Monthly Archives: May 2017

Introducing Altcoins

Bancor Allows Anyone to Create and Trade their Own Cryptocurrency

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Bancor Crypto

Bancor is new interesting crypto protocol that aims to make it really easy for small communities and individuals to issue their own tokens, while retaining price discovery without being listed on exchanges. Intrigued? Read on.

Market Without an Exchange

The biggest feature that the Bancor protocol provides is the ability for a token to have a market but without having to be listed on an exchange. Anyone who’s been in the crypto community long enough knows how hard it can be to list smaller tokens on exchanges. This is not surprising – exchanges make their money on volumes, and if the trading volume is low, they don’t want to go through the overhead of maintaining that token.

However, the proliferation of the token economy means that many different use-cases arise, not all of them having a high trading volume. Smaller communities and individuals could theoretically issue their own tokens for local causes, but they would never garner the types of volumes established global currencies do. If exchanges don’t list them, there is no market and thus no price discovery mechanism.

This is where Bancor comes in. For the first time (that we’re aware of), Bancor provides a way to create a market for a token but without the use of centralized exchanges. It works through a smart contract on Ethereum. The full details are beyond the scope of this introductory post, so read the whitepaper.

But in a nutshell, when a token raises money, it keeps some of it in a reserve, and issues tokens. These tokens trade in the market based on their utility. The smart contract is written so it can create a supply of new tokens whenever needed, by sending ETH (or another ERC20 token) to the contract. This causes the price of the token to increase. By a similar mechanism, whenever someone converts their tokens into ETH (or another ERC20 token), the price of the token decreases.

Note that this whole mechanism is a ‘conversion’ and not an ‘exchange’. One fear is that the prices may be manipulated by whales if they hold supply via the smart contract and also via external exchanges. This also means that during distress, those who are able to exit their positions first are at a significant advantage over those who are not, since the price continues to spiral downward with selling.

A Basket of Tokens

With a full reserve, the Bancor protocol also allows for the creation and redemption of ‘ETF-like’ baskets but of tokens instead of stocks. The price arbitrageurs will make a profit by ensuring the prices stay in sync. This can provide a fairly stable mechanism for a basket of tokens created using Bancor.

Bancor will have an ICO soon. Check out their website to learn more about the project and keep up to date with their progress.

Photo Credit: pedrosimoes7

Introducing Altcoins

Fund Yourself Now (FYN) Targets the Crowdfunding Industry

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Fund Yourself Now FYN

Every once in a while we here at Crypto Sailor come across a crypto project that tackles a real problem in a real industry. Fund Yourself Now (FYN) is one such project. Fund Yourself Now is an Ethereum-based crypto project that takes aims at the rapidly growing crowdfunding industry. The industry scope is high – it is a large and growing industry. If FYN can get even a small chunk of the industry, it will be quite valuable.

So what does FYN offer? It is a smart-contract platform built specifically for crowdfunding on the Ethereum blockchain. By being built on the Ethereum blockchain, it removes the element of trust usually required for centralized crowdfunding applications in general.

By removing this centralized trust, Fund Yourself Now is able to create a better accountability and incentive structure for a crowdfunding campaign. This benefits both the projects looking for backers and the backers themselves, since both sides have an incentive to be honest. Ethereum of course offers the team the ability to create a better form of crowdfunding via the use of smart contracts.

A big problem that Fund Yourself Now solves is to keep the team accountable to the backers who are financially invested in the project. The team does this by a smart contract enabled milestone-triggered payment solution. This way the team cannot just abandon the project and take all the money. Instead, the team gets the money only subject to meeting minimum requirements as outlined in their milestones before the backers put any money into the project. In addition, the project backers will have more say in how the funds are distributed via a voting mechanism. This provides some power to the people who are backing projects financially, and doesn’t leave everything at the mercy of the team, that can find it easy to abuse the trust shown by the backers.

Another very interesting aspect of Fund Yourself Now is the creation of a coin marketplace. This marketplace will act as a medium of exchange between the various project-specific tokens and rewards. Since everything is in the form of blockchain tokens, such an exchange will benefit all the projects that are launched on Fund Yourself Now. It also provides much needed liquidity to the backers of the project, who can trade them in the secondary market depending on how the project is making progress. This will allow the backers to ‘exit’ a project that isn’t going according to their vision or what they originally signed up for.

Finally, there is a social reputation system built into Fund Yourself Now platform, which should help with bringing in more transparency. Although this usually isn’t a huge problem in the traditional crowdfunding arena, it is a big step in the right direction for the crypto-backed projects that tend to remain anonymous even while raising a lot of money. With social reputation, there is less incentive for projects to disappear overnight.

Fund Yourself Now is an ambitious attempt at using Ethereum’s smart contracting platform to build a better experience for all parties involved in the crowdfunding process.

Check out the project here.

Photo Credit: Nick Miller

Introducing Altcoins

Starbase Creates Incentivized Project Management on Blockchain

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Starbase

Starbase is a really interesting new crypto-project that aims to help other companies and projects in the space attract the right talent and incentivize the people properly to ensure everyone works towards success. In the sea of new ICOs being launched as crypto markets reach record-breaking highs, it is easy to be distracted by all the noise. Starbase however is different in that it is not a quick way to make money for the founders but instead is a great way to help the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem move forward.

A Three-Pronged Approach

Starbase is building a three-pronged approach towards new projects in the crypto community. In our view, this is a great use of resources, and something that will be appreciated by the whole community if it works as advertised.

  • Projects: Projects can list on Starbase in order to attract both money and talent. Any crypto project will need both to succeed. By creating a single place that brings all the stakeholders together, Starbase is building a model where new crypto projects are incentivized to move to the platform instead of start from scratch.
  • Investors: For investors, Starbase provides a quick and easy way to find new investment avenues, especially in the nascent crypto-token economy that is just taking off all over the world. In addition, since the Starbase team will do a first-pass due diligence, and the platform will likely not list balatant scams, investor risk is reduced.
  • Workers: There are many talented people in the crypto-economy who were early adopters and believe in the vision of crypto changing the world for good. However, it is very hard for these talented workers to find the right project fit and also be able to gain in the upside of a project they contribute. Starbase solves this problem by making sure that these workers get paid in the project tokens. This way, the workers are incentivized to give their best because if the project succeeds, they make more money. It is a win-win for the projects and workers.

Starbase is building the next-generation blockchain-based crowdfunding platfrom to help grow the entire crypto-economy and move it forward. Of course, the use of Starbase isn’t limited to crypto-projects. However, we expect that the earliest projects to be built on the Starbase platform will come from within the crypto-economy.

Any project needs money to succeed. Therefore, investors are a key piece of the puzzle. In addition, many of my readers are interested in investing in crypto and ICO, so let’s address the key advantages to investors.

Starbase will implement a voting system to weed out obvious scams and really bad projects. This will not be fail-proof of course, but it should reduce the total risk of complete scams or failed projects that investors usually take in other ways. If you see a completely random crypto project in Bitcointalk, the likelihood of it being a scam would be higher than if you spotted the same on Starbase.

Also, the tokens being created by the Starbase platform are liquid like any Ethereum-based ERC20 token. This has become the de-facto standard Ethereum token today. Therefore, plenty of exchanges and platforms will be able to support the tokens.

So Starbase aims to build a whole new crypto-ecosystem that could benefit the entire community. If you want to discuss more, head over to the Bitcointalk thread.

Starbase Email: captain@cryptosailor.com

Photo Credit:  lukas schlagenhauf

Introducing Altcoins

Populous Builds Trade Invoicing Platform on Ethereum

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Populous Trade Invoicing
Populous is a new crypto project that aims to build a decentralized trade invoicing platform on Ethereum. The project aims to undergo its ICO in July 2017.

Trade invoicing? Yes – one of the most profitable and underestimated markets in the financial industry. What is it you ask? Well simple – it’s the buying and selling of trade invoices of businesses. The reason it is a huge deal is because it provides liquidity especially to smaller businesses. The idea is to find lenders that will lend to the business not as secured debt against its assets, but rather as debt secured by the invoice.

A Trade Invoicing Example

As an example, think of Mom-n-Pop store in New Orleans. Mom-n-Pop store sells children’s toys to Target. However, Target being the giant corporation, it will not pay Mom-n-Pop before the product is delivered. Indeed, there is a whole accounts payable cycle, which can be as long as 120 days for the business. During the time, Mom-n-Pop will need to foot its own bills to grow business.

Now say Mom-n-Pop got a new offer to sell to Walmart. Great! However, Walmart requires the toys to be created and sent to them well in time for Christmas. However, the previous large invoice from Target is pending, so now Mom-n-Pop has no money to create toys for Walmart. How will to get the liquidity – cash in hand – to create these toys, sell to Walmart, and ensure the children in Connecticut are spoiled rotten a little more for holidays?

Enter trade invoicing. Mom-n-Pop goes to an investor that is looking for some high rates of return. Considering how much your bank pays you, there are lots of them these days. The investor has money to lend to Mom-n-Pop but needs a guarantee that his money will be paid. This happens through invoice financing. The loan from the investor is secured against the invoice. As long as Target pays Mom-n-Pop, the investor will get paid. If Target doesn’t pay, say because it is goes bankrupt before it can pay its suppliers, then the investor loses money. Since there is always a risk, the investor will demand a decent rate of return. Mom-n-Pop can now use the cash from the investor to make toys to sell to Walmart. When Target pays out, the money goes to the investor, and any interest is paid through existing profits or from the Walmart expansion. Everyone’s happy.

Enter Populous

So how does Populous work? Glad you asked. Go read the whitepaper. Seriously, never invest in an ICO without reading the whitepaper.

Populous creates a peer-to-peer lending platform that is able to work on the blockchain through ‘stablecoins’ called Pokens. Pokens represent real-world currencies, since that’s the currency most businesses operate in. It provides quantitative information like the Altman Z-score that provides information on probability of bankruptcy, so you know what you’re investing in.

As you’d expect, the system works with a borrower and an investor, but there’s also an administrator. The platform administrator approves and manages clients’ accounts and actions. This is needed to liaise the blockchain with the external world.

Populous is built on Ethereum, and its ICO token is PPT.

Check out the ICO on the homepage. Also check out the Bitcointalk announcement thread.

Photo Credit: Chiaochi

ICO Update

EncryptoTel on Track to Sell Out ICO Before its End Date

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EncryptoTel ICO close to finish

EncryptoTel, a crypto-project that we previously introduced to our readers, is on track to finish its ICO well before its deadline of 31st May, as it nears the maximum amount for the ICO. EncryptoTel has capped their ICO at a value of $3 million, or 31st May, whichever is hit first. As of this writing, the EncryptoTel ICO has already raised $2.4 million of the $3 million maximum. The EncryptoTel ICO started on 24th of April 2017. For enthusiasts, the EncryptoTel ICO is still live at their official ICO site.

EncryptoTel is working on the private telecommunications niche, with a coverage of over 100 countries on the roadmap. In addition, it is offering developer APIs so other products or resellers can use the service while using the EncryptoTel technology in the background.

EncryptoTel is opening up an entirely new niche of crypto products by combining its token not just with another blockchain token, but with the real world. The team, smartly, is focusing on a real problem faced by many in the crypto community and the outside world. However, the people in the crypto community tend to be more privacy conscious, and therefore will be more willing customers.

The reception of the EncryptoTel will tell us a lot about the future adoption of blockchain and the service/product world. EncryptoTel is using the blockchain to create a privacy-focused communications network that can be used by blockchain enthusiasts and others. If it has a successful ICO and subsequent trading, EncryptoTel can pave the path for other companies that are working on products or services while integrating blockchains, without that being the primary product or service.

Therefore the industry participants are closely watching the progress of EncryptoTel ICO. Going by the current statistics, it seems like the ICO would be a success. However, for the token to be considered profitable, it will need to trade at a premium to its ICO price, and attract more investors from the early adopters.

Check out the ICO here, and the Bitcoin thread here.

Photo Credit: Flickr

Introducing Altcoins

BOScoin Aims to Solve Blockchain Governance

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BOScoin is a new crypto project that is taking aim at the problem of governance and smart contracts on blockchains. It is self-described as “Self-Evolving Cryptocurrency Platform for Trust Contracts”. Trust Contracts are quite similar to smart contracts that my readers are very well aware of (e.g. Ethereum smart contracts). These are executable contracts on the blockchain, with rules guaranteed and enforced by the decentralized network. BOScoin uses Owlchain, which consists of the Web Ontology Language and the Timed Automata Language.

However, BOScoin goes beyond, and has a “Congress Network”. This is an important part of the blockchain governance model that BOScoin creates. It helps the system become more robust against attacks like The DAO attack on Ethereum. In addition, BOScoin is able to scale to a much larger number of transactions per second than Bitcoin or Ethereum.

This model of governance is a radically different one than the first generation blockchain governance frameworks developed by the likes of Ethereum and Lisk. In fact, other projects offering similar governance structures like Tezos are really popular with investors, including the billionaire Tim Draper who was an early Bitcoin supporter but is moving towards ICO investing through his venture capital fund.

Ideas like BOScoin hold the potential to leave blockchain contracts with the human-understandable wiggle room – after all, very few things in the real world of human perception and morality are so clearly black-and-white like computer code. This might even help BOScoin scale beyond online contracts into legitimate legal contracts, or at least peer-to-peer contracts that would make it safer for people to enter into than say an Ethereum smart contract.

BOScoin is undergoing an ICO. You can discuss more about BOScoin and the team behind this project on their public slack.  As with all crypto projects covered here, we strongly recommend that investors first read the whitepaper before putting any money down, and only invest if they understand the idea and like it for the long-term, not just short-term speculation that can easily burn you.

BOScoins will be distributed in the ICO, and the distribution is shown in the image:

Non-fully-automated blockchain contracts are emerging, and several projects are working on solving this problem from different angles. Crypto investors should research this new emerging trend, and position themselves to take advantage of these coins at an early stage, for the next 6-12 months.