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- by Anton Petrov
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Current Blockchain Systems
The problem with current blockchain systems is that in many decentralized systems, nodes are scattered around the world, and their synchronisation entails significant delays.
So, for example, if you create a large block and starts sending it, while waiting for it to reach the rest of the network’s participants, one of them may have time to create a new block. And, due to this problem, forks will occur.
That is one of the reasons why, in the bitcoin community, there are constant debates about whether to increase block size. Waves explained that if one increases the size of a block in the bitcoin network by four times, “only 90% of participants will have time to download it before creating a new one.
If you increase it to 36 MB, then only half of participants will have time.” Specifically, NG enables blockchains to minimize latency and maximize throughput.
According to Gün Sirer the Waves team has shown that they have an “innovative platform that incorporates the best-known technology and is ready for challenges of the next generation of demanding applications.”NG is a protocol change that allows an increase in the number of transactions per block without increasing the number of forks.
The information necessary to start generating the next block is delivered to all nodes quickly after the previous one is generated. And, only then does the miner send the transactions that will fill the block to the network, submitting them in several tranches (i.e. microblocks).
Bitcoin-NGBitcoin-NG is a blockchain protocol, which serializes transactions in much the same way as Bitcoin, but allows for better latency and bandwidth without sacrificing other properties.
The protocol divides time into so-called epochs. In each epoch, a single leader is in charge of serializing state machine transitions. And, to facilitate state propagation, leaders generate blocks.It introduces two types of blocks: (1) Key blocks for leader election, and (2) Microblocks containing the ledger entries.
Each block has a header that contains the unique reference of its predecessor, namely, a cryptographic hash of the predecessor header - among other fields.
Traditional Blockchain Model Versus NG Model In a traditional blockchain model, blocks are discovered at roughly similar intervals and the most recent transactions are processed once a miner has earned the right to submit them to the network.
As such, this places fundamental limits on the capacity of the blockchain. Bitcoin, for example, has a theoretical maximum of roughly 3 tps. By contrast, in the NG model, the next miner is selected in advance. The miner creates a “key block”, which is then immediately filled with microblocks containing transactions, which requires no further proof-of-work.
Whilst maintaining the open structure of the protocol, it enables transactions to be confirmed “as fast as the network will allow.” Waves’ proof-of-stake approach is said to further improve speed, and thereby increasing capacity by a “factor of a hundred or more”, it is claimed.
Alexander Ivanov, CEO and founder of Waves, commenting in relation to the development said: “As a platform of mass adoption, it is critical that we should be able to support a high throughput of transactions, whilst maintaining robust security.
NG lays the foundations for our next phase of growth and a step-change in the size of the ecosystem we can support.” A word of caution though.
We should be minded to take on board recent comments by a TechCrunch commentator that the crypto community has made a nasty habit of over promising and under delivering when it comes to projects that have real value for the world.
And, with the price of Bitcoin hitting ever new heights, some pundits are predicting a big correction in the offing amid all the hype in the landscape of crypto assets - from the fund raising potential of ICOs to particular use cases for Blockchain technology.
Brian Patrick Eha, a Bitcoin journalist and author of How Money Got Free: Bitcoin and the Fight for the Future of Finance based in New York, speaking earlier this week on a panel at the DECENT ‘Unchained’ Blockchain event in Hong Kong I attended, noted:
“I think even the word Blockchain itself is at risk of becoming a mere buzz word, a kind fairy dust that shady entrepreneurs or even outright scammers can sprinkle on projects that will never pay off.
”The public stress test for Waves, which began on November 8 2017, requires the community to help stress test it.
For Q&A sheet on Waves NG see this link and a 16-page whitepaper titled ‘Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol’ can be accessed here.
Follow Roger, who has penned various investment stories over the years, on Twitter@AitkenRL, LinkedIn, Forbes, Google+. He is involved with the Campaign For Fair Finance in the UK.
Forbes publish several stories, articles and reports covering blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Discover them here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogeraitken/2017/11/08/waves-set-to-become-fastest-decentralized-blockc...
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By marcuss on November 6, 2017 5:12 am in AOL
There’s a revolution brewing in how companies – any business entity, doing anything, anywhere in the world – operate.I’m not exaggerating.Let me explain.
The way it is nowFor hundreds of years, the way that companies are structured and operated has changed little.Investors provide capital to a centralised management hierarchy, which is overseen by a board of directors. The goal of these executives is to increase shareholder value by extracting the maximum possible value out of their customers.Just to be clear:
Profit-seeking companies exist to generate as much value from you, the customer, as they can.
Pick any company or service you use or interact with, and think about how it looks to extract value – as much as possible – from you. I’m not just talking about the obvious upsells… the “would you like fries with that?”As a customer, your interests are not aligned with the company providing you goods and services.
There is a clear conflict of interest (regardless of the marketing smokescreen that suggests otherwise). Every company exists to make money. Is customer satisfaction important?
Sure – but even that is a means to profit.Executives are likewise incentivised to extract the maximum personal profit out of the company they work for.
Think about any company you’ve ever worked for. Aside from personal job satisfaction, your compensation was likely the most important consideration. The more value you extract from customers, the higher your compensation.What’s more, the more money the employee can extract from the company, the less that’s available for shareholders.
This leads to the second conflict, which is known as the “agency problem”. Managers are supposed to act as agents for shareholders and maximise shareholder value.
But the managers’ primary interest is maximising his own wealth. Just google “executive pay scandal” to see just how many companies are facing shareholder revolts regarding executives taking home fat salary packages – despite the company underperforming.
But today, we are on the verge of a radical transformation that has the capacity to completely eliminate these two fundamental conflicts of company versus customer, and shareholder versus management.It promises to eradicate the agency problem and overhaul our ideas of corporate governance. And more importantly, it has the ability to completely align customer and business interests in a way that renders traditional businesses uncompetitive to the point of becoming obsolete.But how? In a word, the blockchain.
What’s coming next
The blockchain is going to completely rewrite the rules of corporate finance, transform corporate governance, engender complete transparency and render huge swathes of existing businesses uncompetitive.If you’re not familiar with the blockchain, go here to read our primer on it.
But the short version is, the blockchain is the technology behind cryptos. For the Bitcoin blockchain for example, it’s like a giant Excel spreadsheet that shows the complete transaction history and location of ever bitcoin. Every 10 minutes the spreadsheet gets updated as an additional “block” of new transactions is added to the spreadsheet.
Everyone can have their own copy of the spreadsheet. It’s completely transparent.
As email is one use case for internet, so too is bitcoin a single use case for blockchain. Bitcoin’s success has shown the world it is possible for independent and fragmented entities to enable strangers to exchange value with no need for an intermediary.
And it can be done in a completely transparent, verifiable and open way.Right now, there are two other critical innovations that are built on top of blockchain. These two innovations are what will solve those fundamental conflicts we talked about earlier – the conflict between a business and its customers, and between employees and the companies they work for.
Smart contracts
The term “smart contract” was originally coined back in 1994 by a legal scholar and cryptographer by the name of Nick Szabo. He realised that a decentralised ledger (like blockchain) could be used for digital or self-executing contracts. Instead of Bitcoin blocks containing transactions, these blocks could contain computer code that executed under certain conditions.
Here’s an example: Let’s say Jim is buying an iPhone from Sally, which she advertised online for one bitcoin. Jim doesn’t know Sally. So he only wants to pay for it when he takes delivery because he doesn’t necessarily trust her. Sally, on the other hand, doesn’t want to wait until Jim has the iPhone, in case he doesn’t pay.
That’s where a simple smart contract comes in.A simple smart contract allows for Jim to pay the bitcoin to Sally into an escrow-style account built on a smart contract blockchain. Sally can see the bitcoin has been paid so Jim is a real customer.
The smart contract states that when delivery is complete, the payment will be released to her. And Jim knows that if the UPS parcel never shows up, he can get his bitcoin released back to him.How is this different from traditional escrow?
Firstly, there’s no centralised middle-man (i.e. the escrow company). Secondly, fees are either non-existent or minimal (with real estate transactions, escrow service can cost US$1,000 or more). Thirdly, current escrow systems work well for larger transaction sizes, but not smaller ones.
A smart contract escrow is scalable to support both large and small transactions.This kind of escrow is an extremely simple use case, so let’s expand it further to a business. A music industry artist (or their record label) is entitled to receive royalties every time their content is used for commercial purposes, i.e., sold through Apple’s iTunes or streamed on music-on-demand service Spotify.
When you pay to download music from iTunes, Apple takes a 30 percent cut before paying the remainder to the record label, who pays their artist accordingly. But the Berklee College of Music estimates that anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of royalties never make it to the musicians themselves.
Now imagine if you will, a blockchain-based version of iTunes where artists upload and sell their own copyright-protected music.Your smart contract can define any kind of revenue split you want. If there’s no record label and the band is independent, then the smart contract can apportion an equal third share between the singer, drummer and guitar player.
When a customer buys an album, the money is automatically and immediately sent into the three separate bitcoin wallets specified in the smart contract.
Decentralised Autonomous OrganisationsThe music distribution platform is an example of a Decentralised Autonomous Corporation (DAC).
What is a DAC?
It’s an entity that uses the power of the blockchain, coupled with smart contracts, to operate a completely transparent business enterprise that aligns its stakeholders with its users/customers.DAOs represent an existential threat to existing centralised businesses that collectively make hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars of profit.
Look at some of the largest technology businesses in the world today.
Take Uber, for example. Uber doesn’t own any taxis, doesn’t hire drivers, doesn’t own any taxi licenses. What is Uber? It’s essentially code that connects people who want to go from A to B with drivers who want to earn some money from taking them there.But Uber wants you as a customer to pay the highest possible fare, and it wants to pay as little as possible of that to the driver.
Or what about AirBnb?
The company doesn’t own any real estate or provide any hospitality services. It simply connects people who want to monetise a spare property or room, with someone who needs a roof over their head.And it earns a lot of money doing so. AirBnb charges hosts (people who provide accommodation) anywhere from 3 to 5 percent, and charges guests up to 15 percent.
What if DAOs were launched targeting these two business models?What if, for example, a blockchain Uber issued its own digital currency?What if the blockchain Uber platform was owned by its riders and its drivers as a decentralised, blockchain-based cooperative, transacting in its own digital currency.
It might sound farfetched, but it’s not. Over the next few years these are the kinds of businesses that will emerge. There are already companies out there building decentralised companies.
Steemit for example is a social media platform that exists entirely on blockchain – it rewards people for popular posts with its own cryptocurrency that can be converted into dollars.
So what will companies like Uber and AirBnb do? They will do what any entity does when threatened, they will fight. They will lobby governments to protect them.
In short, a war between traditional businesses and DACs is coming.Good investing,
Tama Churchouse
If you have enjoyed reading and digesting this opinion piece, you can discover and learn even more on ValueWalk here: http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/11/blockchain-war-coming/
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The potential for blockchain technology to disrupt the insurance industry and change the way we share data, process claims and prevent fraud is intriguing, but we’re still in the very early days of its exploration and implementation—on the radar of innovative insurance industry pioneers but not close to widescale adoption.
Now is the time for the insurance industry to actively work with start-ups, regulators and industry experts to figure out the best ways to navigate blockchain’s potential challenges to the realities of the insurance industry. Individual insurance companies should begin testing new ways of utilizing blockchain with internal processes to gain learning to leverage as the technology matures.
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is more than a buzzword. I believe it has wide-reaching implications that will impact the insurance industry, as well as many other businesses and business sectors. It is a distributed, peer-to-peer ledger of records called blocks that is virtually incorruptible.
Every block links to a previous block and has a time and date stamp. It is self-managed and does not require coordination from an intermediary.How can blockchain disrupt the insurance industry?
Experts predict several areas where blockchain could play a disrupting force within the insurance industry. Since blockchain technology is roughly as mature today as the World Wide Web was in 1996, these are primarily hypotheses at this point; however, it’s very clear that blockchain adoption will lead to big changes and will have a significant impact.
Here are the most likely impacts blockchain will have on the insurance industry:Improve trustThere’s a crisis of trust in the financial services industry. Even though the large banks are the focal point, the erosion of trust impacts all businesses.
Lack of trust, high costs and inefficiency of the insurance industry all play a part in the extraordinary high levels of underinsurance. For example, only 17% of California households carry earthquake insurance even though the likelihood of experiencing losses from an earthquake are high.
Blockchain facilitates building trust of consumers because it provides transparency.... continue to page 2 of this Forbes article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/10/31/blockchain-implications-every-insurance-company-...
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Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst Insurance will be one of the first sectors to be full Blockchain or mixed Blockchain and actual use. The time of dialogue and discussion is now.
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The brilliance of Bitcoin is also its curse. The cryptocurrency system devised by Satoshi Nakamoto intricately interweaves so many artful innovations that it has muddied the very active discussion of how blockchain technologies can be applied to other areas.
Far too often I hear people arguing that any use of blockchain technology must, like Bitcoin, be decentralized, anonymous, peer-to-peer, untethered to central bank currencies, unfettered by government regulation, and designed to undercut the business, technological, and political establishments.
That limited mindset is prevalent even amid this year’s frenzy to apply blockchains and cryptocurrencies, along with newer developments like smart contracts and tokens, to nearly every computing and business problem imaginable.
I certainly see the revolutionary potential of these technologies to empower individuals and small businesses in new ways. But it is a mistake to see blockchain as an all or nothing proposition. The legacy of Bitcoin, rather, is a range of options that can transform many applications, both centralized and decentralized, by many organizations, both insurgent and incumbent.
Here is a menu of some of the most significant choices available to anyone exploring cryptocurrency technology:
Centralized vs. decentralized.
Bitcoin introduced the blockchain as a brilliant way to maintain a reliable database spread across many computers with no central authority. Ethereum extended this idea to enable cloud computing applications to be deployed in a similarly decentralized way.
These are exciting ideas, but don’t fall in love with the ingenuity. Traditional cloud computing servers are very efficient and effective at many tasks. Meanwhile, many of the current crop of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have had trouble keeping up with high transaction volumes.
Smart companies will blend decentralized and centralized processing depending on the application. Consider, for example, the application pioneered by Bitcoin — digital cash. Blockchain allows peer-to-peer transactions anywhere without an intermediary. But digital coins can be stolen or lost.
You could imagine a hybrid payment system that uses a blockchain ledger to validate small transactions (essentially digital cash in your wallet that you might lose) but verifies large amounts with a central database (like money in the bank).
Anonymous vs. identified.
The fact that transactions are anonymous and untraceable is one of the most powerful and polarizing facets of Bitcoin. It is an understatement to say that opinions vary about the legitimate role of government in supervising the exchange of money.
Many other applications could benefit from blockchain technology while also identifying participants and recording transactions.Consider an airline that creates a cryptocurrency version of frequent flier miles. The advantage of using a blockchain system would be added flexibility in earning and spending miles and the ability to exchange them freely with other people.
Still, airlines would not want to give up the information that loyalty programs give them about their customers, so they might design a token that “phones home” to report on how it is used. Customers, presumably, would be notified about this invasion of their privacy and compensated through customized offers and other incentives.
To be sure, another airline might create a fully anonymous crypto rewards program. The technology allows both ways, and the marketplace will decide.
Fixed vs. floating value.
A lot of the new applications being built with Ethereum involve a specialized coin or token, whose value is meant to fluctuate with demand for the underlying service for which the coin can be exchanged. This approach has some appeal, especially for companies that want to raise money by selling coins to speculators that believe their services will eventually be highly sought after.
Other companies, however, may want more direct control over their prices, choosing whether to sell at a premium or discount relative to their competitors and offering more predictable expenses to their customers.
Many powerful applications for blockchain and cryptocurrency technology work very well if the underlying payments are set in a national fiat currency.
There are also hybrid approaches that allow some fluctuations within limited bands.
Freely exchangeable vs. restricted.
Cryptocurrency technology has the potential to make all the closed systems we use to store value — from loyalty reward points to prepaid coffee cards — more useful by making them interchangeable and exchangeable into whatever currency we like to hold.
But even in applications that intend to have freely exchangeable currencies, there is also a place for some coins to carry restrictions.A music application, for example, may be looking for a way to jump-start a token. Ultimately, users will earn some coins for writing reviews; they will buy coins for cash; and they will spend coins to reward artists they like and buy music.
At first, however, the developer may give a sum of restricted tokens to all its users that can be used to buy music but not converted into cash.What’s important here is to understand that the revolution Bitcoin has spawned is far bigger than a single product — digital cash. It is bigger even than a single ideology of how to do business — anonymous, decentralized computing.
The transformative idea is that companies are not simply selling products to customers, they are sponsoring rich economies in which participants contribute and consume in multiple ways.
Just as government-sponsored economies vary in their approaches to monetary policy, regulation, and central control, the new private token-based economies will also have a range of rules and features, drawing from, but not limited to, the brilliant inventions of Satoshi Nakamoto.
Jason Goldberg is founder and CEO of Simple Token. He previously founded consumer Internet companies Pepo, Hem.com, Fab.com, Social Median, and Jobster and led strategy and product teams for T-Mobile and AOL. Before his career in business, his first startup was Bill Clinton’s campaign for President of the U.S.A. in 1992, which carried Jason to a six-year stint in the White House. He currently splits his time between Berlin, Germany; Pune, India; and Hong Kong.
Venturebeat publishes several articles covering all kinds of technologies including blockchain. Discover them here: https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/31/take-off-your-bitcoin-blinders-theres-no-right-way-to-use-blockch...
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Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst Good article for the debate. The use an accommodation of blockchain technology and tokenism in the actual ecosystem or the total disruption and creation of a totally new ecosystem based only on block chain? Members should read this. What do you think?
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Recommended: Disrupting the Disruptors: Why Experts think the Blockchain will ro... (huffingtonpost.com)There are already over 1174 listed cryptocurrencies on CoinMarketCap as of October 2017 and that number grows every week (1).
And while the vast potential of blockchain technology is known in the ‘crypto’ world, many people do not necessarily appreciate the potential that this technology has to completely disrupt longstanding companies and institutions throughout the world.
This becomes doubly true when talking about sharing economy services like Uber and Airbnb — the distributed ledger that is the blockchain is well-suited to take over the types of transactions that happen within these services.I fully expect blockchain technology to create a better, less-costly, more transparent, decentralized versions of these sharing economy services in the coming years.
There are several new kids on the block(chain) already poised to do just this. One pertinent example is The Bee Token, which aims to innovate the short-term housing rental space and put more power in the hands of the renters and guests by utilizing the blockchain.
I’ll let the experts explain more on how companies like these are poised to shake things up.Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.Expert Panel:- Greg Wolfond - CEO of SecureKey
- Ali Nazem - VP of Business Dvelopment at ShoCard
- Tiana Laurence - former Co-founder and CMO of Fatcom
Greg Wolfond:
Greg Wolfond, CEO of SecureKey - Greg is the founder of SecureKey and brings more than 30 years of experience in fintech, security and mobile solutions to his role as CEO. Greg is a serial entrepreneurial whose earlier ventures include Footprint Software Inc., a financial software company he sold to IBM, and 724 Solutions Inc., a wireless infrastructure software provider he took public. He sits on several boards and has been recognized as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40, Entrepreneur of the Year and one of the 100 Top Leaders in Identity.
Q: What challenges are there in adapting blockchain tech to the sharing economy? What are the inherent weaknesses?
A: I think it’s going to be relatively straightforward.We want privacy. We don’t want something tracking where we want to go. Blockchain provides a modicum of privacy – every time my data is shared I should consent to share for each party for a specific purpose. The network in the middle shouldn’t be tracking me in the middle to follow me where I’m going.
Q: Why is blockchain tech advantageous for sharing economy services (Airbnb, Uber, etc.)?
A: When you’re a landlord renting on Airbnb – you don’t care if it’s John or Fred or Steve who rents it. You care that it’s a real person, that they can pay rent, and that they won’t destroy your place and leave it in shambles. If users can do that in trusted and frictionless manner, then those new economy services are going to love it.
Those services don’t want to collect more data than they need to. On the other end, users don’t want to send a full credit report to someone they’re staying with for a week.
Q: How might an Airbnb-like platform based in the blockchain be able to capture some of the market?
A: I think right now, verifying identity online is broken, and I think in this blockchain world it’s going to get fixed.Ali Nazem
Ali Nazem, VP of Business Development at ShoCard, a blockchain-based identity management solution. Ali Nazem manages Business Development and partnership efforts for ShoCard. Nazem is an advertising industry veteran in both traditional and digital media, with experience working with a variety of consumer and technology businesses.
Q: What challenges are there in adapting blockchain tech to the sharing economy? What are the inherent weaknesses?
A: Shared economy companies are inherently open and willing to take advantage of blockchain technologies, because by nature they are usually disruptive entities in their own right with a given marketplace or ecosystem. They are fairly new and don’t have the burden of adapting or complete replacement of legacy systems.
Inherent weaknesses in general for sharing economies and others include: control, security and privacy. While solutions exist, there are still cybersecurity concerns that need to be addressed before the general public will entrust their personal data to a blockchain solution.
In addition, there may be cultural adoption issues.From a cost perspective, blockchain offers tremendous savings in transaction costs and time, but the high initial capital costs could be a deterrent regardless if you are traditional or shared economy business.
Q: Why is blockchain tech advantageous for sharing economy services (Airbnb, Uber, etc)?
A: We remove the dependency on having a central authority. The problem of giving management of security of user authentication to any trusted party is the potential of breaches, as we’ve seen in numerous examples with larger retailers and credit cards, as well as service providers with and login credentials/information.
Using a distributed ledger and no trusted authority, this problem can be solved, especially in a large or vast economic system in which assets or services are shared between private individuals over the internet.
Q: What is the most exciting part of adapting blockchain technology for use in the sharing economy?
A: There are many exciting aspects of blockchain technology that can be particularly effective and exciting for sharing economy companies, providing the ability for various parties to make an exchange data without the oversight or intermediation of a third party.
From a privacy perspective, users are put in control of all their information and transactions, which remains on their mobile device. From a security standpoint, there’s no central database that can be hacked or breached exposing millions of records, like the recent Equifax debacle.Tiana Laurence
Tiana Laurence is the former Co-founder & CMO of Factom, a blockchain-as-a-service company based in Austin, Texas. Under her leadership, the company recently secured a grant from The Gates Foundation and a partnership with the Department of Homeland Security to work on blockchain projects using Factom’s technology. Tiana has a column on TechTarget where she writes about blockchain and IoT. She is also the author of the recently released Blockchain For Dummies book, a #1 Bestseller on Amazon.
Q: Why is blockchain tech advantageous for sharing economy services (Airbnb, Uber, etc)?
A: Blockchain technology is at the front of everyone’s minds because it allows for the disintermediation of intermediaries. The current issue is building the gateways that make Blockchain technology easy and useful for the average person.
Intermediaries such as Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber play really important roles in our lives because they are the trust-layers and connection-layers between two parties that don’t know each other and would like to interact. They handle the tricky stuff, like personal information, payment, and technology improvement.
Some blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, have Turing complete programming languages within them. That means that anything that can be programmed can be created within a blockchain. It is then possible to rewrite Twitter or another website for that matter, but the key questions to ask are who will build, maintain, and improve the platforms especially if no value can be harvested for their creation.
Q: How might an Airbnb-like platform based in the blockchain be able to capture some of the market?
A: It is reasonable that new businesses will pop up, built on blockchains, that will gain market share because they are improving on service and found a way to retain some of the value that they created.
Consolidated industries are most vulnerable to them because they have lost natural competition that kept them lean and customer focused.
What are your thoughts? How do you think current industries will cope with these new emerging technologies?References:- Cryptocurrency Market Capitalizations | CoinMarketCap. (n.d.). Retrieved October 16, 2017, from https://coinmarketcap.com/
If you have enjoyed reading this article and want to learn even more about how the blockchain disrupts our world, click here to explore more: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/disrupting-the-disruptors-why-experts-think-the-blockchain_us_5...
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Building a token sale is at once quite simple — you build a token and sell it — and quite complex. A number of issues crop up immediately, including, but not limited to, the need for an expensive team of lawyers, marketers, social media experts and, until now, an expensive crew to build your smart contract.
CoinLaunch, a project by repeat entrepreneur Reuven Cohen, aims to reduce the complexity of at least one part of the process. His service, CoinCreator, allows non-programmers to build simple smart contracts in a few minutes.
“Early this year we began looking for an end-to-end platform that facilitated everything we needed to build, deploy and monetize compliant Initial Coin Offerings in one place,” said Cohen. “As we searched we quickly realized that nothing like this exists.”
“Today if you want to create an ICO the only real option is to hire a team of blockchain developers, lawyers and accountants, and marketing gurus or build all the smart contract components yourself.
This process is time-consuming, complicated and expensive and also assumes you can even find the right people to help you, which is in itself difficult.
”The creator asks for a few basic bits if data, including the name of your coin and the total issued. Then you create a simple contract that controls the flow and usage of these tokens.
Cohen claims the product is compliant with current regulations as long as you connect the token to some sort of utility and avoid selling equity.
The project is self-funded and Cohen and his partner Randy Clemens are planning their own token sale in 2018.“CoinLaunch provides a free and easy to use Coin Creator that enables anyone with little to no experience in cryptocurrencies the ability to create their own Ethereum-based ICO (ERC20 tokens),” said Cohen.
“Combined with an ICO campaign creator that allows users to create an entire ICO campaign as well as accept Ethereum-based funding from backers.”
“The platform includes an integrated compliance system that allows for any vetted ICOs to comply with various local regulations, including KYC and AML.
We are also working on integrating SEC-based crowdfunding compliance, specifically Job Act Title III and Regulation A.”Ultimately tools that reduce the complexity of token sales will take over from the jerry-built systems currently in place.
Token-sales-in-a-box services exist, but they are aimed at raising massive consulting fees and basic, programmatic and regulated services just don’t exist yet. This is an interesting first step, and, according to Cohen, it’s quite popular.
The project launched yesterday and so far users have generated the equivalent of about $1 billion using the service.
Read more like this on Techcrunch here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/build-your-own-token-sale-with-coinlaunchs-coincreator/
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Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst New opportunities, new services, are born to deal with the challenges of the new blockchain and cryptocurrency economy.
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