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Justin Sun, Tron CEO, looks to memorialize Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin

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A shrine in memory of Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin build by Justin Sun? Who will not want to see that unfold?

The Ethereum-Tron competition is no secret to any crypto enthusiast. Vitalik Buterin and Justin Sun have been on each other’s necks not once since a long time, and it seems the jabs will not come to an end any time soon.

The Sarcastic Monument

So far, the two have attacked each other concerning their crypto ecosystems, and the latest slur is from Sun who claims to build a shrine “in memory of Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin.” According to Sun, if Tron succeeds, a monument will be erected in memory of Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin to remember his contributions to the blockchain industry.

Perhaps, Sun’s remarks sound sarcastic, but who knows maybe Justin is serious. Then again, over and over again we’ve seen him claim that a day a would when Tron will overtake Ethereum. Therefore, Sun may be heating the rivalry to ensure he pushes Tron up rapidly.

Hitting back

Tron and Ethereum are competitors, and such jabs are welcome. Perhaps, Sun’s comments might have been triggered by Buterin’s latest comments whereby he stated that he would lose some specific amount of hope for humanity in case Tron overtakes Ethereum.

The comments were made when he was speaking about ETH losing their rank and stated that the new projects would help it grow.

Furthermore, Buterin made it clear that ETH’s main competitor would definitely be  Ethereum’s “sister network.”

For Justin Sun, Tron is way better that ETH giving reasons that its fees are lower meaning development costs as well are low. Tron also offers bandwidth to users, and it has better tech, too.

Mixed Community Reactions

As expected, people cannot stay out of the picture and not react to this kind of jabs. While some people were enthusiastic, few were not impressed. For instance, crypto analyst Misha Lederman offered his opinion stating that instead the real question should be “when” and not “if” Tron will surpass Ethereum.

https://twitter.com/2ez28u/status/1109925811195277312

Nevertheless, let’s not forget that it was not too long ago when Tron’s daily blockchain operations surpassed those of ETH and EOS combined with even more daily transactions by volume.

So, whether Tron will be better than Ethereum is only something for the future, but for now, we’ll have to continue enjoying the jabs as not any one of them is ready to throw the towel. And yes, the competition is healthy for the crypto space in general.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

Price predictions for BTC, ETH, and XRP for the week. Are the bulls still around?

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The weekend met with expectations. Namely that it would see and support a bullish run on the cryptocurrency market led by Bitcoin (as it always happens in crypto). The overall market capitalization remains steady at around $140 Million.

It’s not just a number; it’s the current resistance level the market will need to overcome to start a new bullish run. If this shouldn’t happen, we’ll see things going back to the way they were during the last few weeks. That means the bears will continue to rule.

For now, Bitcoin remains the world’s largest and most traded digital asset with a 50.7% share of the general market.

But is Bitcoin’s dominance a fact of nature? Of course not. Will it ever be challenged by some other project? It could be. The other two coins in the world’s top three (Ethereum and Ripple) are pushing the envelope in a way that suggests that one of them could reach Bitcoin at some point in the future (but not the immediate future, for sure).

In this article, we’ll try to elucidate what the next week will hold for the world’s top three cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, and we hope you’ll find it useful.

The week for Bitcoin

The price has been moving sideways ever since it hit the $4000 barrier. The oscillation has occurred between the $3,800 and $4,000 levels. This fluctuation shows how the bears and the bulls are fighting it out without any party achieving any significant breakthrough.

As we write this, Bitcoin is trading at $4,026.39 in slightly red numbers (0.04%) over the last day. The market capitalization remains strong, and it’s nearing $71 billion.

In the short term, the mother and father of all digital assets finds itself amid a price correction process so the current price could fall to $3,990.83 by week’s end. This is consistent with Elliott wave theory (if you don’t know what this is don’t worry it’s just a technical analysis technique favored especially by forex traders). The price walk could go as high as $4011.3 with an immediate support level at $3927.89.

The Stochastic Indicator keeps moving decisively towards the overbought zone, which is usually interpreted as a good indicator that the bullish level will be maintained for the time being. But the same projection points to the indicator leaving that zone by midweek.

The current scenario is reminiscent of Bitcoin’s behavior in 2015. So this could very well be the last low floor for Bitcoin before the bulls come back to visit (and probably take over) the market seriously.

Finding out if the level of support is not surpassed will take a few hours of careful observation or if it, in the end, the market’s behavior changes to go against the current and shatters all the week’s expectations. As things stand, the dominant trend for BTC is downwards, and it could go back to $3,800 rather soon (even today).

The Aaron UpTrend indicator is moving in such a way that it seems it confirms this idea. But let’s keep in mind that one shouldn’t act on any indicator in technical analysis by anticipating what it will do, which is a common rookie mistake. You must always move on things that are actually happening, and not on things that could happen.

The EMA25 line also indicates that we are crossing over into the sales area so the bears will hug us hard again.

The week for Ethereum

Ethereum is the world’s second digital asset by market capitalization, and it’s shrunk in price by 1.21%. As we write this, the token’s price is at 139.44 USD, it trades in red numbers for 24 hours (0.8%), but it maintains its market capitalization at almost $14.7 billion. Which means it lost approximately USD 300.00 over the weekend.

Ethereum has been a very discouraging alternative coin for months now (it even lost its second spot by market cap to XRP for a few weeks) and the next week doesn’t look any better. It started strongly and then… well, the technical term would be that it’s been “moving sideways,” but it’s been so violent that “ping bar” describes it better. It reached, but then it started to bounce back and forth until it reached the current price, which presents a reduction of support levels.

According to Elliott Waves, the support level of $142.25 is broken already, and the price is going to fluctuate its way down to $138.00. And then, we can expect to go even lower to the support level of 135.9 as it keeps moving sideways between $135 and $140 for the rest of the week.

EMA 25 predicts that the bears will come into the market in a big way, starting on Monday. Unless something dramatic happens in Vitalik Buterin’s project’s environment, the coin will go down.

The Klinger Oscillator (another technical indicator) also corroborates the bearish perspective because it’s crossed below the signal line and it’s moved into the limit of the buying and selling zone. The next few hours will be decisive in understanding the asset’s behavior for the rest of the week.

But it could also happen that Ethereum finds a way to uphold the $140 billion market capitalization level; that would mean that the current price correction is transitory and that would give us a rebound some time in the middle of the week.

While not the most likely outcome, it’s still possible and even reasonable as the projection of the ABCDE pattern could hit the ascending channel that is still noticeable in the Ethereum chart. Furthermore, the Chaikin Money Flow indicator confirms that, if the money flowing into Ethereum remains ascending nicely and steadily.

The week for Ripple

Ripple’s XRP stands firm in third place by market capitalization. It’s been basically immune (very few coins are behaving like that) from what’s going on with Bitcoin and the rest of the market.

As we write this, XRP’s price is at $0.316991, and trading in slight red numbers. It’s been losing value over the last day.

XRP spent the week moving sideways in a very narrow gap between $0.322 and $0.316. No significant variations happened. This is because XRP has a certain degree of autonomy when it comes to its price. It’s not as dependent as most other assets on Bitcoin’s behavior.

It’s one of the very few projects that’s moving from domination by sheer speculative forces towards price autonomy based on strong fundamentals, real demand, and real-life use cases. So XRP suffers less than the rest of the market when the bear hugs.

But that doesn’t mean XRP is isolated. Sudden changes in the market (which are not particularly rare in crypto) will hit it solidly. But for now, it remains trapped in the aforementioned band, and it seems this week will be the same. The trend will be slightly bearish without really affecting any crucial changes in price.

That conclusion is supported by the EMA 25 for March 19, and the RSI, which is bearish in the middle of the chart, as if balancing the pressures exerted by both buyers and sellers.

XRP will go bullish as soon as any factor (internal or external) boosts its price a little. This will be likely to happen when the RSO hits 80.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

Ethereum is back as the world’s second best cryptocurrency. We tell you why

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Ethereum spent a very long time as the world’s second most important digital asset (it’s hard to beat Bitcoin) both because of market capitalization, and technological influence. Over the recent weeks, Ripple’s XRP took over that second spot. But the market felt a bit of a pump last week, and it pushed ETH back to the second place.

Recent market performance

The price has risen by about 1% over the last day (again), and it’s now trading at USD 123 and still in green numbers. As both BTC and XRP are trading in red numbers, that’s been enough for ETH to gain some momentum, even if BTC saw a 5% rise last week when the Litecoin network was upgraded.

It seems that Ethereum’s growth has to do by some major movements made by some of ETH’s larger holders, according to data by a cryptocurrency whale tracker. That’s even more remarkable as the rest of the market keeps moving sideways or going down.

It’s all about the whales

We’ve seen how USD 8.5 million worth of Ethereum’s tokens have been traded a couple of days ago only by some investors known as whales (which means they’re big). So they increased the coin’s daily volume.

This happens because the digital asset market is still dominated by retail and small investors, so changes that would be considered relatively small in other trades can make a huge difference in crypto.

The new capitalization is worth more than $12.6 billion, which is not that much more than Ripple‘s XRP ($12.5 billion) but still enough to change the rankings. Litecoin is at fourth with $2.6 billion, so it’s still nowhere near to compete for the second or third spot.

Ethereum now has a market capitalization of over $12.6 billion, slightly above Ripple’s XRP $12.5 billion market cap. Litecoin, which powered to fourth place in the list of largest cryptocurrencies last week, has a market cap of $2.6 billion.

So is the bear market over, at last?

“Crypto price movements over the last week have been encouraging, with litecoin experiencing an impressive price surge of around 40%, but it’s important to remember that we’re not out of the bear market just yet,” explained Mati Greenspan, who works at eToro (one of the world’s main crypto brokers) as senior market analyst.

“While some might argue the bears are weakening, bitcoin needs a strong breakout above the psychological level of $5,000 before the bulls can sharpen their horns in earnest.”

In something of an ironic development, ETH’s value went up soon after a report announced that Ethereum’s decentralized apps don’t have that many users anymore. 86% out of 1,300 active apps were completely unused last Saturday. And only 7% of all those apps managed to transact any tokens on the previous day.

The expectation is on the air to find out which digital asset will become the next Bitcoin and also for the next bull run. But having prices as high as they were in December 2017 will not be very useful if those rises happen without mass adoption for at least a handful of essential projects.

In the meantime, Ripple’s XRP is stuck at its current level, which is rather mysterious as well, because, unlike Ethereum, Ripple has been reporting good news for months.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

Tron CEO Justin Sun gets even with Ethereum’s Co-Founder on Twitter

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The unending saga between Sun and Buterin has surfaced again as Mr. Sun made a tweet today that compares their number of followers on Twitter.

Nevertheless, it seems the bromance between both crypto-giants will forever surface. Ethereum’s creator, Vitalik Buterin, made some clarifications concerning BitTorrent lately; Tron’s CEO, Justin Sun, has also come up with his own comments that directly point to Buterin.

Sun had a caption of his and Buterin’s Twitter page that showcased and compared both Twitter followers. He also added this to the caption:

“Now we are both 832k.”

That is not all; Sun also emphasized that he started six years after Buterin and that he has caught up with the Ethereum creator in the crypto-space. In Tron CEO’s words,

“We started six years after you but we always know it is never too late.”

As expected, Sun’s tweet has sparked lots of comments not only in the Tron community but in the crypto-space generally.

A Twitter user who goes by the name SM Airdrops (also a crypto-enthusiasts) said this:

“@justinsuntron I watch the market, I see how the manipulations are made. And with the fact that your network is growing rapidly, I can say with confidence that TRX is the future leader in terms of percentage growth in the coming years. @vitalikButerin and ETH will be number 2.”

Vitalik Buterin has been in the crypto-space for quite some time now as the founder and creator of Ethereum blockchain, which is one of the top-cryptocurrencies without any doubts. Buterin has acknowledged BitTorrent’s work as an app as a “mega time success.”

Coming back to our story, in just a few hours after Justin Sun’s tweet, Misha Lederman, the co-founder of IAmDecentralized.org and known Tron supporter, posted this on his Twitter page:

“That didn’t take too long…The founder of #TRON @justinsun has, after starting his twitter page 6 years after @VitalikButerin, now surpassed #Etherum’s co-founder in followers. It’s a testimony of new vs. old & the hunger in the #crypto space for progress #IAmDecentralized”

Misha Lederman’s tweet showed that Sun now has more followers than Buterin.

At the moment, the top three decentralized apps on DappRadar.com are all powered by Tron. Other apps that follow are based on EOS. Misha Lederman posted this on the 8th of February,

“To think #TRX has been able to dominate the DApp world so quickly, in under 4 months since activation of Tron Virtual Machine on Oct 12, is nothing short of remarkable.”

More interestingly, Buterin has made no comment or reply concerning Sun’s tweet, but it’s certain he will as he is known for his out-of-the-box sense of humor.

It is essential to know that no feud or war is going on between Tron and Ethereum. In fact, both Sun and Buterin have a cordial relationship. Additionally, regardless of whatever is going on, both digital assets are doing well these days, despite the bear market.

Ethereum managed to take back the second spot from Ripple’s XRP a few hours ago, while BitTorrent token campaign is having a success that’s been hardly witnessed before.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

An exclusive interview with Chibi Fighters core developer, a blockchain-based game that’s expanding to Tron after Ethereum

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The blockchain undoubtedly is disrupting the whole gaming experience effectively and quickly. We’ve seen some blockchain games that have grown in popularity in no time, and now, it seems there’s another elephant in the house, Chibi Fighters.

Chibi Fighters gives you an incredible, fun-filled survival game (where you need to secure your pet dragon) to enjoy and a platform to make handsome money through cryptocurrencies (you earn real crypto rewards, in TRX).

The game had been running on Ethereum for some time already but the developers decided to expand to Tron recently (the game will be fully-launched on Tron by coming March). Powered by the Tron blockchain technology now and with cool graphic designs, the core developer will be telling us in detail about himself, Chibi Fighters, why they chose Tron, and more in this interview.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and experience?

I started programming in a time where bulletin boards and aol existed. Back then there was this nifty little program called 3D Studio Max, which of all the 3D programs had a German translation. Btw. That’s why it’s still super popular in Germany.

Anyway, long story short: Making art for my games was more fun than trying to write them so I studied Digital Arts, became a digital artist, left Germany, worked at Weta Digital in New Zealand and was living my personal dream.

While working on Avatar, Hobbit and the likes was an amazing time, crypto was also very interesting. And with it being new, hyped, interesting, I decided to quit my day job and have a go at this bitcoin thing.

My ASIC became my best friend.

How did you meet with crypto and blockchain?

Being surrounded by passionate digital artists, rumors about Bitcoin traveled fast. It soon became office talk #1.

Tell us about how you came up with the idea of Chibi Fighters.

Originally it was the art that convinced me. Asa is such a talented artist, not to forget Kiwi of course, who is also very amazing. The original wave of Chibis was just a game asset. I needed to work on an incredibly low budget. I knew something could be done with those little fighters. While back then there was no animation or even RPG elements planned and soon grow big.

YouTube video

What are the biggest challenges when working on blockchain gaming projects?

The blockchain, interaction, updates. The area is so vast and new, it is impossible to keep up. You would need at least one programmer exclusively dealing with blockchain stuff, per blockchain.

Ethereum is super relaxed. Things hardly ever break. So, we can use our energy and focus on Tron.

Why you chose Tron (also, why you decided to move from Ethereum)?

First of all, it is important to me that we are not moving blockchains. We are expanding. Since we are a fighting game we thought it would be fun to have cross blockchain battles. The Tron server will be completely separate from Ethereum. However, markets will be merged where possible. That way players benefit from each other while still maintaining a friendly hostility.

The move, of course, was a similarity between the chains. It’s basically a clone of Ethereum. So easy to move over, or so we thought. Tron has various benefits over Ethereum, like no gas prices and no annoying ABIs to deal with. But their tech is very very new and is updated constantly.

We see you’ve got a referral program, would you please mind providing some details about that to our readers?

Yes, we do. Everyone can create a referral and receives 20% of sales created with their ref link. It is hardcoded into the contract so no requesting anything from us is needed, you get auto-paid.

What are your future plans or projects?

We just released a multiplayer module for Chibis. Moving forwards we are missing raids and a new clan system. Basically expanding multiplayer, and go from there.

Last, in your opinion, how will the blockchain change computer games from the way we’ve known them for years?

Difficult question. Of course, we all hope to Moon no matter what blockchain it is, but let’s be serious here for a moment. Games run on tight budgets (yes even a AAA title have tons of expenses, one bad choice, and the studio is bust) so adding on top of that the additional hassle of dealing with a fragile very volatile software and the market scenario is a decision, not one CFO will approve.

That being said though, this is exactly the strength of the new medium. Giving players ownership of their goods. You can dump 1000h in your WOW warrior, Blizzard laughs their ass to the bank and might just ban your account because why not.

Same goes for Magic, introducing their Duels where you can’t even trade cards anymore, an odd choice for a trading card game. Hearthstone etc. Studios will suck you dry.

Now actually owning your characters, assets and being able to sell them is something that is, of course, great for players, so this will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

In addition, it is easier to offer ingame revenue. Normal payment processors like PayPal would block your account if you dare to give the player a profit. Or fees will just kill you.
Pyramid schemes are fun, but having a quick game of something, and even if you just make some cents, it’s some cents you made by having fun, this will be interesting to see where it will take us.

Head over to https://trx.chibifighters.io/ for more details.

Discord: Chibi Fighters

Why BitGuildPlat migrated from Ethereum to Tron

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If you like to keep current with news from the cryptosphere, you’ll know a few things already. But if you don’t, there’s nothing to worry about, that’s why we’re here. For instance, you would know that Tron started life as a project running on Ethereum’s network and that it later developed its own main net which came online last May.

You would also know that the technical specifications for Tron’s new main net were so good that Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum’s founder and current leader) mocked them as fake promises. But as the new network went live, every single specification turned out to be true.

As that happened, many observers declared Tron as the new “Ethereum killer.” Let’s remember that blockchain technologies of the second and third generation (Ethereum and Tron, respectively, in this case) are not about a cryptocurrency only, but they are programmable platforms that can support the development and deployment of decentralized applications and smart contracts.

That niche has been dominated by Ethereum since it started, as it was the first project to offer that kind of features. But is Ethereum the prevailing project when it comes to dApps and smart contracts still? Or is Tron (along with EOS, Cardano, Stellar Lumens, and other third generation blockchains) finally killing it? Things seem to lean for the second option, let’s see why.

First of all, Ethereum has been plagued by problems. The transaction speeds are comparatively slow, and the gas price is kind of high. Ethereum users have been complaining about this for months, and Ethereum’s leadership hasn’t done much about it. An update to the blockchain (called the Constantinople hard fork) was supposed to appear last week, but it was defective, so it’s been postponed for next month.

If Ethereum’s problems were not enough, Justin Sun (Tron’s CEO and founder) came forward and invited Ethereum developers and users to move their apps to Tron’s platform. Some people mocked him. And some people took him at face value and are doing exactly that, like BitGuild.

BitGuild’s a decentralized gaming platform that develops several games currently available on Ethereum’s network. It claims to be designed to do away with fees, fraud, and regulations in a tokenized gaming marketplace. The fee-free bit is currently impossible on Ethereum, not to mention the network’s speeds limitations which is why BitGuild moved to Tron, as per Mr. Sun’s invitation, among other factors.

The announcement came this January 18th at Tron’s, niTROn summit at San Francisco and it was made by Jared Psigoda, BitGuild’s CEO. He gave several reasons for the company’s decision:

  • Transaction speeds.
  • Low fees (essentially none).
  • The strong community at Tron.
  • TRX holders are bullish about the token, and they actually use it.
  • The Tron Foundation is supporting the move.

It’s hard to argue with any of those reasons. If only a couple were true, the case for making a move would still be solid.

So, it’s happening. Tron (and other blockchains) are indeed killing Ethereum. It’s not even the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization anymore (that’s Ripple’s XRP). EOS is still far from challenging Ethereum for the third place (it would still need 10 Billion USD), but the thing is that EOS is growing as Ethereum is shrinking so it could happen at some point during the year. And Tron has gone from 11th place a couple of months ago to 7th as we write this article.

The important thing is this: if EOS, Tron, and other blockchains can overcome Ethereum as the main network to deploy dApps, then it will be a matter of time to do the same regarding capitalization. We shall see.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

The dApp wars: Tron is beating Ethereum and EOS (clearly)

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Tron had an amazing year last year. It achieved several milestones during the year (most notably, blockchain independence as well as token independence from Ethereum) and all seems to support the idea that 2019 will be even better for Justin Sun’s project.

In this very young year, Tron already has a lot to boast about. It’s been barely seven months since it launched its new main net, and it already has more than 200 decentralized applications. And that’s not all. Those apps are quickly developing a huge user base and growing at such an amazing rate that they’re leaving Ethereum and EOS (its main competitors when it comes to dApps) far behind.

If you would care to have a look at dappradar.com, which is a web site that monitors activity in decentralized apps you’d notice several interesting things. Let’s talk about them.

Every single dApp in dappradar’s top ten runs either in Tron or EOS. This means that Ethereum, which was the project that arguably invented decentralized apps and smart contracts, is falling behind and losing its capability to compete.

Among those top ten apps, five run on Tron and the rest on EOS. They’re ranked by the number of daily users they serve. Number one is EOS’ PRA CandyBox with 8.8k users daily. So it has a lot more users than any other app on the list, but its transaction volume is exactly zero. No cryptocurrency flows through PRA CandyBox, popular as it is.

Then comes Tron’s Epic Dragons at the second place with 5.5k users daily. While 5.5k is surely not as impressive as 8.8k, there is a huge difference in transaction volume as Epic Dragons transacts almost 10,000 USD daily (or 396.9k TRX). So it has a lot fewer users, but at least it has a bit of money flowing.

Third is EOS’ Knights which has more or less the same number of users and transaction volumes as Epic Dragons.

But let’s skip numbers four and five (you can always check dappradar.com if you’re curious enough) so we can talk about number six which is the real phenomenon.

At number six we find TronBet, which is one of Tron’s gaming and gambling platforms. It has only 3,200 users daily, but that’s not the story. TronBet transacts 24.5 million USD daily. This is a lot of money, and there is no other decentralized application in the cryptoverse that comes even close to that kind of volume. The closest one is FarmEOS (number nine) with 1.3 million.

Tron is quickly dominating the dApp world by being innovative, reliable, and also through good marketing strategies for good products. Tron’s blockchain’s apps may not have the most users (yet), but they do have the most transactions per second and the largest trading volume by a very long shot.

Comparing EOS and Tron apps is quite appropriate too because both projects left Ethereum behind to start their own main nets at roughly the same time, so the odds are even amongst them. And Tron is moving forward more quickly than any other platform in this regard.

We suggest for you to have a look at Tron’s apps. You might just like what you see.

Image courtesy of PixaBay.

The best-featured cryptocurrencies as per Forbes experts

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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.

Transaction fees: Tron vs. Ethereum vs. POA

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The days in which Bitcoin was the world’s only blockchain are long gone. There are hundreds of digital assets right now, and each one is a different blockchain, even if some are not 100% independent than others (for instance, many coins are based on Ethereum’s ETH20 technology, some others on Tron’s TRC20).

So the panorama can be confusing because it takes quite a bit of technical knowledge to understand exactly how each blockchain differs from others (especially when it comes to the consensus protocols). But one question still lingers in every user’s mind: how much will my transactions cost? We’ll endeavor to explain to you exactly that in this article.

Transaction fees: Why do we need them?

A blockchain is comprised of lots of independent nodes working in tandem and reaching consensus according to each network’s protocol. Independence is critical here because it implies that there must be some kind of incentive for those who run and support a node. That incentive usually comes in the form of tokens which come, at least in some proportion, from user transaction fees.

So we need the fees because that’s how we support every blockchain’s infrastructure. And that’s not cheap if you realize that Bitcoin alone is burning more electricity that some countries in Europe.

But that’s not all. Fees are useful also because they prevent users from wasting a network’s resources. For example, it’s not a good idea for hackers to try and do a DoS attack if they have to pay for every single request. So fees keep the network secure and available for significant projects.

So fees are not just an arbitrary thing, They matter a great deal. Now that we’ve (hopefully) persuaded you that fees are important (even good for you), let’s find out in some detail what is the deal offered by three of the most essential blockchain networks.

Ethereum

Ethereum is the first and quintessential second-generation blockchain. That means it created the first smart contract platform using the Proof of Work consensus protocol in which miners run the most important nodes. There are no limitations on the number of miners that can join the network.

They all compete between themselves to solve a mathematical problem (a cryptographic collision in a hash function that will create the next block). The miner who solves it first gets a reward for creating the next block. That needs specialized hardware and lots of power. So miners need to buy hardware and pay for their electricity which is why the rewards must be significant.

In the Ethereum environment, a transaction’s cost equals Gas times the gas price.

Gas: Ethereum needs to know the amount of computer power and storage it must provide to save and complete the transaction. That’s called “Gas.” If your transaction is a simple exchange of tokens, it will be cheap, but if you’re interacting with smart contracts and de dApps, it will be different.

And it could be tricky because the gas amount is computed only after the transaction is done. If you should want to know beforehand how much each of your transactions will cost you will need to ask the dApp provider how much the price has been in the past for similar operations.

Gas price: that’s how much you pay for every unit of gas/computing power, and it depends on your transaction. It’s paid in the native token (ETH in this case). Then miners rank pending transactions by price for blockchain inclusion. Miners get a better deal by processing higher gas prices, so more expensive transactions are completed sooner. The price changes all the time, and if you don’t choose it correctly, your transaction can be left in the Ether (no pun intended) for days.

There’s no doubt that Ethereum is a bonafide decentralized blockchain. But its protocol lacks scalability, and it can be very expensive, or slow, or both, especially when the network is loaded which happens often because of the most trivial reasons, such as betting games.

POA Network

PAO uses Proof of Authority (PoA) as a consensus protocol, hence the name. Unlike Ethereum, the number of miners is limited. Each validator (block producer) builds a block each time. This makes this chain light, efficient, and quick.

Fees are computed in POA using the same formula as Ethereum’s: it’s gas times a fixed price.

Gas: It’s the same definition as with Ethereum.

The difference between POA and Ethereum has nothing to do with the gas definition. The thing is that POA does all the tricks a decentralized blockchain can do while keeping things simpler. The PoA consensus allows for lower gas prices and for a straightforward transaction system. It’s designed to allow horizontal scalability, but not necessarily high loads.

Tron

Yet another consensus protocol for yet another blockchain. In this case, it’s called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPos), and it’s at Tron‘s blockchain’s heart. A limited number of privileged users (known as Super Representatives and elected by the community in a worldwide voting process) are the ones who create the blocks, one at a time. This design has allowed Tron’s blockchain one of the world’s fastest, safest, cheapest, and more reliable.

There are two ingredients needed to calculate Tron’s fees. They’re called Bandwidth and Energy. You take both of them and multiply it times a fixed price.

Bandwidth: this is the piece of the network (so to speak) needed to execute and save your transaction. The price is fixed (almost negligible) for simple financial transactions, but it can vary for dApps and smart contracts. But unlike Ethereum and POA, it can be easily calculated in advance if you just know the size (in bytes) your transactions needs.

Tron’s network allows for a bit of free bandwidth for everybody, roughly equivalent to 15 financial transactions.

Energy: The network needs a certain amount of power to compute and execute your transaction. That’s called “Energy.” If you’re asking for a simple transaction, then the Energy amount you need is zero. But smart contracts and dApps do need a bit of energy (just as Gas in Ethereum), and different transactions cost different amounts.

It’s not as straightforward as with Bandwidth because the SR knows the energy price only after the transaction is completed so, again, you need to have some idea of how previous, similar transactions, cost so you can know how much you’ll need to pay.

Freezing: this is Tron’s extra ingredient. If you freeze some of your Tronix coins, that will get you a bit of free Bandwidth, Energy, and also the ability to vote for SR’s which are often willing to reward voters with free tokens. The more coins you freeze, the more free transactions you get. Freezings also make the token scarcer, so it helps to drive its price up, so it ends up helping users, hodlers (if Tron has any) and SRs.

Tron’s system could seem quite a bit more complicated than the previous two. And it is. But it’s also faster, cheaper, it ensures a number of free transactions for all users.

Even if you overdo things and have to pay for transactions, it’s way cheaper than Ethereum or POA, and it also rewards SRs. Last but not least. These rewards facilitate vertical scalability in the network (unlike POA which is horizontal, or Ethereum, which is basically non-existing).

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Tron (TRX)’s Justin Sun and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin go at it again; Twitter saga continues

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The feud between Tron [TRX]’s Justin Sun and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin seems to have escalated with the two bigwigs of the cryptoverse going at it at on Twitter. The latest retorts were initiated by Sun when he had called out Buterin by tweeting:

Justin Sun has always made the news with his comments on Ethereum [ETH], with the CEO urging users multiple times to ditch the ETH network and switch to Tron.

The Tron Foundation official based his comments on Vitalik’s earlier comments when had stated in an interview that the next wave of crypto adoption is not going to be built on hype. He had said:

“Every time I come here, the space definitely keeps growing, and at this point, it’s looking like it’s just huge, you know. There’s just people in all of the different universities get interested in the technology, seeing the interest from just all the sheer number of companies that are based here.”

Sun’s direct collision with the Ethereum was not left unnoticed by Vitalik, who called Sun a “self identified shill” and even added that Sun was not worth listening to. Sun, who is very active on Twitter did not take the comments lying down, rebutting:

“We can talk about the dollar sign after the day #ETH reaches 2 million Txs per day, which I think will never happen. 😊#TRON”

The war of words between the two have long been an eye-catching engagement for users and holders in the cryptocurrency space. Sun never fails to mention Tron’s achievement and makes it a point to inform users that Tron has surpassed Ethereum in terms of daily transactions.

Tron had also received a boost recently when it enjoyed a sudden bullish spike of 6%, threatening to overtake Monero on the cryptocurrency charts. The rise came in the wake of Justin Sun’s comments on the framework of the company. He had said:

“BitTorrent is popular in 138 countries. So its very important that we find a solution like a payment channel that all the country it’s the same. Right now, the banking system and all this payment channel is fragile.”

Image courtesy of Pixabay.