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Tron DApps TronBet and TronDice make it to GoDapp

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GoDapp is a Chinese-based website that catalogs and offers access to decentralized apps in three blockchain projects: EOS, Tron and ETH. It currently features 114 EOS dApps, 146 for Ethereum and 32 for Tron.

Decentralized applications are computer programs that use blockchain technology to run over a decentralized network. The decentralization ensures safety, reliability, and lack of interference by any central authority.

DApps are critical in second and third generation projects. When the first blockchain in history came online (Bitcoin) it had the sole purpose of creating the world’s first cryptocurrency. Then Ethereum came along. Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum’s creator and current leader) found a way to create not only a new cryptocurrency but also a programmable platform in which applications could run.

Most importantly he invented the idea of smart contracts which are contracts that deliver on their own terms once the given conditions are met. In other words, decentralized apps are as defining of the newest blockchain networks every bit as much as the native token they have.

After Ethereum invented the blockchain programmable platform (with applications and smart contracts included), other blockchain projects have appeared that allow for developers to also create that kind of programs but in a faster network with cheaper costs. Among those are Tron, Cardano, EOS, Stellar Lumens, just to name a few.

When Tron became independent of Ethereum, last June, its new main net had such amazing features regarding speed and costs that many crypto observers soon started to write about the new “Ethereum killer” because the pioneering second generation blockchain was (and remains) plagued by performance problems and high gas costs that are robbing its fans of their former enthusiasm.

But Tron has not killed Ethereum yet. Neither have EOS, Cardano, or any other network. Why? Because Ethereum arrived way earlier than everybody else, and inertia matters everywhere in the universe. More time means more development, more development means more apps, and more apps mean more users.

One of the main reasons Tron has not beaten Ethereum yet is, quite simply, that Ethereum still has many more decentralized applications and smart contracts running.

Tron is investing a lot of money in incentivizing its community developers to keep creating new apps so that it can finally compete with Ethereum in that regard, and that’s why today’s news is relevant.

A couple of days ago, the GoDapp platform added TronBet and TronDice (two gambling and gaming apps based on Tron) so that now you can use them from there, more easily.

Tronbet has over 2280 users as we write this article and it’s grown by 11.24% over the last couple of days. But many other Tron apps are available as well: TronVegas, TronDice, DiceBet, TronFun, TronBlock, and TronWin among others.

Tron remains a very young project, but it’s making progress very quickly, as shown by today’s news. So it’s only a matter of time until the Tron’s developers community comes up with more apps and contracts so that the network becomes more useful and interesting for both crypto aficionados and neutral observers alike.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Tron (TRX) on the cards for dx.exchange

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Dx.Exchange is a cryptocurrency exchange which prides itself in being the first whole crypto community that enables both institutional and individual investors to buy cryptocurrencies using fiat currencies, trade them, and convert them back to fiat.

It’s built using Nasdaq’s market matching technology which is considered to be one of the world’s leading technologies when it comes to trading in the stock market.

It’s based out of Estonia (don’t be surprised, it’s one of the world’s most wired and technological savvy countries). It has a reputation for transparency and ethical behavior.

Tron, on the other hand, is one of the cryptosphere’s most interesting and ambitious projects. It’s barely eighteen months old, and, in that short period of time it’s managed to become the world’s largest decentralized network, one of the busiest blockchains in the world in terms of completed transfers, and one of the most credible projects in crypto.

https://twitter.com/MotherOfCrypto_/status/1080899718744629248

Tron’s mission is to utilize blockchain tech to decentralize the whole web. It’s an incredibly ambitious project. The idea is for the internet to become decentralized and free from the influence of any central authority in a way that content producers won’t need big corporations (think Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, Comcast, etc.) to publish their material or to monetize it.

Tron was founded and is led by Justin Sun whose credibility as a technology tycoon has been well established for years as the founder of China’s most popular messaging app. Mr. Sun is also famous as Jack Ma’s protegé and former student (yes, that Jack Ma, the man who founded Alibaba).

In a year that’s been terrible for crypto, with most coins going down like a led balloon, Tron has managed to keep securing strategic partnerships, to make the project grow, to deliver milestones on time and to be one of the most solid coins in the market.

That last point is very well illustrated by one simple fact: as most other digital assets keep receding, Tron has managed to grow and to become the world’s tenth cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

It’s one of the very few blockchain projects that has consistently been reporting good news as most of the rest just try to avoid disaster in the currently bearish market

There’s even more good news in the works for Tron. While this is not an official announcement yet, DX.Exchange’s CEO has confirmed (if informally) that the exchange platform is working towards adopting Tron’s Tronix (TRX) in their platform.

This is an important development for both parties. From Dx.exchange’s point of view, it’s a good idea to adopt one of the tokens that has created more interest over the last 18 months. For Tron, and Tron aficionados, this is important because it means that they will be able to buy TRX using fiat currency, which is not as straightforward as you could think.

So far, most of TRX’s trading happens on Binance, the huge and influential Chinese crypto exchange, and all that trade is paired against Bitcoin. In other words, if you have a Binance account, you can’t buy TRX using your local fiat currency. You have to get some bitcoins first (or Satoshis) and then trade them for TRX.

So both projects keep growing and gaining relevance in the cryptosphere as the new year keeps moving. Keep an eye on both.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

500 million XRP go back to escrow for 55 more months

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As the new year begun, 500 million XRP tokens went back to an escrow account for 55 months. Why did that happen and why does it matter? Well, it’s a bit of a long story but bear with us and will explain it all to you.

Some time ago, Ripple committed to putting 55 billion Ripple’s XRP in an escrow account in order to ensure certainty of XRP supply and stability at any given time. The account is there and it’s releasing a billion XRP into the market every month, and whatever is left after selling tokens to Ripple’s customers goes back into a new escrow account and it’s kept there for 55 months.

https://twitter.com/XrpCenter/status/1080148841280782337

Keeping the XRP’s lion’s share secure in escrow allows people to figure out exactly the maximal market supply the token can have. Ripple still owns most of the world’s XRP supply which makes the company the token’s steward.

It’s shown to be a competent guardian with a track of investing and backing the XRP environment. The escrow lockup ensures that Ripple can’t speculate and change the assets’ price by flooding the market. It would make no sense for Ripple to do that since it would be the most affected party in that kind of scenario, but with the escrow contract, everybody can be sure about it without the need to trust Ripple’s good faith.

The lockup also ensures the community about Ripple’s commitment to build XRP’s liquidity and keep the market healthy and trustworthy. The coin’s price will be determined by demand and utility in the long term, and not by sheer speculative forces, which remain dominant in crypto.

And that matters a lot because unlike those other assets drove purely by sentiment and speculation, real institutional customers are already using XRP because they find it has real value. Moreover, central banks, regulators and governments are coming to realize that this is a cryptocurrency that could play a role in the global economy.

XRP can do something that Bitcoin does well already: to store value. But it takes things a step further by delivering transactions speeds an order of magnitude higher than BTC or ETH. It’s the fastest, most efficient and scalable digital asset in the world, which makes it suitable to process payments of all kinds the world over.

Here’s how the Escrow works: parties involved in a transaction can secure a number of XRP tokens for a fixed amount of time until some particular conditions are met. Until such conditions are cleared, the tokens remain cryptographically secured. That’s known as a smart contract.

Ripple created 55 contracts worth a billion XRP that will expire on every month’s first day for 55 months. As each contract expires, the blockchain firm behind XRP, Ripple will have a billion tokens to use to sell its clients or to offer into the market, but so far they’ve privileged the option of making the asset available to institutional clients.

At the end of each month, some of the currency will be unused and it will go back into escrow (a different one). For instance, if 500 million XRP remain available by the time the next contract is due, those 500 million will go back into escrow as the new contract delivers another billion. And that’s exactly what happened today.

Ripple has sold 300M XRP on average for several months, so December was a good month for XRP, which is now the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Ripple’s vision remains the same – to enable the Internet of Value in which money moves like information moves today – and XRP is at the heart.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Justin Sun recaps the year 2018 for Tron (TRX)

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Justin Sun ended his tweeting year recalling how successful it was for his project, as it managed to keep growing when so many other blockchain projects had to shrink because of the bearish market. In that regard, Tron stood up among all others by keeping their growth rate up and delivering in time every announced milestone in good conditions.

Tron will grow strongly in the future because it laid a strong foundation in 2018.

The last year (2018) was cataclysmic for the cryptosphere. Some crypto coins faced such great adversity from traders and investors that they were just bashed in terms of price. But the year, bad as it was for the market, saw a few critical projects develop their fundamentals swimming against the current. Tron was one of those.

Tron had great results along the year. It kept to its plan, and it delivered on every milestone in time, despite the terrible market environment. Looking back on 2018 Mr. Sun had this to tweet:

Mr. Sun’s tweet points out at the key achievement in Tron’s network for last year. Not in terms of the project’s successful development but also thinking about long-term strategic progress.

In 2018 Tron was able to develop its very own network (called MainNet) to become independent from Ethereum. This was just the beginning. It’s worked amazingly well, and the community is not missing Ethereum at all. In only 183 days as a completely independent project, Tron was able to achieve all the following things:

  • Higher transaction volume than Ethereum.
  • More active accounts than EOS.
  • More than a million registered users in barely half a year.
  • More than 80 decentralized applications after only two months of launching its Virtual Machine (TVM), which is the dApp development environment.
  • A spot in the world’s top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Those feats are all very relevant, and they attest the hard work done by team Tron all year long, but Mr. Sun is not ready to rest on his laurels despite that much success.  He wants a lot more, and he already published the project’s goals for the new year. Here’s what he wants:

  • To get into the top four currencies by market capitalization.
  • To make Tron ecosystem’s larger than Ethereum’s.
  • To complete Project Atlas (to integrate BitTorrent into Tron’s blockchain).
  • To make Tron the largest decentralized environment in the world.

Some of these goals are obviously quite ambitious, but ambition has been Tron’s hallmark since day one. And the way the team has performed for the last twelve months just shows that all those new goals for the new year are within the Tron’s community reach if they keep working as hard (and as smart) as they have for the last year.

Tron is a project with great ambition but also with solid fundamentals, and it’s managed to grow in a highly speculative and adverse environment. Keep an eye out for Tron on the new year, started today. Perhaps you’ll be as surprised as we are.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

Stellar (XLM) vs. Tron (TRX): Is a new crypto feud starting?

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Jed McCaleb has built a reputation for himself over the years. He founded Ripple Labs, Mt. Gox, e-Donkey and, more recently, Stellar Lumens. Yesterday, he told Yahoo finance that Tron is “just garbage.” He also said his interviewer that, even with the year’s turbulence, the crypto market is going well.

Over the telephonic interview, Mr. McCaleb was asked what he takes away from crypto independently of the price. He answered that the way in which capital is invested in crypto projects is “wild to watch.” He added that a reduction in market capitalizations and token prices things would smooth out.

“One of the nice things that comes with the market calming down—I still say it’s not a bear market—it means there’s less of that. Ninety percent of these projects are B.S. I’m looking forward to that changing. Things like Tron, it’s just garbage. But people dump tons of money into it, these things that just do not technically work.”

It’s anybody’s guess why Mr. McCaleb chose to pick at Tron which is actually an interesting project. Tron has already outperformed Ethereum as a platform for actual smart contracts development and usage, which almost nobody could have predicted a year ago.

That is no mean feat as Ethereum was the blockchain that created the smart contract technology and even Tron came to life as a project running over the Ethereum network. Stellar Lumens itself still has no smart contract development platform that can compete with Ethereum, let alone Tron. Mr. Macaleb did not explain himself about calling Tron “just garbage.” This will probably leave many neutral observers in the cryptosphere scratching their heads.

Stellar’s marketing is poor

Mr. McCaleb had to answer an uncomfortable question. Do people generally know what Stellar Lumens is? He answered he didn’t think so.

“I don’t think they do. We’ve done a pretty poor job of marketing it and telling the world what Stellar is about. I think they have a vague notion that it’s for payments, but I don’t think they know the details and the real power of it. We’re hoping to change that in 2019, but it’s a process.”

It’s quite clear that most people in the world, even technical people with university degrees have little or no idea of what blockchain technology is. They have no idea about how Bitcoin works, not to mention Stellar which is nowhere near as famous.

Majorities have no interest so far in blockchain banking offerings. Most people in the world still prefer to use their credit or debit cards to settle payments using the USD as the mediating fiat currency. So Stellar’s market is still in diapers, maybe even in fetal stages.

Mr. McCaleb is not alone in going against Tron. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator and leader, has also had harsh words for Justin Sun and the Tron network in the past, especially as Tron became an independent blockchain (which previously ran on Ethereum) last May.

Stellar remains on the top ten list of cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. But Tron has recently entered that very same list, in a year that has seen most digital assets lose a lot of value. And Ripple which is very alike to Stellar Lumens in design and functionality (let’s not forget that Stellar came to life as a Ripple fork, which Mr. McCaleb also founded) is already the world’s second largest.

Ripple and Stellar Lumens are considered to be direct competitors because both projects pursue the same markets. Both have scored successes. Ripple has outperformed Stellar in terms of strategic partnerships and integration with banking systems all over the world. But Stellar has secured IBM’s backup, which could end up being critical, as it was for Microsoft 40 years ago.

If we go by transactions, Tron processed 2,845,490 on December 30th. By comparison Stellar did 1,024 over the same time period, and Ripple 396,354.

On hearing Mr. McCaleb’s comment, Justin Sun, Tron’s CEO and founder had this to tweet:

Mr. Sun refers in his tweet to e-Donkey which was a decentralized P2P network that became fashionable at the turn of the century (much like Napster) but ultimately failed. That very network and protocol were founded by Mr. McCaleb. Many P2P networks were online at the time, following e-Donkey’s protocols more or less (e-Mule, for instance), and they have all disappeared now.

They were all substituted by another P2P network called BitTorrent a few years later which is still active today and remains the world’s largest decentralized P2P network in the world. So why is Mr. Sun kind of bragging after Mr. McCaleb’s comment?

Because Tron bought the BitTorrent network a few months ago and it plans to merge it into the Tron blockchain. That merging is called “Project Atlas,” and it’s been on the works for several months already. When it’s completed, every single BitTorrent user in the world will become a Tron community member, whether he knows it or not. And that’s more than 100 million monthly users.

While there is little doubt that Mr. McCaleb created the P2P decentralized networks or Ripple, the fact now is that the P2P world belongs now to Justin Sun and Tron.

It’s clear that Stellar Lumens is a solid project with lots of value as attested by the many strategic partnerships it’s managed to secure. But it still lags behind Ripple, which is just too similar, and poking a stick at Tron is probably not the wisest action Mr. McCaleb has ever taken.

Time will tell if this feud remains as an exchange of a couple of tweets or if it becomes more serious.

We have the utmost respect for Mr. McCaleb, but we can’t understand at all why he had to be so vocal about a project like Tron that is actually working and rendering results.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

2019: The year many cryptos might struggle to survive

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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.

SEC Veteran, David Labhart, confirms to speak at Tron niTron 2019

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In a recent press release through their Twitter handle, Tron foundation announced that David Labhart, a veteran SEC compliance officer, would be attending the niTron Summit that is scheduled to be held in January 2019. The tweet read:

“As one of the notable experienced SEC Compliance Officer, David Labhart, will be giving his contributions at #niTROn2019 to share his views on blockchain market and its regulations. David has 15 years of experience in the securities industry working for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and S&P Global Ratings.”

According to many cryptoanalysts, the scheduled niTRon 2019 event has the potential of being a hub where individuals and companies from different industries are familiarized with blockchain technology and how it stands to benefit them and make their lives not only better but also allow them to profit from the venture.

Themed as “acceleration,” niTron 2019 promises to be one of the most significant advanced tech hubs the world has witnessed in recent time with expectations high that it’s going to give cryptocurrency and blockchain technology the more exposure and adoption it deserves provided everything goes according to plan. The event is going to be held at San Francisco, the world’s most advanced tech hub.

Tron as a company that recognizes the significance of the research and development of blockchain technology hopes to make use of the event by sharing with the audience their findings and experience with developers and industry players in blockchain related fields.

“We also hope to create awareness among non-blockchain markets by sharing our experiences and knowledge on how to reap big through implementing blockchain technology. At the Summit, we will engage in a dialog concerning the current technological progress within the blockchain industry, the future of the technology, and the best practices to players can adapt to inspire the market to contribute to the development of blockchain.”

Tron to Rekindle the Entrepreneurship of Silicon Valley

For a long time, San Francisco more so Silicon Valley was perceived to be the Holy land of new technology and entrepreneurship. The energetic society of entrepreneurs, marketers, developers, investors among many other players, have all contributed to the ever-growing tech industry in Silicon Valley.

And as one of the world’s significant and promising tech hubs, Silicon Valley not only played a significant role in supporting the development and adoption of blockchain technology during its initial years but continues to do so to date.

According to reports from various researchers, blockchain technology has stood out of the pack to rank as the fastest growing technology in the tech market, with organizations hiring and looking for bright individuals who have blockchain experience to build their internal teams and projects.

And with such a strong and supportive base of bright individuals in Silicon Valley, niTRon 2019 promises to be one explosive event not only in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world but to the entire world of money and technology.

A Big Celebrity Expected at niTRon 2019

Apart from the array of experienced cryptocurrency and blockchain experts expected to grace the event, Kobe Bryant, a familiar sports icon and celebrity is also expected to be on the list of individuals who are going to give keynotes speeches at the niTRon 2019 event.

Having Kobe will undoubtedly have a marketing advantage that is expected to capture the attention of a big audience in the US and other parts of the world. As it is his usual style, Justin Sun took to Twitter to express his anticipation and enthusiasm for having the basketball star on the summit platform.

“Kobe Bryant is one of the top basketball names and genius. I also happen to be a huge fan of Kobe throughout the years. It is my great honor to announce Kobe is going to be our special guest for the niTRon Summit 2019. It is prudent for me to say that Kobe is not only a basketball genius but also an investment genius. We look forward to having him and hearing his great contributions at the summit.”

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Justin Sun’s Tron DApp adoption growth prediction becomes half-filled already

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Not too long ago, Tron released its major decentralized exchange called TRXMarket, where the exchange of TRC20 tokens can take place. However, we shouldn’t forget that the exchange of TRC10, which is the major block for the improvement of Tron ecosystem, hasn’t changed on Tronscan.

Both TRC10 and TRC20 token are better advancements to Ethereum’s ERC20 tokens. The TRC10 tokens are tokens that do not need the writings of Smart-contracts. On the other hand, the TRC20 tokens boast the functionalities and the abilities of Smart-contracts.

Undoubtedly, Tron has recorded immerse growth over the past few months despite the bear market. Right now, the cryptocurrency has numerous Decentralized Applications on its network. According to the report released by Tron Foundation itself, it has been revealed that Tron Dapp usage has increased by 50% in the past two weeks.

It is important to know that the Tron Dapp adoption surged and surpassed one million transaction threshold within a day. In an official blog post by Tron last week, it was noted:

“This week, the 24-hour transaction number for Dapps reached 1.04M, a 48% increase compared with last week; the 24-hour trading volume hit 640M TRX, an 151% increase compared with last week.”

We need to recall that Justin Sun himself predicted last month on the growth of Tron Dapp. He twitted last month on his official Twitter page that:

“Today is November 27th 2018. One month after #Tron release #TVM. According to @DappRadar and @dapp_review, there are 20+ dapps built on #TRON. In December, we are expecting 80+ more dapps coming in the pipeline! 400% growth next month! #TRX $TRX.”

And now yesterday, he twitted:

Ethereum’s Dapps Are Nowhere near Tron’s Dapps.

Taking a look at the standings given by DappTRACK, you would think that if Ethereum’s Dapps were close to the reach of Tron’s Dapps activities, then they would have recorded a massive upturn.

Indeed, Tron is making sure all hands are on deck so that Ethereum developers migrate totally to Tron platform – and surely, they have recorded extreme success on this.

Additionally, it is necessary also to know that Ethereum’s IDEX, which is one of the most prominent Decentralized Applications worldwide has also been overtaken by TronBet (a gambling application built on Tron network). Tronbet now boasts more users more than IDEX.

Overall, Tron is a futuristic project and has now become a force to reckon with. The main vision of Tron is to create a decentralized internet majorly for the entertainment industry. Tron came to life only last year and has recorded massive success with a market capitalization $950 million, according to CoinMarketCap as we write this article.

Though the current worth of TRX has decreased by a big value against its all-time high due to market trend this year, the developments on Tron has kept on booming despite that.

No doubts, as things stand (and look), more developments will come on Tron platform which will spur its growth and increase the usage of Tron Dapps in the future.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Green Flag, Red Flag: Tips to Evaluate a TRON ICO

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The simple saying ‘Better safe than sorry’ takes a lot of precedences these days when it comes to choosing an ICO to invest within the TRON ecosystem. We have witnessed an astronomical growth regarding transactions being handled by the TRON network, a lot of credit for that goes to the SRs and the projects running on TRON protocol.

In a short span of time, we have seen close to 1600+ tokens being launched using the TRC10 protocol which is also helping a lot in terms of enhancing the usage. Most of these tokens trade only using TRX pair, ICO purchase is also through TRX only.

All these are helping TRON eventually hold its ground in this bear market and also promises for a prosperous future as a lot of these projects gets into mainstream usage. TRON (TRX) has made the token creation process super simple and almost free with the cost of token creation being just 1024 TRX. This is helping a lot of projects which had an idea but lacked access to funds and resources to launch their projects.

Having said this, there is a flip side to it; low entry barriers are also allowing a lot of ‘scamsters’ get into the system. They are creating tokens with the intent to exit scam at some point of time and escape with the investor’s fund.

Lack of regulation in this domain makes it all the more difficult for you to recover your funds once lost. The objective of this article is to assist you with 10 pointers which will help you evaluate a project and make an informed decision. Our humble request to all of you reading this article is not to gamble/speculate when it comes to ICO investments.

Success takes time; hence legit projects will take time, but the ROI will be phenomenal. Becoming millionaire overnight is a myth, it takes a lot of patience, perseverance, and knowledge to sail through this roller-coaster ride and achieve your financial goals. So be smart and choose wisely.

In this article we use a simple strategy to evaluate a project – Green Flag means the project is good to invest, the Red flag means we need to avoid investing in it. So here are our 10 pointers to conduct an essential evaluation of a project:

Product

This is the heart of any business. GREEN flag goes to the project which has a working or planned product, a clear use-case, has plans to launch BETA versions. Also, you need to evaluate if using blockchain actually makes it viable and useful.

RED flag a project which has vague or undefined use-case or is too simple that every kid off the blocks is doing it. Simple tipping/meme tokens are classic examples of this where you need to carefully access the usability and how the project differentiates itself from other off the mill projects.

Few note-worthy projects which can be given green flag on this aspect are – IGG, CyberTron, TronWatchMarket, TronWeeklyJournal, SEED, WIN, BeatzCoin, GEMS, Book.

Team

This is again one of the most important aspects to access a project. A team which is not public has a higher probability of pulling off an exit scam. The blockchain is about transparency, and if the unit itself is not transparent, then it’s a big RED flag. So look out if the project has a team, who are the developers, advisors, marketers.

Does the team has public profiles visible on the portal, do they have previous business / ICO / blockchain experience. Is the project happy to post the photographs of the team on the official website? Give it a RED flag if you don’t find these basic information, give a GREEN flag if the results of your finding are satisfactory.

Few projects which score green here are – TRWJ (Tron Weekly now), IGG, KsumNole, SEED.

Token supply and pricing

This is an excellent indicator to access the intent of the project. This differentiates the professionals from the noobs. A big RED flag goes to ICOs which creates ridiculously high supply which runs into thousands of billions/trillions with an absurd ICO price on www.tronscan.org ranging from 0.1 to 50 TRX for each token.

If you do simple mathematics you will realize that we will run out of all the TRX available and still the ICO will not be 100% sold, which means the creator doesn’t even intend to achieve full ICO sale, a clear exit strategy. If you observe this RED flag then immediately drop the idea of investing in that project as high chances you are dealing with a scam or a noob and both are not good for your investments.

GREEN flag goes to projects which if 100% sold at the ICO price covers only a small percentage of TRX supply thus leaving enough space for its value to grow and give good ROI to early investors.

White paper and website

These are the first impression of the project and again are a big differentiator between professionals and new kids of the block. Give a GREEN flag to a project which has a detailed whitepaper and website which clearly explains the project, product, use case, roadmap, key benefits, token distribution allocation, etc.

A RED flag goes to projects which either do not have these ready or it’s just for namesake. A project should have this basic stuff ready before they venture out to garner funds from the public.

Social Media

In the digital space, social media is the strongest tool available to create a huge global customer base. A legit team will strongly invest a lot of time and energy to build up their social media presence.

Give a GREEN flag to the project which is active on most of the social media channels like Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, Medium, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, etc. A RED flag goes to projects which create it for namesake and do not actually use it to build the community or engage proactively.

Communication of the team

The communication by the community managers and teams are a good indicator of accessing the true intent of the top bosses. Check if the community managers are engaging with the community to build relationships with them and spread awareness about the project, developments, future plans or are they just trying to hard sell the ICO.

Also, transparency of the community managers goes a long way in establishing the trust for the project. Give a GREEN flag where the admins are real and transparent, their social media profiles are matching in different platforms (i.e. they are the same person in the telegram, twitter, facebook, linkedin, Instagram, etc.) and they are actively involved in spreading knowledge and awareness.

Give RED flag to the admins whose real identity you cannot access. Real people who believe into an idea/project and are entrusted with the task of promoting it will never be required to hide their identity.

Pre-mine and freeze

A legit ICO will have a clearly defined roadmap for token release and distribution. GREEN flag goes to projects which follow their roadmap and keep the un-utilized tokens frozen as defined.

RED flag for projects which put 100% of supply into circulation and trade on day one itself, high chances they just want to sell whatever they can before they pull the plug.

Market size and potential

Give a GREEN flag to the project which has identified a niche market and are leveraging blockchain to create a global customer base. Typically products which have a global use case, sizeable customers already spending money in that domain( which will shift to blockchain over a period of time) are good green flag indicators.

RED flag for the projects which hardly has any existing or future market because the use case is vague or non-practical.

Community

Communicating with the community can give you a lot of indications about the project. Give GREEN flag to a project where the community is loyal and knowledgeable; they vouch for the product and the team, discussions in the group is constructive and project-centric. A RED flag where the community is not aware of the project as high chances they were just bought or are bots.

Commitment

This parameter kicks in a little later but still helps in safeguarding your money from becoming ZERO. Give a GREEN flag to the team that values responsibilities and delivers on time – be it a product release, partnerships, merchant onboarding, events, commitments to investors, etc. Vice-a-versa for teams which frequently backs out from their own words.

Apart from these also be cautious about the fake/counterfeit tokens which almost look real to the legit tokens except for a small change in the alphabets. It is advisable to buy your tokens from legit exchanges / tronscan link shared by the project officials / from the official telegram channel of the project. You are venturing into risky domain when you enter private sale groups having low control over the fake tokens.

Very few things in the world are perfect, but we need to aspire towards perfection on a daily basis. So after evaluating a project on above parameters if a project scores 8-10 it could be considered safe, any score below five should definitely be skipped for the time being till the team proves it another way around.

Due diligence and a little time investment can go a long way in not only safeguarding your money but also to give you phenomenally high ROI in the long run. It’s just a hunt to avoid garbage and fill your bags with gold.

Hope all of you create massive wealth in years to come. Happy Investing!

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Bitcoin is sinking so as Tron and others with it. Now what?

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Bitcoin’s been going down all week long. It’s been bad, and it could go as low as 3k in the next few days, despite several days moving sideways. It could remain moving sideways for a while which is terrible for investors that are either buying or selling short. In other words, current market conditions make you damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So what to do now?

In this article, we’ll try to share our perspective with you, but before we try that, we have to remind you that this is not financial advice at all. If you choose to get into Bitcoin or to get out, it has to be your own decision, which should be informed by doing your own due diligence and research.

We will start by acknowledging the elephant in the room. The year has been terrible for Bitcoin. There’s no doubt about that. Next Monday it will be a year since Bitcoin has kept going down constantly (save a few meaningless fluctuations) and it’s lost roughly 80% of its value. This is terrible news for those who bought tokens almost a year ago when it was at its peak. But does it really mean that BTC was a bubble that popped? We don’t think so.

First of all, this has happened it the past. Bitcoin has sunk four times already by more or less the same percentage that it’s lost this year. And every time, it’s managed to recover and skyrocket again, beating every prediction and reaching previously unsuspected heights. Despite the current situation, Bitcoin remains the most profitable asset over the last ten years (and this includes traditional financial instruments such as stocks, forex, and commodities).

Second of all, you and us, and everybody else need to understand that Bitcoin is not just a digital currency. It is, but it’s also an international payment system. In that regard, it’s been (and it remains) incredibly successful. Whatever way the market behaves Bitcoin is moving money around the world at quantities that are comparable to those of MasterCard and Visa.

In other words: it remains a useful resource, and as long as it’s useful, it will be valuable. In fact, the more useful it becomes, the better suited it will be to be independent of speculative pressure which is what is ruining the market for everybody as we write this.

The third is this: for the last decade the crypto market has been in the hands of retail investors because institutional investors have been too afraid to join the action. That is changing. A partnership among Microsoft, Starbuck’s and ICE (the company that owns the New York stock exchange) is about to bring online a new venture called Bakkt.

The new company will strive to offer financial services based on digital assets so that you can pay for your latte using bitcoin on your mobile phone. And this is not the only such initiative. Many big players in Wall Street are getting ready to wet their feet in crypto finally. This will inject a lot of money and demand for Bitcoin tokens, and it will create a bull run the likes of which have not been seen in ten years.

So what to do? Be patient, be intelligent, be disciplined and well informed. Think usefulness and vision of a coin. Tron, for example, has a powerful vision (of decentralizing the whole internet) and incredible real-life use cases – of course, Bitcoin has a strong case too. Consider value before price. Don’t try to win the lottery in a couple of weeks. We can’t tell you when but things will pick up.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.