and it doesn’t matter if you understand the technology, the product, or the company as long as you have reliable historical data you can use in charts and apply the typical technical analysis tools. This is the dominant way of doing business in crypto, and one of the reasons why speculation runs rampant.

So we will paraphrase our opening question: what makes a cryptocurrency valuable? This is, of course, open to debate and we could argue about it until the cows come home. But for this article’s purposes, we will posit that digital assets are no different than any other thing you can buy. They’re as valuable as they’re useful.

The next pertinent question is how do you measure usefulness? This can be a very subjective question, but, fortunately, in the blockchain world, we have an objective measure for this: activity. The most useful blockchain projects have the most users and the most activity which can be quantified regarding the number of operations completed daily.

Ok, after this rather protracted introduction we proceed to give you the day’s news when it comes to completed operations in the world’s blockchains: Tron made it to the top three.

And why does that matter? Because a blockchain that has that many users doing that many operations can only be useful, which translates to intrinsic value, which sooner or later also translates into rising prices.

Tron is trading at $0.014 as we write this article, and alongside all the major coins, it’s in red numbers to the tune of 7.67%, so maybe the market has yet to see it.

Tron is a valuable project that should not be underestimated because of the token’s low price, and this is not an opinion anymore. The number of completed daily operations doesn’t lie.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.