EXPERIMENT - Tracking Top 10 Cryptos of 2018 - Month Twenty-Nine - Down -79%
See the full blog post with all the tables here.
tl;dr - Cardano wins May, BTC still way ahead, ETH solidly in second place, NEM (anyone still remember NEM?) still in basement. Markets going up despite world on fire. 3 x $1k investments in crypto in 2018, 2019, 2020 are down -7% compared to the US stock market. Word.

Month Twenty-Nine – Down 79%

While not quite as strong as April, May was undeniably a strong month overall, especially with the last minute push that saw Bitcoin climb over the $10k mark. Although BTC (and the market overall) has fallen in the last few days while I’ve been compiling these updates, we saw almost every 2018 Top Ten crypto end the month of May higher than where it started.

Question of the month:

The Bitcoin halving took place on May 11th, 2020 at 7:23 PM UTC. Since the first Bitcoin block was generated in 2009, how many halving events have occurred?

A) One B) Three C) Five D) None of the above
Scroll down for the answer.

Ranking and May Winners and Losers

Half of our 2018 Top Ten group were on the move in May. Cardano made the most upward progress, climbing two positions to #11. IOTA picked up rose one spot in the standings to #24 as well. On the other side, NEM keeps slipping, losing three spots to #30. Dash and Stellar also dropped two positions each in May.
The overall drop out rate remains at the 50% mark (meaning half of the cryptos that started 2018 in the Top Ten have dropped out). NEM, Dash, IOTA, Cardano, and Stellar have been replaced by EOS, Binance Coin, Tezos, Tether, and BSV.
May Winners – Massive month for ADA, up an impressive +62%. That’s about what Cardano gained last month, so, yeah, Cardano is having a great spring. IOTA also had a solid month, up +28%.
May Losers – XRP lost about -4% making it the worst performing of this group in May.
How has your favorite crypto fared over the first 29 months of the 2018 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment? Most monthly wins (7): Bitcoin. Most monthly losses (5) is a now tie between Stellar and NEM. All cryptos have at least one monthly win and Bitcoin stands alone as the only crypto that hasn’t lost a month (although it came close in January 2020 when it gained “only” +31%).

Overall update – BTC still way ahead, ETH firmly in second place, NEM worst performing.

Bitcoin made up more ground in May, now down -23% since January 2018. The last time we saw this price level to end a month was August 2019. The initial $100 investment is now worth about $77.
BTC is still well ahead of the field and Ethereum is firmly in second place. This may feel like a foregone conclusion at this point, but for context, long time 2018 Top Ten Experiment followers will note that this has not always been the case. Just a little over a year ago for example, BTC was second place behind Stellar.
NEM (down -95%) is in last place. That initial $100 investment in NEM? Now worth $4.74.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

The overall crypto market added about $35B in May 2020, back near August 2019 levels. This is down about half from January 2018 when the market was worth roughly $575B.

Bitcoin dominance:

Another flat month for Bitcoin dominance, which hasn’t moved at all in the last three months.
For context, the range since the beginning of the experiment in January 2018 has been wide: a high of 70% BitDom in September 2019 and a low of 33% BitDom in February 2018.

Overall return on investment since January 1st, 2018:

The 2018 Top Ten Portfolio gained about $20 bucks in May 2020, back near where it was at the end of February. If I cashed out today, my $1000 initial investment would return about $205, down -79% from January 2018.
Here’s the ROI over the life of the experiment, month by month:
The streak of nine consecutive months down at least -80% was finally broken in May. Just barely (at -79%), but hey, I’ll take it. July 2019 was the last time the 2018 Top Ten finished a month in the negative seventies. What about the negative sixties? That level hasn’t been seen in about two years.
Painful stuff. What about the follow on Experiments? Let’s see:

2019 Top Ten Experiment: up about +43% ($1,432)
2020 Top Ten Experiment: up about +47% ($1,467)

So overall? Taking the three portfolios together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line:
After a $3000 investment in the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, my portfolios are worth $3,104‬.
That’s up about +3.5% for the combined portfolios. Better than a few months ago (aka the zombie apocalypse) where it was down -24%, but not yet back at January (+13%) or February (+6%) levels.

Comparison to S&P 500:

I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of the experiment to have a comparison point with other popular investments options. The stock market (as measured by the S&P) continued to recover in May. It’s pretty amazing with all that’s going on in the world, but the market is already back up where it was in February 2020. The initial $1k investment into crypto on New Year’s Day 2018 would have gained about $140 had it been redirected to the S&P.
This is where it gets interesting. Taking the same drop-$1,000-per-year-on-January-1st approach with the S&P 500 that I’ve been documenting through the Top Ten Crypto Experiments would yield the following:

$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2018: +$140
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2019: +$220
$1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2020: -$50

Taken together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line for a similar approach with the S&P:
After three $1,000 investments into an S&P 500 index fund in January 2018, 2019, and 2020, my portfolio would be worth $3,310.
That is up over+10% since January 2018, compared to the $3,104 value (+3.5%) of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios.
That’s about a 7% difference in favor of the stock market. Last month, there was only a 3% difference. The month before, the gap was 13%.

Implications/Observations:

No news here: the 2018 Experiment’s focus of solely holding the Top Ten Cryptos has not and has never been a winning approach when compared to the overall market. The total market cap is down -51% from January 2018 compared to the -79% for the cryptos that began 2018 in the Top Ten. This of course implies that I would have done a bit better if I’d picked different cryptos – but much better than if I’d put all my eggs in NEM‘s -95% basket, for example. To reiterate, at no point in this experiment has this investment strategy been successful: the initial 2018 Top Ten have under-performed each of the twenty-nine months compared to the market overall.
In the following two Top Ten experiments, it’s a slightly different story. There are a few examples of this approach outperforming the overall market in the parallel 2019 Top Ten Crypto Experiment. For the most recent 2020 group, this approach had outperformed the overall market 100% of the time…until this month.

Conclusion:

The Bitcoin halving turned out to be a non event and markets continue to steadily rise despite riots in the US and a global pandemic. We’re almost half way through a very strange year. As the world changes, what will crypto’s place be in the new normal?
Final word: Please take care of yourselves, your families, and your communities. Be excellent to each other.
Thanks for reading and for supporting the experiment. I hope you’ve found it helpful. I continue to be committed to seeing this process through and reporting along the way. Feel free to reach out with any questions and stay tuned for progress reports. Keep an eye out for my parallel projects where I repeat the experiment twice, purchasing another $1000 ($100 each) of two new sets of Top Ten cryptos as of January 1st, 2019 then again on January 1st, 2020.

And the Answer is…

B) Three
Bitcoin’s third halving event took place May 2020.

Author: Gamals Ahmed, CoinEx Business Ambassador

https://preview.redd.it/a7jv4azk86u51.jpg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e4a4dbb5afacd5747076beaa59e6343b805c3392

ABSTRACT

Aryacoin is a new cryptocurrency, which allows for decentralized, peer to peer transactions of electronic cash. It is like Bitcoin and Litecoin, but the trading of the coin occurs on sales platforms that have no restriction to use. Further, it was created with the goal of addressing the double spend issues of Bitcoin and does so using a timestamp server to verify transactions. It works by taking the hash of a block of items to be timestamped and widely publishing the hash. The timestamp proves that the data must have existed at the time in order to get the hash. Each timestamp then includes the previous timestamp in its hash, forming a chain.
The Aryacoin team is continuously developing new use cases for the coin, including exchanges where users can exchange the coins without any fees or restrictions, and offline options where the coins can be bought and sold for cash. The coins can also be used on the company’s other platform, mrdigicoin.io. Along with the coin, there is a digital wallet that can be created and controlled by the user entirely, with no control being retained by the Aryacoin team.

1.INTRODUCTION

The concept of Blockchain first came to fame in October 2008, as part of a proposal for Bitcoin, with the aim to create P2P money without banks. Bitcoin introduced a novel solution to the age-old human problem of trust. The underlying blockchain technology allows us to trust the outputs of the system without trusting any actor within it. People and institutions who do not know or trust each other, reside in different countries, are subject to different jurisdictions, and who have no legally binding agreements with each other, can now interact over the Internet without the need for trusted third parties like banks, Internet platforms, or other types of clearing institutions.
When bitcoin was launched it was revolutionary allowing people to transfer money to anytime and anywhere with very low transaction fees . It was decentralized and their is no third party involved in the transaction , only the sender and receiver were involved.
This paper provide a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes. Bitcoin was made so that it would not be controlled or regulated but now exchanges and governments are regulating bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies at every step. Aryacoin was developed to overcome these restrictions on a free currency.
Aryacoin is a new age cryptocurrency, which withholds the original principle on which the concept of cryptocurrency was established. Combining the best in blockchain technology since the time of its creation, Aryacoin strives to deliver the highest trading and mining standards for its community.

1.1 OVERVIEW ABOUT ARYACOIN

Aryacoin is a new age cryptocurrency, which withholds the original principle on which the concept of cryptocurrency was established. Combining the best in blockchain technology since the time of its creation, Aryacoin strives to deliver the highest trading and mining standards for its community.
Aryacoin is a blockchain based project that allows users to access their wallet on the web and mobile browsers, using their login details.
Aryacoin can be mined; it also can be exchanged by other digital currencies in several world-famous exchanges such as Hitbtc, CoinEx, P2pb2b, WhiteBit, Changelly and is also listed in reputable wallets such as Coinomi and Guarda.
Aryacoin is a coin, which can be used by anyone looking to use cryptocurrency which allows them to keep their privacy even when buying/selling the coin along with while using the coin during transactions. Proof of work and cryptographic hashes allows transactions to verified.
Stable Fee Per AYA is a unique feature of Aryacoin, so by increasing the amount or volume of the transaction, there is no change in the fee within the network, which means that the fee for sending an amount less than 1 AYA is equal to several hundred million AYA. Another unique feature of Aryacoin is the undetectability of transactions in Explorer, such as the DASH and Monero, of course, this operation is unique to Aryacoin.
Using Aryacoin digital currency, like other currencies, international transactions can be done very quickly and there are no limitations in this area as the creators claim.
Aryacoin aims to allow users to access the Aryacoin wallet via the web and mobile browsers using their login details.
Aryacoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that enables users to send and receive payments directly from one party to another, and allow them to transfer funds across borders with no restriction or third party involvement. The blockchain-based system embraces the digital signature, which prevents double spending and low transfer fees, which enables users to transfer huge amounts with very low fees. The proof-of-work consensus mechanism allows each transaction to be verified and confirmed, while anonymity enables users to use the coin anywhere at any time.
According to the website of the operation, each wallet is divided into 2 or more AYA wallet addresses for each transaction, and depending on the volume of the transaction block, the origin, and destination of transactions in the network can not be traced and displayed to the public.
In fact, each wallet in Aryacoin consists of a total of several wallets. The number of these wallets increases per transaction to increase both security and privacy. Aryacoin also uses the dPoW protocol. In the dPoW protocol, a second layer is added to the network to verify transactions, which makes “51% attack” impossible even with more than half of the network hash, and blocks whose Blockchain uses this second layer of security never run the risk of 51% attacks.
AYA has been listed on a number of crypto exchanges, unlike other main cryptocurrencies, it cannot be directly purchased with fiats money. However, You can still easily buy this coin by
first buying Bitcoin from any large exchanges and then transfer to the exchange that offers to trade this coin.

1.1.1 ARYACOIN HISTORY

Aryacoin (AYA) is a new cryptocurrency, which has been created by a group of Iranian developers, is an altcoin which allows for decentralised, peer to peer transactions of electronic cash without any fees whatsoever. Along with the coin, there is a digital wallet that can be created and managed by the user entirely, with no control being retained by the Aryacoin team.
Aryacoin’s founder, Kiumars Parsa, has been a fan of alternative currencies and particularly Bitcoin.
“We see people from all around the world using Blockchain technology and the great benefits that came with it and it then that I decided to solve this puzzle for find a way of bringing the last missing piece to the jigsaw. The idea for Aryacoin was born.” Parsa said.
Parsa and his team of Iranian ex-pats not only persevered but expedited the project and just a year later, in the summer of 2019, the first version of Aryacoin was released. In 2020, Aryacoin is the first and only Iranian coin listed on CMC.
Parsa goes on to state that it is now the strength of the community that has invested in the coin that will ultimately drive its success, alongside its robust technology and appealing 0% network fees.
“We have thousands of voices behind Aryacoin. People for the people make this coin. It is a massive shout out for democracy. This had made us base the whole team strategy on the benefits for both our users and our traders.”
“One key example is that the network fee on AYA Blockchain is 0%. Yes, absolutely nothing, which which differentiates us from other networks. What also differentiates us from other coins is that we have AYAPAY which is the first cryptocurrency Gateway in the world which does not save funds on third party storage with all funds being forwarded directly to any wallet address that the Gateway owner requests”.
“So for the first time ever, and unlike other gateways, incoming funds will be saved on the users account with submitted withdrawal requests then made on the Gateway host website. In AYAPAY which has also been developed by the Aryacoin team, all funds without extra fees or extra costs will directly forwarded to users wallets. We have named this technology as CloudWithdrawal.”
“We are continuously challenging ourselves as it is a crowded marketplace. We are striving to have a safer Blockchain against 51% attacks, faster confirmations speeds of transactions, cheaper network fee, growing the market by cooperation with Top tier Exchangers.”

1.1.2 ARYACOIN’S MAIN GOAL

Aryacoin’s main goal is to educate people and give them the freedom to use cryptocurrency in any way they want. Aryacoin empowers the users to transfer, pay, trade cryptocurrency from any country around the globe.
Platforms that have been created by Aryacoin Team, as well as those that will go live in future, operate on the same principle and exclude absolutely no one.

1.1.3 PROBLEM ARYACOIN SEEKS TO SOLVE

Aryacoin aims to provide a long-term solution to the problem of double spending, which is still common in the crypto market. The developers of the system have created a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server that generates computational proof of the transactions as they occur.
Besides, the system remains secure provided honest nodes control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes. While Bitcoin was designed not to be regulated or controlled, many exchanges and governments have put regulatory measures on the pioneer cryptocurrency at every step. Aryacoin aims to overcome these restrictions as a free digital currency.

1.1.4 BENEFITS OF USING ARYACOIN

Aryacoin solution offers the following benefits:

Real-time update: whether you’re going on a holiday or a business trip, no problem. You can access your coins all over the world.
Instant operations: Aryacoin makes it quite easy for you to use your digital wallet and perform various operations with it.
Safe and secure: all your data is stored encrypted and can only be decrypted with your private key, seed, or password.
Strong security: The system has no control over your wallet. You are 100% in charge of your wallet and funds.

1.1.5 ARYACOIN FEATURES

1. Anonymity
The coin provides decent level of anonymity for all its users. The users can send their transactions to any of the public nodes to be broadcasted , the transaction sent to the nodes should be signed by the private key of the sender address . This allows the users to use the coin anywhere any time , sending transactions directly to the node allows users from any place and country .
2. Real Life Usage
aryacoin’s team is continuously developing new and innovative ways to use the coins , they are currently developing exchanges where the users can exchange the coins without any fees and any restrictions . They also are currently developing other innovative technologies, which would allow users to spend our coins everywhere and anywhere.
3. Offline Exchanges
They are also working with different offline vendors which would enable them to buy and sell the coins directly to our users on a fixed/variable price this would allow easy buy/sell directly using cash . This would allow the coins to be accessible to users without any restrictions which most of the online exchanges have, also increase the value and number of users along with new ways to spend the coin. This would increase anonymity level of the
coin. In addition, introduce new users into the cryptomarket and technology. Creating a revolution, which educates people about crypto and introduce them to the crypto world, which introduces a completely new group of people into crypto and a move towards a Decentralized future!
4. Transactions
When it comes to transactions, Aryacoin embraces a chain of digital signatures, where each owner simply transfers the coin to the next person by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner. The recipient can then verify the signatures to confirm the chain of ownership. Importantly, Aryacoin comes with a trusted central authority that checks every transaction for double spending.
5. Business Partner with Simplex
Aryacoin is the first and only Iranian digital currency that managed to obtain a trading license in other countries.
In collaboration with the foundation and financial giant Simplex, a major cryptocurrency company that has large companies such as Binance, P2P, Changelly, etc. Aryacoin has been licensed to enter the world’s major exchanges, as well as the possibility of purchasing AYA through Credit Cards, which will begin in the second half of 2020.
Also, the possibility of purchasing Aryacoin through Visa and MasterCard credit cards will be activated simultaneously inside the Aryacoin site. plus, in less than a year, AYA will be placed next to big names such as CoinCapMarket, Coinomi, P2P, Coinpayments and many other world-class brands today.

1.1.6 WHY CHOOSE ARYACOIN?

If you want to use a cryptocurrency that allows you to keep your privacy online even when buying and selling the coins, the Aryacoin team claims that AYA is the way to go. Aryacoin is putting in the work: with more ways to buy and sell, and fixing the issues that were present in the original Bitcoin, plus pushing the boundaries with innovative solutions in cryptocurrencies. You can get started using Aryacoin (AYA) payments simply by having a CoinPayments account!

1.1.7 ARYANA CENTRALIZED EXCHANGE

Aryana, the first Iranian exchange is a unique platform with the following features:

The first real international Persian exchange that obtains international licenses and is listed in CoinMarketCap.
The first Iranian exchange that has been cooperating with a legal and European exchange for 3 years.
The possibility of trading in Tomans (available currency in Iran) at the user’s desired price and getting rid of the transaction prices imposed by domestic sites inside Iran.
There is an internal fee payment plan by Iranian domestic banks for depositing and withdrawing Tomans for Aryacoin holders in Aryana Exchange.
The number that you see on the monitor and in your account will be equal to the number that is transferred to your bank account without a difference of one Rial.
The last but not least, noting the fact that there is a trading in Tomans possibility in Aryana exchange.

Aryana Exchange is using the most powerful, fastest, and most expensive server in the world, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which is currently the highest quality server for an Iranian site, so that professional traders do not lag behind the market even for a second.
The feature of Smart Trading Robots is one of the most powerful features for digital currency traders. Digital cryptocurrency traders are well aware of how much they will benefit from smart trading robots. In the Aryana exchange, it is possible to connect exchange user accounts to intelligent trading bots and trade even when they are offline.
The injection of $ 1 million a day in liquidity by the WhiteBite exchange to maintain and support the price of Tether and eliminate the Tether fluctuations with Bitcoin instabilities used by profiteers to become a matter of course.

1.1.8 HOW DOES ARYACOIN WORK?

Aryacoin (AYA) tries to ensure a high level of security and privacy. The team has made sure to eliminate any trading restrictions for the network users: no verification is required to carry out transactions on AYA, making the project truly anonymous, decentralized, and giving it a real use in day-to-day life. The Delayed-Proof-of-Work (dPoW) algorithm makes the Aryacoin blockchain immune to any attempts of a 51% attack. AYA defines a coin as a chain of digital signatures — each owner transfers the coin to the next owner by digitally signing the hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner, and the receiver verifies the signatures and the chain of ownership.

2. ARYACOIN TECHNOLOGY

2.1 PROOF-OF-WORK

They use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back’s Hashcash to implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis, rather than newspaper or Usenet publications. The proof-of-work involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits. The average work required is exponential in the number of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash.
For their timestamp network, they implement the proof-of-work by incrementing a nonce in the block until a value is found that gives the block’s hash the required zero bits. Once the CPU effort has been expended to make it satisfy the proof-of-work, the block cannot be changed without redoing the work. As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block would include redoing all the blocks after it.
The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it. If honest nodes control a majority of CPU power, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past
block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it, then catch up with, and surpass the work of the honest nodes.

2.2 NETWORK

The steps to run the network are as follows:

New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.
Each node collects new transactions into a block.
Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.

This is a very simple system that makes the network fast and scalable, while also providing a decent level of anonymity for all users. Users can send their transactions to any of the public nodes to be broadcast, and the private key of the sender’s address should sign any transaction sent to the nodes. This way, all transaction info remains strictly confidential. It also allows users to send transactions directly to the node from any place at any time and allows the transferring of huge amounts with very low fees.

2.3 AYAPAY PAYMENT SERVICES GATEWAY:

According to creators Aryacoin, the development team has succeeded in inventing a new blockchain technology for the first time in the world, which is undoubtedly a big step and great news for all digital currency enthusiasts around the world.
This new technology has been implemented on the Aryacoin AYAPAY platform and was unveiled on October 2. AYAPAY payment platform is the only payment gateway in the world that does not save money in users’ accounts and transfers incoming coins directly to any wallet address requested by the gateway owner without any additional transaction or fee.
In other similar systems or even systems such as PayPal, money is stored in the user account.

2.4 CONSENSUS ALGORITHM IN ARYACOIN

The devs introduced the Delayed-Proof-of-Work (dPoW) algorithm, which represents a hybrid consensus method that allows one blockchain to take advantage of the security provided by the hashing power of another blockchain. The AYA blockchain works on dPoW and can use such consensus methods as Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and join to any desired PoW blockchain. The main purpose of this is to allow the blockchain to continue operating without notary nodes on the basis of its original consensus method. In this situation, additional security will no longer be provided through the attached blockchain, but this is not a particularly significant problem. dPoW can improve the security level and reduce energy consumption for any blockchain.

2.5 DOUBLE-SPEND PROBLEM AND SOLUTION

One of the main problems in the blockchain world is that a receiver is unable to verify whether or not one of the senders did not double-spend. Aryacoin provides the solution, and has established a trusted central authority, or mint, that checks every transaction for double-spending. Only the mint can issue a new coin and all the coins issued directly from the mint are trusted and cannot be double-spent. However, such a system cannot therefore
be fully decentralized because it depends on the company running the mint, similar to a bank. Aryacoin implements a scheme where the receiver knows that the previous owners did not sign any earlier transactions. The mint is aware of all transactions including which of them arrived first. The developers used an interesting solution called the Timestamp Server, which works by taking a hash of a block of items to be ‘timestamped’ and publishing the hash. Each timestamp includes the previous timestamp in its hash, forming a chain. To modify a block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of all previous blocks, then catch up with, and surpass the work of the honest nodes. This is almost impossible, and makes the network processes more secure. The proof-of-work difficulty varies according to circumstances. Such an approach ensures reliability and high throughput.

3. ARYACOIN ROADMAP

April 2019: The launch of Aryacoin; AYA ICO, resulting in over 30BTC collected
December 2019: The launch of AYA Pay
April 2020: The successful Hamedan Hardfork, supported by all AYA exchanges, aimed at integrating the dPoW algorithm, improving the security of the AYA blockchain.
June 2020: Aryana Exchange goes live, opening more trading opportunities globally
July 2020: The enabling of our Coin Exchanger
November 2020: The implementation of Smart Contracts into the Aryacoin Ecosystem
Q1 2021: Alef B goes live (more details coming soon)

4. THE NUCYBER NETWORK COMMUNITY & SOCIAL

Website: https://aryacoin.io/
Explorer: https://explorer.aryacoin.io/
Github: https://github.com/Aryacoin/Aryacoin
Twitter: 1.1k followers https://twitter.com/AryacoinAYA
Reddit: 442 members https://github.com/nucypher
Instagram: 3.8k followers https://www.instagram.com/mrdigicoin/ Telegram: 5.9k subscribers https://t.me/AYA_Global

5. SUMMARY

Aryacoin (AYA) is a new age cryptocurrency that combines the best of the blockchain technology and strives to deliver high trading and mining standards, enabling users to make peer-to-peer decentralized transactions of electronic cash. Aryacoin is part of an ecosystem that includes payment gateway Ayapay and the Ayabank. AYA has a partnership with the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which provides the ability to develop applications and store data on servers located in distributed data centers. The network fee for the AYA Blockchain is 0%. In Ayapay service, which has been developed by the Aryacoin team, all funds without extra fees or costs are directly forwarded to users’ wallets with technology called CloudWithdrawal. The devs team is introducing new use cases including exchanges where users will exchange AYA without any restrictions. You can buy AYA on an exchange of your choice, create an Aryacoin wallet, and store it in Guarda.

6. REFERENCES

1) https://coincodex.com/crypto/aryacoin/
2) https://www.icosandstos.com/coin/Aryacoin%20AYA/YuXO60UPF3
3) https://www.publish0x.com/iran-and-cryptocurrency/a-brief-introduction-of-aryacoin-first-ever-iranian-cryptocu-xoldlom
4) https://techround.co.uk/cryptocurrency/aryacoin-the-digital-currency-created-by-iranians/
5) https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/aryacoin/
6) https://blog.coinpayments.net/coin-spotlight/aryacoin
7) https://guarda.com/aryacoin-wallet

Edit: TL;DR added in the comments

Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analyzed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk-reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralized and scalable in my opinion.

Below I post my analysis of why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!

Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”

This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise, just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.

Technology and some more:

Introduction

The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.

Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.

The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.

Mainnet is live since the end of January 2019 with daily transaction rates growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralized and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. The maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.

Zilliqa realized early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralized, secure, and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in the amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralization. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.

Before we continue dissecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?

Down the rabbit hole

How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.

The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.

The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour, no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here.
Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.

We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts, etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.

Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as: “A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronize cryptographically-secure data”.

Next, he states that: "blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”. For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber, and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.

With public blockchains like Zilliqa, this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network, etc.

Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.

After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever-changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralized and scalable being low.

pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimization on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.

The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and the University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017.
Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”

pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (66%) double-spend attacks become possible.

If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.

Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT, etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralization.

Decentralisation

Currently, there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so-called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralized nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics, you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching its transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand.
Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end-users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.

The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public. They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public-facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.

5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers. The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translate to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non-custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.

With a high amount of DS; shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralized too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralized in my opinion.

Smart contracts

Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. The faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal.
If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time-stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.

Generalized: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object-oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: * “all programs have two basic components, data – what the program knows – and behavior – what the program can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviors in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behavior are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.” *

Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: OCaml is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.

Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognized by academics and won a so-called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.

One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise, it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts, it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.

Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa or Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).

So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”. Scilla design story part 1

Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.

Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue: In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.

Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.

“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”

Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.

Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding

There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.

Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.

And this is where the downsides of state sharding comes in currently. All shards in Zilliqa have access to the complete state. Yes the state size (0.1 GB at the moment) grows and all of the nodes need to store it but it also means that they don’t need to shop around for information available on other shards. Requiring more communication and adding more complexity. Computer science knowledge and/or developer knowledge required links if you want to dig further: Scilla - language grammar Scilla - Foundations for Verifiable Decentralised Computations on a Blockchain Gas Accounting NUS x Zilliqa: Smart contract language workshop

Easier to follow links on programming Scilla https://learnscilla.com/home Ivan on Tech

Roadmap / Zilliqa 2.0

There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.

Business & Partnerships

It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organizations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggests that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.

Zilliqa seems to already take advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, Airbnb, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.

What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.

Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:

There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are built on top of these blocks.

So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”

Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human-readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.

Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They don't just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.

Marketing & Community

Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data, it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities also seem to be growing.

Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community-run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non-custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiative (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggests in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.

Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.

Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real-time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding of what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.

To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures, Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!

What’s up team? I have a hot one for you. XVG returned 12 million percent in 2017 and this one reminds me a lot of it. Here’s why:
Mimblewimble is like Blu-Ray compared to CD-ROM in terms of its ability to compress data on a blockchain. The current BTC chain is 277gb and its capacity is limited because every time you spend a coin, each node needs to validate its history back to when it was mined (this is how double spending is prevented). Mimblewimble is different - all transactions in a block are aggregated and netted out in one giant CoinJoin, and only the current spending needs to be verified. This means that dramatically more transactions can fit into a smaller space, increasing throughput and lowering fees while still retaining the full proof of work game theory of Bitcoin. These blockchains are small enough to run a full node on a cheap smartphone, which enhances the decentralization and censorship resistance of the network.
The biggest benefit, though, is that all transactions are private - the blockchain doesn’t reveal amounts or addresses except to the actual wallet owner. Unlike earlier decoy-based approaches that bloat the chain and can still be data mined (XMR), Mimblewimble leaves no trace in the blockchain, instead storing only the present state of coin ownership.
The first two Mimblewimble coins, Grin and Beam, launched to great fanfare in 2019, quickly reaching over $100m in market cap (since settled down to $22m and $26m respectively). They are good projects but grin has infinite supply and huge never-decreasing emission, and Beam is a corporate moneygrab whose founding investors are counting on you buying for their ROI.
ZEC is valued at $568m today, despite the facts that only 1% of transactions are actually shielded, it has a trusted setup, and generating a confidential transaction takes ~60 seconds on a powerful PC. XMR is a great project but it’s valued at $1.2b (so no 100x) and it uses CryptoNote, which is 2014 tech that relies on a decoy-based approach that could be vulnerable to more powerful computers in the future. Mimblewimble is just a better way to approach privacy because there is simply no data recorded in the blockchain for companies to surveil.
Privacy is not just for darknet markets, porn, money launderers and terrorists. In many countries it’s dangerous to be wealthy, and there are all kinds of problems with having your spending data be out there publicly and permanently for all to see. Namely, companies like Amazon are patenting approaches to identify people with their crypto addresses, “for law enforcement” but also so that, just like credit cards, your spending data can be used to target ads. (A) Coinbase is selling user data to the DEA, IRS, FBI, Secret Service, and who knows who else? (B) What about insurance companies raising your premiums or canceling your policy because they see you buying (legal) cannabis? If your business operates using transparent cryptocurrency, competitors can data mine your customer and supply chain data, and employees can see how much everyone else gets paid. I could go on, but the idea of “I have nothing to hide, so what do I care about privacy?” will increasingly ring hollow as people realize that this money printing will have to be paid by massive tax increases AND that those taxes will be directly debited from their “Central Bank Digital Currency” wallets.
100% privacy for all transactions also eliminates one HUGE problem that people aren’t aware of yet, but they will be: fungibility. Fungibility means that each coin is indistinguishable from any other, just like paper cash. Why is this important? Because of the ever-expanding reach of AML/KYC/KYT (Anti-Money Laundering / Know Your Customer / Know Your Transaction) as regulators cramp down on crypto and banks take over, increasingly coins become “tainted” in various ways. For example, if you withdraw coins to a mixing service like Wasabi or Samourai, you may find your account blocked. (C) The next obvious step is that if you receive coins that these chainalysis services don’t like for whatever reason, you will be completely innocent yet forced to prove that you didn’t know that the coins you bought were up to no good in a past life. 3 days ago, $100k of USDC was frozen. (D) Even smaller coins like LTC now have this problem, because “Chinese Drug Kingpins” used them. (E) I believe that censorable money that can be blocked/frozen isn’t really “your money”.
Epic Cash is a 100% volunteer community project (like XVG and XMR) that had a fair launch in September last year with no ICO and no premine. There are very few projects like this, and it’s a key ingredient in Verge’s success (still at $110m market cap today despite being down 97% since the bubble peak) and why it’s still around. It has a small but super passionate community of “Freemen” who are united by a belief in the sound money economics of Bitcoin Standard emission (21m supply limit and ever-decreasing inflation) and the importance of privacy.
I am super bullish on this coin for the following reasons:

Only $400k market cap
Supply started at zero, so there are no VC’s and team to dump on you into the pumps - all coins are mined into existence, just like Bitcoin.
It just had its first halving, reducing emission from 16 to 8 per block. Between now and 2028 there are FOUR (!) more halvings, from 4 to 2 to 1 and then finally 0.15 (I guess that would be an 85%-ing :p) and at this point the supply is the same as BTC and stays in sync forever until the last coin is mined in 2140. This simple supply curve is already accepted by the market as a winner, so why mess with success? (I)
Meets Andreas Antonopolous’ 5 pillars of open blockchains test: Public, Open, Borderless, Neutral, and Censorship Resistant. (How many coins can say this?)
Unlike Bitcoin, Epic created a multi-algorithm approach that enables people to mine on ordinary computers - 60% for CPU on RandomX, 38% for GPU on ProgPow, and 2% for ASIC’s on Cuckoo31+. The algorithms don’t compete with one another. This is essential for leveling the playing field and preventing massive farms from dominating. These percentages can change over time and new algorithms can be easily dropped in. You can mine today using an old laptop and in 5 years you will still be able to. Incidentally, there is nothing standing in the way of adding mobile phone-based mining, which ETN showed there’s a huge demand for.
Based off the excellent Grin codebase, which means they continue to pull in ongoing core code enhancements and focus on ease of use and market penetration instead. (Smart!)
Litecoin’s Charlie Lee is out there daily talking about their move to Mimblewimble, which provides free publicity. What people don’t realize is that you can’t just bolt on Mimblewimble to a legacy blockchain, that’s like putting a Ferrari engine into a school bus - it’s still a school bus, not a race car! LTC is doing it as an optional soft fork via “extension blocks” which will not be supported by all wallets and exchanges. Also, anyone using “optional” privacy features is declaring themselves to be suspicious, which kind of defeats the point for people who care about privacy.
The community is friendly and welcoming to new people coming in, with lots of helpful (independently created) tutorials and guides. (F)
It’s already a global phenomenon, with the whitepaper in 20+ languages (G) and (not bot-infested) active local-language communities on not only Telegram but also Wechat, LINE, QQ and other messenger platforms.
It’s only on two random little exchanges currently, Citex and Vitex. Vitex is actually a pretty good DEX with no KYC and a great mobile wallet.
They are very creative - since centralized exchanges want huge money to list, they created a non-inflationary ERC20 tracker token that’s exchangeable 1:1 for coins so that Uniswap trading is possible (H)

Because it doesn’t have a huge marketing budget in a sea of VC-funded shitcoins, it is as-yet undiscovered, which is why it’s so cheap. There are only 4 Mimblewimble-based currencies on the market: MWC at $162m, BEAM at $26m, GRIN at $22m, and EPIC at $0.4m. This is not financial advice and as always, do your own research, but I’ve been buying this gem for months and will continue to.
This one ticks all the boxes for me, the only real problem is that it’s hard to buy much without causing a huge green candle. Alt season is coming, and coins like this are how your neighbor Chad got his Lambo back in 2017. For 2021, McLaren is a better choice and be sure to pay cash so that it doesn’t get repossessed like Chad!

Links:

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/epic-cash/
Coingecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/epic-cash
Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/epiccash
Explorer: https://explorer.epic.tech/
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5230747
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EpicCashTech
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EpicCashTech
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/epiccash/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQBFfksJlM97rgrplLRwNUg
Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?exactAmount=1&exactField=input&outputCurrency=0x4149195911EB592307d9aCb08aC6a5de08B8717d
Vitex: https://x.vite.net/trade?symbol=EPIC-001_BTC-000
Citex: https://trade.citex.me/trade/EPIC_BTC

In case you haven't noticed the consultation paper, staff notice, and report on Quadriga, regulators are now clamping down on Canadian cryptocurrency exchanges. The OSC and other regulatory bodies are still interested in industry feedback. They have not put forward any official regulation yet. Below are some ideas/insights and a proposed framework.

This framework was developed through a study of 96 past exchange hack/scam/fraud events. It prevents all historic cases where funds were lost in cryptocurrency exchanges.
Typical securities frameworks will cost Canadians millions of dollars (ie Sarbanes-Oxley estimated at $5m USD/yr per firm). Implementation costs of this proposal are significantly cheaper.
Canadians can maintain a diverse set of exchanges, multiple viable business models are still fully supported, and innovation is encouraged while keeping Canadians safe.

Many of you have limited time to read the full proposal, so here are the highlights:

Offline Multi-Signature

Effective standards to prevent both internal and external theft. Exchange operators are trained and certified, and have a legal responsibility to users.

Regular Transparent Audits

Provides visibility to Canadians that their funds are fully backed on the exchange, while protecting privacy and sensitive platform information.

Insurance Requirements

Establishment of basic insurance standards/strategy, to expand over time. Removing risk to exchange users of any hot wallet theft.

Background and Justifications

Cold Storage Custody/Management
After reviewing close to 100 cases, all thefts tend to break down into more or less the same set of problems:
• Funds stored online or in a smart contract,
• Access controlled by one person or one system,
• 51% attacks (rare),
• Funds sent to the wrong address (also rare), or
• Some combination of the above.
For the first two cases, practical solutions exist and are widely implemented on exchanges already. Offline multi-signature solutions are already industry standard. No cases studied found an external theft or exit scam involving an offline multi-signature wallet implementation. Security can be further improved through minimum numbers of signatories, background checks, providing autonomy and legal protections to each signatory, establishing best practices, and a training/certification program.
The last two transaction risks occur more rarely, and have never resulted in a loss affecting the actual users of the exchange. In all cases to date where operators made the mistake, they've been fully covered by the exchange platforms.
• 51% attacks generally only occur on blockchains with less security. The most prominent cases have been Bitcoin Gold and Ethereum Classic. The simple solution is to enforce deposit limits and block delays such that a 51% attack is not cost-effective.
• The risk of transactions to incorrect addresses can be eliminated by a simple test transaction policy on large transactions. By sending a small amount of funds prior to any large withdrawals/transfers as a standard practice, the accuracy of the wallet address can be validated.
The proposal covers all loss cases and goes beyond, while avoiding significant additional costs, risks, and limitations which may be associated with other frameworks like SOC II.

On The Subject of Third Party Custodians
Many Canadian platforms are currently experimenting with third party custody. From the standpoint of the exchange operator, they can liberate themselves from some responsibility of custody, passing that off to someone else. For regulators, it puts crypto in similar categorization to oil, gold, and other commodities, with some common standards. Platform users would likely feel greater confidence if the custodian was a brand they recognized. If the custodian was knowledgeable and had a decent team that employed multi-sig, they could keep assets safe from internal theft. With the right protections in place, this could be a great solution for many exchanges, particularly those that lack the relevant experience or human resources for their own custody systems.
However, this system is vulnerable to anyone able to impersonate the exchange operators. You may have a situation where different employees who don't know each other that well are interacting between different companies (both the custodian and all their customers which presumably isn't just one exchange). A case study of what can go wrong in this type of environment might be Bitpay, where the CEO was tricked out of 5000 bitcoins over 3 separate payments by a series of emails sent legitimately from a breached computer of another company CEO. It's also still vulnerable to the platform being compromised, as in the really large $70M Bitfinex hack, where the third party Bitgo held one key in a multi-sig wallet. The hacker simply authorized the withdrawal using the same credentials as Bitfinex (requesting Bitgo to sign multiple withdrawal transactions). This succeeded even with the use of multi-sig and two heavily security-focused companies, due to the lack of human oversight (basically, hot wallet). Of course, you can learn from these cases and improve the security, but so can hackers improve their deception and at the end of the day, both of these would have been stopped by the much simpler solution of a qualified team who knew each other and employed multi-sig with properly protected keys. It's pretty hard to beat a human being who knows the business and the typical customer behaviour (or even knows their customers personally) at spotting fraud, and the proposed multi-sig means any hacker has to get through the scrutiny of 3 (or more) separate people, all of whom would have proper training including historical case studies.
There are strong arguments both for and against using use of third party custodians. The proposal sets mandatory minimum custody standards would apply regardless if the cold wallet signatories are exchange operators, independent custodians, or a mix of both.

On The Subject Of Insurance
ShakePay has taken the first steps into this new realm (congratulations). There is no question that crypto users could be better protected by the right insurance policies, and it certainly feels better to transact with insured platforms. The steps required to obtain insurance generally place attention in valuable security areas, and in this case included a review from CipherTrace. One of the key solutions in traditional finance comes from insurance from entities such as the CDIC.
However, historically, there wasn't found any actual insurance payout to any cryptocurrency exchange, and there are notable cases where insurance has not paid. With Bitpay, for example, the insurance agent refused because the issue happened to the third party CEO's computer instead of anything to do with Bitpay itself. With the Youbit exchange in South Korea, their insurance claim was denied, and the exchange ultimately ended up instead going bankrupt with all user's funds lost. To quote Matt Johnson in the original Lloyd's article: “You can create an insurance policy that protects no one – you know there are so many caveats to the policy that it’s not super protective.”
ShakePay's insurance was only reported to cover their cold storage, and “physical theft of the media where the private keys are held”. Physical theft has never, in the history of cryptocurrency exchange cases reviewed, been reported as the cause of loss. From the limited information of the article, ShakePay made it clear their funds are in the hands of a single US custodian, and at least part of their security strategy is to "decline[] to confirm the custodian’s name on the record". While this prevents scrutiny of the custodian, it's pretty silly to speculate that a reasonably competent hacking group couldn't determine who the custodian is. A far more common infiltration strategy historically would be social engineering, which has succeeded repeatedly. A hacker could trick their way into ShakePay's systems and request a fraudulent withdrawal, impersonate ShakePay and request the custodian to move funds, or socially engineer their way into the custodian to initiate the withdrawal of multiple accounts (a payout much larger than ShakePay) exploiting the standard procedures (for example, fraudulently initiating or override the wallet addresses of a real transfer). In each case, nothing was physically stolen and the loss is therefore not covered by insurance.
In order for any insurance to be effective, clear policies have to be established about what needs to be covered. Anything short of that gives Canadians false confidence that they are protected when they aren't in any meaningful way. At this time, the third party insurance market does not appear to provide adequate options or coverage, and effort is necessary to standardize custody standards, which is a likely first step in ultimately setting up an insurance framework.
A better solution compared to third party insurance providers might be for Canadian exchange operators to create their own collective insurance fund, or a specific federal organization similar to the CDIC. Such an organization would have a greater interest or obligation in paying out actual cases, and that would be it's purpose rather than maximizing it's own profit. This would be similar to the SAFU which Binance has launched, except it would cover multiple exchanges. There is little question whether the SAFU would pay out given a breach of Binance, and a similar argument could be made for a insurance fund managed by a collective of exchange operators or a government organization. While a third party insurance provider has the strong market incentive to provide the absolute minimum coverage and no market incentive to payout, an entity managed by exchange operators would have incentive to protect the reputation of exchange operators/the industry, and the government should have the interest of protecting Canadians.

On The Subject of Fractional Reserve
There is a long history of fractional reserve failures, from the first banks in ancient times, through the great depression (where hundreds of fractional reserve banks failed), right through to the 2008 banking collapse referenced in the first bitcoin block. The fractional reserve system allows banks to multiply the money supply far beyond the actual cash (or other assets) in existence, backed only by a system of debt obligations of others. Safely supporting a fractional reserve system is a topic of far greater complexity than can be addressed by a simple policy, and when it comes to cryptocurrency, there is presently no entity reasonably able to bail anyone out in the event of failure. Therefore, this framework is addressed around entities that aim to maintain 100% backing of funds.
There may be some firms that desire but have failed to maintain 100% backing. In this case, there are multiple solutions, including outside investment, merging with other exchanges, or enforcing a gradual restoration plan. All of these solutions are typically far better than shutting down the exchange, and there are multiple cases where they've been used successfully in the past.

Proof of Reserves/Transparency/Accountability
Canadians need to have visibility into the backing on an ongoing basis.
The best solution for crypto-assets is a Proof of Reserve. Such ideas go back all the way to 2013, before even Mt. Gox. However, no Canadian exchange has yet implemented such a system, and only a few international exchanges (CoinFloor in the UK being an example) have. Many firms like Kraken, BitBuy, and now ShakePay use the Proof of Reserve term to refer to lesser proofs which do not actually cryptographically prove the full backing of all user assets on the blockchain. In order for a Proof of Reserve to be effective, it must actually be a complete proof, and it needs to be understood by the public that is expected to use it. Many firms have expressed reservations about the level of transparency required in a complete Proof of Reserve (for example Kraken here). While a complete Proof of Reserves should be encouraged, and there are some solutions in the works (ie TxQuick), this is unlikely to be suitable universally for all exchange operators and users.
Given the limitations, and that firms also manage fiat assets, a more traditional audit process makes more sense. Some Canadian exchanges (CoinSquare, CoinBerry) have already subjected themselves to annual audits. However, these results are not presently shared publicly, and there is no guarantee over the process including all user assets or the integrity and independence of the auditor. The auditor has been typically not known, and in some cases, the identity of the auditor is protected by a NDA. Only in one case (BitBuy) was an actual report generated and publicly shared. There has been no attempt made to validate that user accounts provided during these audits have been complete or accurate. A fraudulent fractional exchange, or one which had suffered a breach they were unwilling to publicly accept (see CoinBene), could easily maintain a second set of books for auditors or simply exclude key accounts to pass an individual audit.
The proposed solution would see a reporting standard which includes at a minimum - percentage of backing for each asset relative to account balances and the nature of how those assets are stored, with ownership proven by the auditor. The auditor would also publicly provide a "hash list", which they independently generate from the accounts provided by the exchange. Every exchange user can then check their information against this public "hash list". A hash is a one-way form of encryption, which fully protects the private information, yet allows anyone who knows that information already to validate that it was included. Less experienced users can take advantage of public tools to calculate the hash from their information (provided by the exchange), and thus have certainty that the auditor received their full balance information. Easy instructions can be provided.
Auditors should be impartial, their identities and process public, and they should be rotated so that the same auditor is never used twice in a row. Balancing the cost of auditing against the needs for regular updates, a 6 month cycle likely makes the most sense.

Hot Wallet Management
The best solution for hot wallets is not to use them. CoinBerry reportedly uses multi-sig on all withdrawals, and Bitmex is an international example known for their structure devoid of hot wallets.
However, many platforms and customers desire fast withdrawal processes, and human validation has a cost of time and delay in this process.
A model of self-insurance or separate funds for hot wallets may be used in these cases. Under this model, a platform still has 100% of their client balance in cold storage and holds additional funds in hot wallets for quick withdrawal. Thus, the risk of those hot wallets is 100% on exchange operators and not affecting the exchange users. Since most platforms typically only have 1%-5% in hot wallets at any given time, it shouldn't be unreasonable to build/maintain these additional reserves over time using exchange fees or additional investment. Larger withdrawals would still be handled at regular intervals from the cold storage.
Hot wallet risks have historically posed a large risk and there is no established standard to guarantee secure hot wallets. When the government of South Korea dispatched security inspections to multiple exchanges, the results were still that 3 of them got hacked after the inspections. If standards develop such that an organization in the market is willing to insure the hot wallets, this could provide an acceptable alternative. Another option may be for multiple exchange operators to pool funds aside for a hot wallet insurance fund. Comprehensive coverage standards must be established and maintained for all hot wallet balances to make sure Canadians are adequately protected.

Current Draft Proposal

(1) Proper multi-signature cold wallet storage.
(a) Each private key is the personal and legal responsibility of one person - the “signatory”. Signatories have special rights and responsibilities to protect user assets. Signatories are trained and certified through a course covering (1) past hacking and fraud cases, (2) proper and secure key generation, and (3) proper safekeeping of private keys. All private keys must be generated and stored 100% offline by the signatory. If even one private keys is ever breached or suspected to be breached, the wallet must be regenerated and all funds relocated to a new wallet.
(b) All signatories must be separate background-checked individuals free of past criminal conviction. Canadians should have a right to know who holds their funds. All signing of transactions must take place with all signatories on Canadian soil or on the soil of a country with a solid legal system which agrees to uphold and support these rules (from an established white-list of countries which expands over time).
(c) 3-5 independent signatures are required for any withdrawal. There must be 1-3 spare signatories, and a maximum of 7 total signatories. The following are all valid combinations: 3of4, 3of5, 3of6, 4of5, 4of6, 4of7, 5of6, or 5of7.
(d) A security audit should be conducted to validate the cold wallet is set up correctly and provide any additional pertinent information. The primary purpose is to ensure that all signatories are acting independently and using best practices for private key storage. A report summarizing all steps taken and who did the audit will be made public. Canadians must be able to validate the right measures are in place to protect their funds.
(e) There is a simple approval process if signatories wish to visit any country outside Canada, with a potential whitelist of exempt countries. At most 2 signatories can be outside of aligned jurisdiction at any given time. All exchanges would be required to keep a compliant cold wallet for Canadian funds and have a Canadian office if they wish to serve Canadian customers.
(2) Regular and transparent solvency audits.
(a) An audit must be conducted at founding, after 3 months of operation, and at least once every 6 months to compare customer balances against all stored cryptocurrency and fiat balances. The auditor must be known, independent, and never the same twice in a row.
(b) An audit report will be published featuring the steps conducted in a readable format. This should be made available to all Canadians on the exchange website and on a government website. The report must include what percentage of each customer asset is backed on the exchange, and how those funds are stored.
(c) The auditor will independently produce a hash of each customer's identifying information and balance as they perform the audit. This will be made publicly available on the exchange and government website, along with simplified instructions that each customer can use to verify that their balance was included in the audit process.
(d) The audit needs to include a proof of ownership for any cryptocurrency wallets included. A satoshi test (spending a small amount) or partially signed transaction both qualify.
(e) Any platform without 100% reserves should be assessed on a regular basis by a government or industry watchdog. This entity should work to prevent any further drop, support any private investor to come in, or facilitate a merger so that 100% backing can be obtained as soon as possible.
(3) Protections for hot wallets and transactions.
(a) A standardized list of approved coins and procedures will be established to constitute valid cold storage wallets. Where a multi-sig process is not natively available, efforts will be undertaken to establish a suitable and stable smart contract standard. This list will be expanded and improved over time. Coins and procedures not on the list are considered hot wallets.
(b) Hot wallets can be backed by additional funds in cold storage or an acceptable third-party insurance provider with a comprehensive coverage policy.
(c) Exchanges are required to cover the full balance of all user funds as denominated in the same currency, or double the balance as denominated in bitcoin or CAD using an established trading rate. If the balance is ever insufficient due to market movements, the firm must rectify this within 24 hours by moving assets to cold storage or increasing insurance coverage.
(d) Any large transactions (above a set threshold) from cold storage to any new wallet addresses (not previously transacted with) must be tested with a smaller transaction first. Deposits of cryptocurrency must be limited to prevent economic 51% attacks. Any issues are to be covered by the exchange.
(e) Exchange platforms must provide suitable authentication for users, including making available approved forms of two-factor authentication. SMS-based authentication is not to be supported. Withdrawals must be blocked for 48 hours in the event of any account password change. Disputes on the negligence of exchanges should be governed by case law.

Steps Forward

Continued review of existing OSC feedback is still underway. More feedback and opinions on the framework and ideas as presented here are extremely valuable. The above is a draft and not finalized.
The process of further developing and bringing a suitable framework to protect Canadians will require the support of exchange operators, legal experts, and many others in the community. The costs of not doing such are tremendous. A large and convoluted framework, one based on flawed ideas or implementation, or one which fails to properly safeguard Canadians is not just extremely expensive and risky for all Canadians, severely limiting to the credibility and reputation of the industry, but an existential risk to many exchanges.
The responsibility falls to all of us to provide our insight and make our opinions heard on this critical matter. Please take the time to give your thoughts.

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How popular is DeFi?
Link, known as the leader of the oracle machine, has increased by 305.19% for the past three months, with an investment return of 17,052%, climbing to the fifth spot in the cryptocurrency ranking list by market value in the short term;
Since its issuance, YFI, which has soared 350 times all the way, has attracted 630 million US dollars of investment in 5 days, and was even dubbed the next Bitcoin in this circle;
From Comp for lending, KNC and BAL, governance tokens for decentralized exchanges, to SNX which is a stable currency payment network, various governance tokens of the DeFi ecosystem have emerged in an endless stream, stirring the blood in the market.
Such a boom is not only reflected in the currency price, but also pushes the brand new DEX based on the AMM (automated market making) model an overnight hit. UniSwap, known as the next-generation casino, has surpassed the world's first-tier centralized exchanges such as Binance, OKex, and Huobi in user activity, daily trading volume, and daily turnover.
With the rapid rise of UniSwap, the DEX threat theory has once again triggered heated discussions among the media and communities in the blockchain industry.
DEX on the Rise
The success of UniSwap is by no means something accidental. As early as 2018 when centralized exchanges suffered the hacker theft one after another, Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, predicted that the future lay in decentralized exchanges and that Ethereum, by developing a "better" decentralized platform, could empower the cryptocurrency community to regain the dominance from the centralized cryptocurrency exchange.
To realize the decentralized concept of returning to users their asset ownership, geeks in the blockchain industry have made many attempts.
Kyber Network, Bancor, Balancer, 0X, Curvefi, etc. are all DEXs based on Ethereum blocks. For a long time, affected by the performance of Ethereum and cross-chain issues, these DEXs were once stagnant.
With the lessons learned from Ethereum DEX, newcomers to the DEX have focused on high performance, high TPS, and rich assets as the ultimate goal for product development.
Amid the DEX threat theory, major exchanges have deployed their own public chain DEX products in a response to their respective development strategies: Binance launched Binance DEX on its Binance Chain, and Bittrex Exchange unveiled Ethfinex on the Ethereum and EOSfinex on the EOS blockchain, two platforms where users can exchange for fiat currencies; last year, CoinEx officially launched CoinEx Chain, a public chain dedicated to decentralized transactions, followed by CoinEx DEX.
Since the birth of the DEX in the blockchain world, this field has never run out of competition.
By independent development or other’s advantage?
From 2017 when it was established to 2019 as it stabilized, DEX has witnessed its annual trading volume skyrocketing from less than US$5 million to over US$2.5 billion. As DeFi gains fame and grows rapidly, DEX has grown into the most popular source of money, attracting a flood of speculators. In the past month, the trading volume of the global cryptocurrency market DEX has exceeded US$ 4 billion, more than twice the figure across 2019.
In the past two years, despite the increasingly in-depth exploration in the DEX, the cross-chain issue remains a stumbling block in its development path. DEX will not outperform CEX in the trading experience until a cross-chain solution is worked out.
The concept of DeFi went viral in 2019. With the continuous improvement of the DeFi ecosystem, the current Ethereum blockchain has developed into a complete decentralized financial system, covering mortgage lending, interest from deposit, leveraged trading, token exchange, identity authentication, and other infrastructure essential to traditional financial systems.
In addition to the mouth-watering profit, the DeFi ecosystem has also brought along explosive growth in both the type and quantity of digital assets, making DEX a market favorite. Compared with the DEX dedicated to public chains, the Ethereum-based DEX has been equipped with more possible functions and thus become more attractive thanks to the comprehensive supplementary infrastructure on Ethereum.
This also presents DEX pioneers with new opportunities. Dubbed “Swap’s summer”, the summer of 2020 has seen a market rush in Swap development after UniSwap became a hit.
Miniswap, Justswap, and btswap are no more innovative than UniSwap according to their product structures and white papers.
By comparison, OneSwap has injected unique essence into its product design and governance model based on UniSwap's automated market making.
Upgraded UniSwap
OneSwap, which has a double mining model + order book, has received an investment of tens of millions from CoinEx even before the product is launched. It is known that OneSwap is jointly developed by a group of technology geeks who have engaged in the cryptocurrency community for many years. The project was initiated by a member of the team in an attempt to upgrade UniSwap after he experienced the convenient AMM enabled by UniSwap.
Without limit orders, users have to trade in the price set by the platform, which, however, compromised their experience. In addition, the lack of liquidity mining and transaction mining rewards cannot reduce the losses of liquidity providers caused by unilateral market conditions.
"DEX still has much room for perfection, and could even surpass CEX in trading experience"
The OneSwap development team always believes that UniSwap still has a long way to go before it becomes the strongest DEX in the DeFi ecosystem. They have endeavored to, relying on their abundant experience in exchange product development and digital currency trading, create the most powerful DEX product in the DeFi ecosystem based on smart contracts.
OneSwap is called the “upgraded UniSwap” in the community. By the combination of the Constant Product Market Maker (CPMM) model in the Uniswap project and the on-chain order book, it reduces restrictions on users’ trading, and, through its OneSwap Wallet, improves user interaction methods and further enhances their experience in trading and product usage.
OneSwap boasts one-click token issuance and listing essential to DEX. Unlike the listing review mechanism on Binance DEX, the setting of OneSwap is more consistent with the concept of decentralization. Anyone can put his or her good projects and ideas, if any, into practice through OneSwap without permission.
In terms of product design, OneSwap will add to its function menu the Candlestick chart, order form, and depth chart according to user habits, apart from limit orders. These functions will offer OneSwap users an experience as smooth, easy-to-use, and convenient as in the CEX.
A new source of money? A two-pronged platform with transaction mining + liquidity mining
To support on-chain governance, OneSwap will issue a ERC20 governance token called ONES. The total number of ONES remains constant at 100 million, 50% of which will be used as community funds to support the construction of the OneSwap ecosystem and 50% will be owned by the OneSwap team. Community funds can be applied for through on-chain governance. 5% of the part held by the team will be unlocked initially, and the rest will be unlocked at a rate of 5% every six months until all is unlocked after four and a half years.
After the OneSwap product was launched, the OneSwap team will take part of the initially unlocked tokens as airdrop rewards for the open beta. Then OneSwap will officially start liquidity mining and transaction mining, and the governance token ONES will also be simultaneously launched on centralized trading platforms across the world. The first round of mining activities will last for one month, and mining rewards are yet to be made public.
Liquidity mining is a popular way of obtaining governance tokens in the DeFi ecosystem. Well-known DeFi projects including COMP, Cure, and Banner have all enabled liquid mining.
Transaction mining could date back to 2018 when Fcoin grew popular.
The transaction mining model initiated by Fcoin in 2018 once set off a bull market that year, pushing many investors into financial freedom in the rush of transaction mining. In addition, transaction mining based on the DeFi ecosystem is still a blue ocean, which is not common in the current market. The success of OneSwap's double mining model, if possible, would surely start a craze in the cryptocurrency market.
The OneSwap team has not yet announced specific mining rules, but disclosed that it has developed the smart contract code. To ensure the product security, OneSwap will invite three well-known security agencies in the blockchain industry to audit the code and announce the auditing results in early September at the soonest.
Conclusion
DeFi did not rise to fame without reason in 2020. Such overnight popularity is an inevitable result of Ethereum's efforts to build a decentralized consensus mechanism and improve infrastructure in the past few years. Ethereum has almost become the only public chain in the DeFi circle and the only construction base for well-known DEX. If OneSwap succeeds, it means a huge breakthrough for both DeFi and Ethereum, and decentralization in its true sense is around the corner.

Author: Gamals Ahmed, CoinEx Business Ambassador

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ABSTRACT

In this research report, we present a study on Kyber Network. Kyber Network is a decentralized, on-chain liquidity protocol designed to make trading tokens simple, efficient, robust and secure.
Kyber design allows any party to contribute to an aggregated pool of liquidity within each blockchain while providing a single endpoint for takers to execute trades using the best rates available. We envision a connected liquidity network that facilitates seamless, decentralized cross-chain token swaps across Kyber based networks on different chains.
Kyber is a fully on-chain liquidity protocol that enables decentralized exchange of cryptocurrencies in any application. Liquidity providers (Reserves) are integrated into one single endpoint for takers and users. When a user requests a trade, the protocol will scan the entire network to find the reserve with the best price and take liquidity from that particular reserve.

1.INTRODUCTION

DeFi applications all need access to good liquidity sources, which is a critical component to provide good services. Currently, decentralized liquidity is comprised of various sources including DEXes (Uniswap, OasisDEX, Bancor), decentralized funds and other financial apps. The more scattered the sources, the harder it becomes for anyone to either find the best rate for their trade or to even find enough liquidity for their need.
Kyber is a blockchain-based liquidity protocol that aggregates liquidity from a wide range of reserves, powering instant and secure token exchange in any decentralized application.
The protocol allows for a wide range of implementation possibilities for liquidity providers, allowing a wide range of entities to contribute liquidity, including end users, decentralized exchanges and other decentralized protocols. On the taker side, end users, cryptocurrency wallets, and smart contracts are able to perform instant and trustless token trades at the best rates available amongst the sources.
The Kyber Network is project based on the Ethereum protocol that seeks to completely decentralize the exchange of crypto currencies and make exchange trustless by keeping everything on the blockchain.
Through the Kyber Network, users should be able to instantly convert or exchange any crypto currency.

1.1 OVERVIEW ABOUT KYBER NETWORK PROTOCOL

The Kyber Network is a decentralized way to exchange ETH and different ERC20 tokens instantly — no waiting and no registration needed.
Using this protocol, developers can build innovative payment flows and applications, including instant token swap services, ERC20 payments, and financial DApps — helping to build a world where any token is usable anywhere.
Kyber’s fully on-chain design allows for full transparency and verifiability in the matching engine, as well as seamless composability with DApps, not all of which are possible with off-chain or hybrid approaches. The integration of a large variety of liquidity providers also makes Kyber uniquely capable of supporting sophisticated schemes and catering to the needs of DeFi DApps and financial institutions. Hence, many developers leverage Kyber’s liquidity pool to build innovative financial applications, and not surprisingly, Kyber is the most used DeFi protocol in the world.
The Kyber Network is quite an established project that is trying to change the way we think of decentralised crypto currency exchange.
The Kyber Network has seen very rapid development. After being announced in May 2017 the testnet for the Kyber Network went live in August 2017. An ICO followed in September 2017, with the company raising 200,000 ETH valued at $60 million in just one day.
The live main net was released in February 2018 to whitelisted participants, and on March 19, 2018, the Kyber Network opened the main net as a public beta. Since then the network has seen increasing growth, with network volumes growing more than 500% in the first half of 2019.
Although there was a modest decrease in August 2019 that can be attributed to the price of ETH dropping by 50%, impacting the overall total volumes being traded and processed globally.
They are developing a decentralised exchange protocol that will allow developers to build payment flows and financial apps. This is indeed quite a competitive market as a number of other such protocols have been launched.
In Brief - Kyber Network is a tool that allows anyone to swap tokens instantly without having to use exchanges. - It allows vendors to accept different types of cryptocurrency while still being paid in their preferred crypto of choice. - It’s built primarily for Ethereum, but any smart-contract based blockchain can incorporate it.
At its core, Kyber is a decentralized way to exchange ETH and different ERC20 tokens instantly–no waiting and no registration needed. To do this Kyber uses a diverse set of liquidity pools, or pools of different crypto assets called “reserves” that any project can tap into or integrate with.
A typical use case would be if a vendor allowed customers to pay in whatever currency they wish, but receive the payment in their preferred token. Another example would be for Dapp users. At present, if you are not a token holder of a certain Dapp you can’t use it. With Kyber, you could use your existing tokens, instantly swap them for the Dapp specific token and away you go.
All this swapping happens directly on the Ethereum blockchain, meaning every transaction is completely transparent.

1.1.1 WHY BUILD THE KYBER NETWORK?

While crypto currencies were built to be decentralized, many of the exchanges for trading crypto currencies have become centralized affairs. This has led to security vulnerabilities, with many exchanges becoming the victims of hacking and theft.
It has also led to increased fees and costs, and the centralized exchanges often come with slow transfer times as well. In some cases, wallets have been locked and users are unable to withdraw their coins.
Decentralized exchanges have popped up recently to address the flaws in the centralized exchanges, but they have their own flaws, most notably a lack of liquidity, and often times high costs to modify trades in their on-chain order books.

Some of the Integrations with Kyber Protocol
The Kyber Network was formed to provide users with a decentralized exchange that keeps everything right on the blockchain, and uses a reserve system rather than an order book to provide high liquidity at all times. This will allow for the exchange and transfer of any cryptocurrency, even cross exchanges, and costs will be kept at a minimum as well.
The Kyber Network has three guiding design philosophies since the start:

To be most useful the network needs to be platform-agnostic, which allows any protocol or application the ability to take advantage of the liquidity provided by the Kyber Network without any impact on innovation.
The network was designed to make real-world commerce and decentralized financial products not only possible but also feasible. It does this by allowing for instant token exchange across a wide range of tokens, and without any settlement risk.
The Kyber Network was created with ease of integration as a priority, which is why everything runs fully on-chain and fully transparent. Kyber is not only developer-friendly, but is also compatible with a wide variety of systems.

1.1.2 WHO INVENTED KYBER?

Kyber’s founders are Loi Luu, Victor Tran, Yaron Velner — CEO, CTO, and advisor to the Kyber Network.

1.1.3 WHAT DISTINGUISHES KYBER?

Kyber’s mission has always been to integrate with other protocols so they’ve focused on being developer-friendly by providing architecture to allow anyone to incorporate the technology onto any smart-contract powered blockchain. As a result, a variety of different dapps, vendors, and wallets use Kyber’s infrastructure including Set Protocol, bZx, InstaDApp, and Coinbase wallet.
Besides, dapps, vendors, and wallets, Kyber also integrates with other exchanges such as Uniswap — sharing liquidity pools between the two protocols.
A typical use case would be if a vendor allowed customers to pay in whatever currency they wish, but receive the payment in their preferred token. Another example would be for Dapp users. At present, if you are not a token holder of a certain Dapp you can’t use it. With Kyber, you could use your existing tokens, instantly swap them for the Dapp specific token and away you go.
Limit orders on Kyber allow users to set a specific price in which they would like to exchange a token instead of accepting whatever price currently exists at the time of trading. However, unlike with other exchanges, users never lose custody of their crypto assets during limit orders on Kyber.
The Kyber protocol works by using pools of crypto funds called “reserves”, which currently support over 70 different ERC20 tokens. Reserves are essentially smart contracts with a pool of funds. Different parties with different prices and levels of funding control all reserves. Instead of using order books to match buyers and sellers to return the best price, the Kyber protocol looks at all the reserves and returns the best price among the different reserves. Reserves make money on the “spread” or differences between the buying and selling prices. The Kyber wants any token holder to easily convert one token to another with a minimum of fuss.

1.2 KYBER PROTOCOL

The protocol smart contracts offer a single interface for the best available token exchange rates to be taken from an aggregated liquidity pool across diverse sources. ● Aggregated liquidity pool. The protocol aggregates various liquidity sources into one liquidity pool, making it easy for takers to find the best rates offered with one function call. ● Diverse sources of liquidity. The protocol allows different types of liquidity sources to be plugged into. Liquidity providers may employ different strategies and different implementations to contribute liquidity to the protocol. ● Permissionless. The protocol is designed to be permissionless where any developer can set up various types of reserves, and any end user can contribute liquidity. Implementations need to take into consideration various security vectors, such as reserve spamming, but can be mitigated through a staking mechanism. We can expect implementations to be permissioned initially until the maintainers are confident about these considerations.
The core feature that the Kyber protocol facilitates is the token swap between taker and liquidity sources. The protocol aims to provide the following properties for token trades: ● Instant Settlement. Takers do not have to wait for their orders to be fulfilled, since trade matching and settlement occurs in a single blockchain transaction. This enables trades to be part of a series of actions happening in a single smart contract function. ● Atomicity. When takers make a trade request, their trade either gets fully executed, or is reverted. This “all or nothing” aspect means that takers are not exposed to the risk of partial trade execution. ● Public rate verification. Anyone can verify the rates that are being offered by reserves and have their trades instantly settled just by querying from the smart contracts. ● Ease of integration. Trustless and atomic token trades can be directly and easily integrated into other smart contracts, thereby enabling multiple trades to be performed in a smart contract function.
How each actor works is specified in Section Network Actors. 1. Takers refer to anyone who can directly call the smart contract functions to trade tokens, such as end-users, DApps, and wallets. 2. Reserves refer to anyone who wishes to provide liquidity. They have to implement the smart contract functions defined in the reserve interface in order to be registered and have their token pairs listed. 3. Registered reserves refer to those that will be cycled through for matching taker requests. 4. Maintainers refer to anyone who has permission to access the functions for the adding/removing of reserves and token pairs, such as a DAO or the team behind the protocol implementation. 5. In all, they comprise of the network, which refers to all the actors involved in any given implementation of the protocol.
The protocol implementation needs to have the following: 1. Functions for takers to check rates and execute the trades 2. Functions for the maintainers to registeremove reserves and token pairs 3. Reserve interface that defines the functions reserves needs to implement
https://preview.redd.it/d2tcxc7wdcg51.png?width=700&format=png&auto=webp&s=b2afde388a77054e6731772b9115ee53f09b6a4a

1.3 KYBER CORE SMART CONTRACTS

Kyber Core smart contracts is an implementation of the protocol that has major protocol functions to allow actors to join and interact with the network. For example, the Kyber Core smart contracts provide functions for the listing and delisting of reserves and trading pairs by having clear interfaces for the reserves to comply to be able to register to the network and adding support for new trading pairs. In addition, the Kyber Core smart contracts also provide a function for takers to query the best rate among all the registered reserves, and perform the trades with the corresponding rate and reserve. A trading pair consists of a quote token and any other token that the reserve wishes to support. The quote token is the token that is either traded from or to for all trades. For example, the Ethereum implementation of the Kyber protocol uses Ether as the quote token.
In order to search for the best rate, all reserves supporting the requested token pair will be iterated through. Hence, the Kyber Core smart contracts need to have this search algorithm implemented.
The key functions implemented in the Kyber Core Smart Contracts are listed in Figure 2 below. We will visit and explain the implementation details and security considerations of each function in the Specification Section.

1.4 HOW KYBER’S ON-CHAIN PROTOCOL WORKS?

Kyber is the liquidity infrastructure for decentralized finance. Kyber aggregates liquidity from diverse sources into a pool, which provides the best rates for takers such as DApps, Wallets, DEXs, and End users.

1.4.1 PROVIDING LIQUIDITY AS A RESERVE

Anyone can operate a Kyber Reserve to market make for profit and make their tokens available for DApps in the ecosystem. Through an open reserve architecture, individuals, token teams and professional market makers can contribute token assets to Kyber’s liquidity pool and earn from the spread in every trade. These tokens become available at the best rates across DApps that tap into the network, making them instantly more liquid and useful.
MAIN RESERVE TYPES Kyber currently has over 45 reserves in its network providing liquidity. There are 3 main types of reserves that allow different liquidity contribution options to suit the unique needs of different providers. 1. Automated Price Reserves (APR) — Allows token teams and users with large token holdings to have an automated yet customized pricing system with low maintenance costs. Synthetix and Melon are examples of teams that run APRs. 2. Fed Price Reserves (FPR) — Operated by professional market makers that require custom and advanced pricing strategies tailored to their specific needs. Kyber alongside reserves such as OneBit, runs FPRs. 3. Bridge Reserves (BR) — These are specialized reserves meant to bring liquidity from other on-chain liquidity providers like Uniswap, Oasis, DutchX, and Bancor into the network.

1.5 KYBER NETWORK ROLES

There Kyber Network functions through coordination between several different roles and functions as explained below: - Users — This entity uses the Kyber Network to send and receive tokens. A user can be an individual, a merchant, and even a smart contract account. - Reserve Entities — This role is used to add liquidity to the platform through the dynamic reserve pool. Some reserve entities are internal to the Kyber Network, but others may be registered third parties. Reserve entities may be public if the public contributes to the reserves they hold, otherwise they are considered private. By allowing third parties as reserve entities the network adds diversity, which prevents monopolization and keeps exchange rates competitive. Allowing third party reserve entities also allows for the listing of less popular coins with lower volumes. - Reserve Contributors — Where reserve entities are classified as public, the reserve contributor is the entity providing reserve funds. Their incentive for doing so is a profit share from the reserve. - The Reserve Manager — Maintains the reserve, calculates exchange rates and enters them into the network. The reserve manager profits from exchange spreads set by them on their reserves. They can also benefit from increasing volume by accessing the entire Kyber Network. - The Kyber Network Operator — Currently the Kyber Network team is filling the role of the network operator, which has a function to adds/remove Reserve Entities as well as controlling the listing of tokens. Eventually, this role will revert to a proper decentralized governance.

1.6 BASIC TOKEN TRADE

A basic token trade is one that has the quote token as either the source or destination token of the trade request. The execution flow of a basic token trade is depicted in the diagram below, where a taker would like to exchange BAT tokens for ETH as an example. The trade happens in a single blockchain transaction. 1. Taker sends 1 ETH to the protocol contract, and would like to receive BAT in return. 2. Protocol contract queries the first reserve for its ETH to BAT exchange rate. 3. Reserve 1 offers an exchange rate of 1 ETH for 800 BAT. 4. Protocol contract queries the second reserve for its ETH to BAT exchange rate. 5. Reserve 2 offers an exchange rate of 1 ETH for 820 BAT. 6. This process goes on for the other reserves. After the iteration, reserve 2 is discovered to have offered the best ETH to BAT exchange rate. 7. Protocol contract sends 1 ETH to reserve 2. 8. The reserve sends 820 BAT to the taker.

1.7 TOKEN-TO-TOKEN TRADE

A token-to-token trade is one where the quote token is neither the source nor the destination token of the trade request. The exchange flow of a token to token trade is depicted in the diagram below, where a taker would like to exchange BAT tokens for DAI as an example. The trade happens in a single blockchain transaction. 1. Taker sends 50 BAT to the protocol contract, and would like to receive DAI in return. 2. Protocol contract sends 50 BAT to the reserve offering the best BAT to ETH rate. 3. Protocol contract receives 1 ETH in return. 4. Protocol contract sends 1 ETH to the reserve offering the best ETH to DAI rate. 5. Protocol contract receives 30 DAI in return. 6. Protocol contract sends 30 DAI to the user.

2.KYBER NETWORK CRYSTAL (KNC) TOKEN

Kyber Network Crystal (KNC) is an ERC-20 utility token and an integral part of Kyber Network.
KNC is the first deflationary staking token where staking rewards and token burns are generated from actual network usage and growth in DeFi.
The Kyber Network Crystal (KNC) is the backbone of the Kyber Network. It works to connect liquidity providers and those who need liquidity and serves three distinct purposes. The first of these is to collect transaction fees, and a portion of every fee collected is burned, which keeps KNC deflationary. Kyber Network Crystals (KNC), are named after the crystals in Star Wars used to power light sabers.
The KNC also ensures the smooth operation of the reserve system in the Kyber liquidity since entities must use third-party tokens to buy the KNC that pays for their operations in the network.
KNC allows token holders to play a critical role in determining the incentive system, building a wide base of stakeholders, and facilitating economic flow in the network. A small fee is charged each time a token exchange happens on the network, and KNC holders get to vote on this fee model and distribution, as well as other important decisions. Over time, as more trades are executed, additional fees will be generated for staking rewards and reserve rebates, while more KNC will be burned. - Participation rewards — KNC holders can stake KNC in the KyberDAO and vote on key parameters. Voters will earn staking rewards (in ETH) - Burning — Some of the network fees will be burned to reduce KNC supply permanently, providing long-term value accrual from decreasing supply. - Reserve incentives — KNC holders determine the portion of network fees that are used as rebates for selected liquidity providers (reserves) based on their volume performance.

Finally, the KNC token is the connection between the Kyber Network and the exchanges, wallets, and dApps that leverage the liquidity network. This is a virtuous system since entities are rewarded with referral fees for directing more users to the Kyber Network, which helps increase adoption for Kyber and for the entities using the Network.
And of course there will soon be a fourth and fifth uses for the KNC, which will be as a staking token used to generate passive income, as well as a governance token used to vote on key parameters of the network.
The Kyber Network Crystal (KNC) was released in a September 2017 ICO at a price around $1. There were 226,000,000 KNC minted for the ICO, with 61% sold to the public. The remaining 39% are controlled 50/50 by the company and the founders/advisors, with a 1 year lockup period and 2 year vesting period.
Currently, just over 180 million coins are in circulation, and the total supply has been reduced to 210.94 million after the company burned 1 millionth KNC token in May 2019 and then its second millionth KNC token just three months later.
That means that while it took 15 months to burn the first million KNC, it took just 10 weeks to burn the second million KNC. That shows how rapidly adoption has been growing recently for Kyber, with July 2019 USD trading volumes on the Kyber Network nearly reaching $60 million. This volume has continued growing, and on march 13, 2020 the network experienced its highest daily trading activity of $33.7 million in a 24-hour period.
Currently KNC is required by Reserve Managers to operate on the network, which ensures a minimum amount of demand for the token. Combined with future plans for burning coins, price is expected to maintain an upward bias, although it has suffered along with the broader market in 2018 and more recently during the summer of 2019.
It was unfortunate in 2020 that a beginning rally was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, although the token has stabilized as of April 2020, and there are hopes the rally could resume in the summer of 2020.

2.1 HOW ARE KNC TOKENS PRODUCED?

The native token of Kyber is called Kyber Network Crystals (KNC). All reserves are required to pay fees in KNC for the right to manage reserves. The KNC collected as fees are either burned and taken out of the total supply or awarded to integrated dapps as an incentive to help them grow.

2.2 HOW DO YOU GET HOLD OF KNC TOKENS?

Kyber Swap can be used to buy ETH directly using a credit card, which can then be used to swap for KNC. Besides Kyber itself, exchanges such as Binance, Huobi, and OKex trade KNC.

2.3 WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH KYBER?

The most direct and basic function of Kyber is for instantly swapping tokens without registering an account, which anyone can do using an Etheruem wallet such as MetaMask. Users can also create their own reserves and contribute funds to a reserve, but that process is still fairly technical one–something Kyber is working on making easier for users in the future.

2.4 THE GOAL OF KYBER THE FUTURE

The goal of Kyber in the coming years is to solidify its position as a one-stop solution for powering liquidity and token swapping on Ethereum. Kyber plans on a major protocol upgrade called Katalyst, which will create new incentives and growth opportunities for all stakeholders in their ecosystem, especially KNC holders. The upgrade will mean more use cases for KNC including to use KNC to vote on governance decisions through a decentralized organization (DAO) called the KyberDAO.
With our upcoming Katalyst protocol upgrade and new KNC model, Kyber will provide even more benefits for stakeholders. For instance, reserves will no longer need to hold a KNC balance for fees, removing a major friction point, and there will be rebates for top performing reserves. KNC holders can also stake their KNC to participate in governance and receive rewards.

2.5 BUYING & STORING KNC

Those interested in buying KNC tokens can do so at a number of exchanges. Perhaps your best bet between the complete list is the likes of Coinbase Pro and Binance. The former is based in the USA whereas the latter is an offshore exchange.
The trading volume is well spread out at these exchanges, which means that the liquidity is not concentrated and dependent on any one exchange. You also have decent liquidity on each of the exchange books. For example, the Binance BTC / KNC books are wide and there is decent turnover. This means easier order execution.
KNC is an ERC20 token and can be stored in any wallet with ERC20 support, such as MyEtherWallet or MetaMask. One interesting alternative is the KyberSwap Android mobile app that was released in August 2019.
It allows for instant swapping of tokens and has support for over 70 different altcoins. It also allows users to set price alerts and limit orders and works as a full-featured Ethereum wallet.

2.6 KYBER KATALYST UPGRADE

Kyber has announced their intention to become the de facto liquidity layer for the Decentralized Finance space, aiming to have Kyber as the single on-chain endpoint used by the majority of liquidity providers and dApp developers. In order to achieve this goal the Kyber Network team is looking to create an open ecosystem that garners trust from the decentralized finance space. They believe this is the path that will lead the majority of projects, developers, and users to choose Kyber for liquidity needs. With that in mind they have recently announced the launch of a protocol upgrade to Kyber which is being called Katalyst.
The Katalyst upgrade will create a stronger ecosystem by creating strong alignments towards a common goal, while also strengthening the incentives for stakeholders to participate in the ecosystem.
The primary beneficiaries of the Katalyst upgrade will be the three major Kyber stakeholders: 1. Reserve managers who provide network liquidity; 2. dApps that connect takers to Kyber; 3. KNC holders.
These stakeholders can expect to see benefits as highlighted below: Reserve Managers will see two new benefits to providing liquidity for the network. The first of these benefits will be incentives for providing reserves. Once Katalyst is implemented part of the fees collected will go to the reserve managers as an incentive for providing liquidity.
This mechanism is similar to rebates in traditional finance, and is expected to drive the creation of additional reserves and market making, which in turn will lead to greater liquidity and platform reach.
Katalyst will also do away with the need for reserve managers to maintain a KNC balance for use as network fees. Instead fees will be automatically collected and used as incentives or burned as appropriate. This should remove a great deal of friction for reserves to connect with Kyber without affecting the competitive exchange rates that takers in the system enjoy. dApp Integrators will now be able to set their own spread, which will give them full control over their own business model. This means the current fee sharing program that shares 30% of the 0.25% fee with dApp developers will go away and developers will determine their own spread. It’s believed this will increase dApp development within Kyber as developers will now be in control of fees.
KNC Holders, often thought of as the core of the Kyber Network, will be able to take advantage of a new staking mechanism that will allow them to receive a portion of network fees by staking their KNC and participating in the KyberDAO.

2.7 COMING KYBERDAO

With the implementation of the Katalyst protocol the KNC holders will be put right at the heart of Kyber. Holders of KNC tokens will now have a critical role to play in determining the future economic flow of the network, including its incentive systems.
The primary way this will be achieved is through KyberDAO, a way in which on-chain and off-chain governance will align to streamline cooperation between the Kyber team, KNC holders, and market participants.
The Kyber Network team has identified 3 key areas of consideration for the KyberDAO: 1. Broad representation, transparent governance and network stability 2. Strong incentives for KNC holders to maintain their stake and be highly involved in governance 3. Maximizing participation with a wide range of options for voting delegation
Interaction between KNC Holders & Kyber
This means KNC holders have been empowered to determine the network fee and how to allocate the fees to ensure maximum network growth. KNC holders will now have three fee allocation options to vote on: - Voting Rewards: Immediate value creation. Holders who stake and participate in the KyberDAO get their share of the fees designated for rewards. - Burning: Long term value accrual. The decreasing supply of KNC will improve the token appreciation over time and benefit those who did not participate. - Reserve Incentives:Value creation via network growth. By rewarding Kyber reserve managers based on their performance, it helps to drive greater volume, value, and network fees.

2.8 TRANSPARENCY AND STABILITY

The design of the KyberDAO is meant to allow for the greatest network stability, as well as maximum transparency and the ability to quickly recover in emergency situations. Initally the Kyber team will remain as maintainers of the KyberDAO. The system is being developed to be as verifiable as possible, while still maintaining maximum transparency regarding the role of the maintainer in the DAO.
Part of this transparency means that all data and processes are stored on-chain if feasible. Voting regarding network fees and allocations will be done on-chain and will be immutable. In situations where on-chain storage or execution is not feasible there will be a set of off-chain governance processes developed to ensure all decisions are followed through on.

2.9 KNC STAKING AND DELEGATION

Staking will be a new addition and both staking and voting will be done in fixed periods of times called “epochs”. These epochs will be measured in Ethereum block times, and each KyberDAO epoch will last roughly 2 weeks.
This is a relatively rapid epoch and it is beneficial in that it gives more rapid DAO conclusion and decision-making, while also conferring faster reward distribution. On the downside it means there needs to be a new voting campaign every two weeks, which requires more frequent participation from KNC stakeholders, as well as more work from the Kyber team.
Delegation will be part of the protocol, allowing stakers to delegate their voting rights to third-party pools or other entities. The pools receiving the delegation rights will be free to determine their own fee structure and voting decisions. Because the pools will share in rewards, and because their voting decisions will be clearly visible on-chain, it is expected that they will continue to work to the benefit of the network.

3. TRADING

After the September 2017 ICO, KNC settled into a trading price that hovered around $1.00 (decreasing in BTC value) until December. The token has followed the trend of most other altcoins — rising in price through December and sharply declining toward the beginning of January 2018.
The KNC price fell throughout all of 2018 with one exception during April. From April 6th to April 28th, the price rose over 200 percent. This run-up coincided with a blog post outlining plans to bring Bitcoin to the Ethereum blockchain. Since then, however, the price has steadily fallen, currently resting on what looks like a $0.15 (~0.000045 BTC) floor.
With the number of partners using the Kyber Network, the price may rise as they begin to fully use the network. The development team has consistently hit the milestones they’ve set out to achieve, so make note of any release announcements on the horizon.

4. COMPETITION

The 0x project is the biggest competitor to Kyber Network. Both teams are attempting to enter the decentralized exchange market. The primary difference between the two is that Kyber performs the entire exchange process on-chain while 0x keeps the order book and matching off-chain.
As a crypto swap exchange, the platform also competes with ShapeShift and Changelly.

5.KYBER MILESTONES

• June 2020: Digifox, an all-in-one finance application by popular crypto trader and Youtuber Nicholas Merten a.k.a DataDash (340K subs), integrated Kyber to enable users to easily swap between cryptocurrencies without having to leave the application. • June 2020: Stake Capital partnered with Kyber to provide convenient KNC staking and delegation services, and also took a KNC position to participate in governance. • June 2020: Outlined the benefits of the Fed Price Reserve (FPR) for professional market makers and advanced developers. • May 2020: Kyber crossed US$1 Billion in total trading volume and 1 Million transactions, performed entirely on-chain on Ethereum. • May 2020: StakeWith.Us partnered Kyber Network as a KyberDAO Pool Master. • May 2020: 2Key, a popular blockchain referral solution using smart links, integrated Kyber’s on-chain liquidity protocol for seamless token swaps • May 2020: Blockchain game League of Kingdoms integrated Kyber to accept Token Payments for Land NFTs. • May 2020: Joined the Zcash Developer Alliance , an invite-only working group to advance Zcash development and interoperability. • May 2020: Joined the Chicago DeFi Alliance to help accelerate on-chain market making for professionals and developers. • March 2020: Set a new record of USD $33.7M in 24H fully on-chain trading volume, and $190M in 30 day on-chain trading volume. • March 2020: Integrated by Rarible, Bullionix, and Unstoppable Domains, with the KyberWidget deployed on IPFS, which allows anyone to swap tokens through Kyber without being blocked. • February 2020: Popular Ethereum blockchain game Axie Infinity integrated Kyber to accept ERC20 payments for NFT game items. • February 2020: Kyber’s protocol was integrated by Gelato Finance, Idle Finance, rTrees, Sablier, and 0x API for their liquidity needs. • January 2020: Kyber Network was found to be the most used protocol in the whole decentralized finance (DeFi) space in 2019, according to a DeFi research report by Binance. • December 2019: Switcheo integrated Kyber’s protocol for enhanced liquidity on their own DEX. • December 2019: DeFi Wallet Eidoo integrated Kyber for seamless in-wallet token swaps. • December 2019: Announced the development of the Katalyst Protocol Upgrade and new KNC token model. • July 2019: Developed the Waterloo Bridge , a Decentralized Practical Cross-chain Bridge between EOS and Ethereum, successfully demonstrating a token swap between Ethereum to EOS. • July 2019: Trust Wallet, the official Binance wallet, integrated Kyber as part of its decentralized token exchange service, allowing even more seamless in-wallet token swaps for thousands of users around the world. • May 2019: HTC, the large consumer electronics company with more than 20 years of innovation, integrated Kyber into its Zion Vault Wallet on EXODUS 1 , the first native web 3.0 blockchain phone, allowing users to easily swap between cryptocurrencies in a decentralized manner without leaving the wallet. • January 2019: Introduced the Automated Price Reserve (APR) , a capital efficient way for token teams and individuals to market make with low slippage. • January 2019: The popular Enjin Wallet, a default blockchain DApp on the Samsung S10 and S20 mobile phones, integrated Kyber to enable in-wallet token swaps. • October 2018: Kyber was a founding member of the WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin) Initiative and DAO. • October 2018: Developed the KyberWidget for ERC20 token swaps on any website, with CoinGecko being the first major project to use it on their popular site.

Trader Series Part 1: Bitcoin Correlations Binance Blog

I bought $1k of the Top Ten Cryptos on January 1st, 2018. Result? Down -79%

Month Twenty-Nine – Down 79%

Question of the month:

The Bitcoin halving took place on May 11th, 2020 at 7:23 PM UTC. Since the first Bitcoin block was generated in 2009, how many halving events have occurred?

Ranking and May Winners and Losers

Overall update – BTC still way ahead, ETH firmly in second place, NEM worst performing.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

Bitcoin dominance:

Overall return on investment since January 1st, 2018:

Comparison to S&P 500:

Implications/Observations:

Conclusion:

And the Answer is…

RESEARCH REPORT ABOUT ARYACOIN

ABSTRACT

1.INTRODUCTION

1.1 OVERVIEW ABOUT ARYACOIN

1.1.1 ARYACOIN HISTORY

1.1.2 ARYACOIN’S MAIN GOAL

1.1.3 PROBLEM ARYACOIN SEEKS TO SOLVE

1.1.4 BENEFITS OF USING ARYACOIN

1.1.5 ARYACOIN FEATURES

1.1.6 WHY CHOOSE ARYACOIN?

1.1.7 ARYANA CENTRALIZED EXCHANGE

1.1.8 HOW DOES ARYACOIN WORK?

2. ARYACOIN TECHNOLOGY

2.1 PROOF-OF-WORK

2.2 NETWORK

2.3 AYAPAY PAYMENT SERVICES GATEWAY:

2.4 CONSENSUS ALGORITHM IN ARYACOIN

2.5 DOUBLE-SPEND PROBLEM AND SOLUTION

3. ARYACOIN ROADMAP

4. THE NUCYBER NETWORK COMMUNITY & SOCIAL

5. SUMMARY

6. REFERENCES

Why i’m bullish on Zilliqa (long read)

The next XVG? Microcap 100x potential actually supported by fundamentals!

How To End The Cryptocurrency Exchange "Wild West" Without Crippling Innovation

Offline Multi-Signature

Regular Transparent Audits

Insurance Requirements

Background and Justifications

Current Draft Proposal

Steps Forward

"Swap" is Poised for Take-off

RESEARCH REPORT ABOUT KYBER NETWORK

ABSTRACT

1.INTRODUCTION

1.1 OVERVIEW ABOUT KYBER NETWORK PROTOCOL

1.1.1 WHY BUILD THE KYBER NETWORK?

1.1.2 WHO INVENTED KYBER?

1.1.3 WHAT DISTINGUISHES KYBER?

1.2 KYBER PROTOCOL

1.3 KYBER CORE SMART CONTRACTS

1.4 HOW KYBER’S ON-CHAIN PROTOCOL WORKS?

1.4.1 PROVIDING LIQUIDITY AS A RESERVE

1.5 KYBER NETWORK ROLES

1.6 BASIC TOKEN TRADE

1.7 TOKEN-TO-TOKEN TRADE

2.KYBER NETWORK CRYSTAL (KNC) TOKEN

2.1 HOW ARE KNC TOKENS PRODUCED?

2.2 HOW DO YOU GET HOLD OF KNC TOKENS?

2.3 WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH KYBER?

2.4 THE GOAL OF KYBER THE FUTURE

2.5 BUYING & STORING KNC

2.6 KYBER KATALYST UPGRADE

2.7 COMING KYBERDAO

2.8 TRANSPARENCY AND STABILITY

2.9 KNC STAKING AND DELEGATION

3. TRADING

4. COMPETITION

5.KYBER MILESTONES

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