Dear NANO community,
This is going to be a long post where I will discuss why NANO under performed and will keep under performing in this bull run unless some things change.
I'm going to start up with straight facts with the famous quote of Floyd Mayweather: "Men lie, women lie, numbers don't lie".
If you feel offended by some of this, facts don't care about your feelings.
Technical Analysis
In the time where BTC Dominance fell from peak of 74% to 56% and keeps falling, NANO has moved from its low of 0.0000640 sats to a price of 0.0000950 sats. That is about 50% gain if you bought on the absolute low, but looking at the monthly chart, we can see that NANO has basically been in the range of 0.0001400 sats to 0.0000750 sats ever since July of 2019 (for more than 2 years).
https://charts.cointrader.pro/snapshot/zaXzV
The all time high of NANO was 0.0028, so this price is currently 96% down in terms of BTC .
https://charts.cointrader.pro/snapshot/tTF4J
With this price NANO is falling out of top 100 cryptocurrency based on market cap.
​
My thoughts: Considering that entire altcoin market is moving and that it keeps reaching new highs, this is very concerning for NANO and one can only ask themselves why does NANO keep falling behind?
Why does on every Bitcoin pump price falls hardest and on every day when other altcoins go up 30%, NANO only goes up 10%.
Reasons why NANO is lagging on the market:

• Reason 1. - Lack of adoption where NANO can be utilized to its fullest

We all know that NANO has near instantaneous transactions and is fee-less which is why most of us fell in love with this cryptocurrency.
Problem is that it has little to no adoption. What does it matter if NANO is feeless, when you don't have an exchange that will make a NANO/USD conversion for 0%.
Who cares if STR, XRP and other fast coins have like 0.01$ fee if either way, exchange will take 1% or more fees from you.?
If XRP has better exchange, they can easily be more cost efficient than NANO because of this problem. Devs need to be much more proactive rather than sit and wait while entire market is eating you alive.
Proposed solution: Nano needs to invest more in marketing and in making a deal with exchange that will be liquid enough and provide little to no fees on NANO.
​

• Reason 2. - There is no reward for NANO holders

I am a NANO holder ever since 2018 and it's been a long ride with constant buying at the end of each month with average buy of 2$ when I look at it totally.
This is not that bad considering NANO's massive fall and what some other holders had to go through.
Let's remind ourselves again, NANO has 0% inflation. And yet NANO's price doesn't grow. Where as other cryptocurrencies have 5-10% inflation and they are over-performing NANO massively.
NANO holders get no rewards from holding NANO which is a big problem. People call this an advantage and I somewhat agree, but NANO holders need to be rewarded with something, because crypto space doesn't care about inflation.
Proposed solution: Introduce POS (Proof of Stake) with inflation of 5% where NANO holders will be able to stake their NANO and receive 5% more NANO each year. You can do this or make it 6% and after each 2 years, there is halving of inflation. Imagine how coins get hyped when their rewards per year get cut in half. NANO has 0% inflation and it doesn't get any hype. It's already scarce, but people fail to see it.
​

• Reason 3. - NANO is refusing to adapt with the current market

Current bull run has been ignited with DEFI and because people see that they can earn up to 3-5% daily income just for holding ERC20 token like BAT, BAL, LINK etc. There's even been introudect WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin) and WETH (Wrapped Ethereum), which means that people can hold their cryptocurrency which they would hold even if there weren't any rewards and they get 3-5% daily income + the chance of the DEFI coin actually pumping by 1000+% which many of them have done in the past month.
Because of all of this people are massively buying ERC20 tokens just to get these gains daily.
What has NANO do to interact with this entire DEFI space? Absolutely nothing.
Did they try to introduce wNANO (wrapped NANO) like Ethereum and Bitcoin did? No.
They just kept working on some other bullshit even-though protocol is in of itself 99% perfect and working. They keep focusing their energy on technology when technology is already better than anything else on the crypto market. NANO is currently the best fast cryptocurrency and it is not even close.
Proposed solution: Devs need to start focusing energy on things that matter and which will help the price and not dump their stash and blindly look how everything else keeps growing.
​

• Reason 4. - No one is making money of NANO market

This is similar to reason number 2 but it has to be said separately. Just ask yourself, who benefits of BTC markets? Miners.
Who benefits of any other POS market? All of the holders.
And then with this money you can finance devs which will work on the currency and will by this raise the price and the whole cycle repeats itself.
So all of these things have in common that people are making money of doing something for the ecosystem. On one hand resources get paid, on the other people that are loyal to the project.
NANO has one of the best and largest communities in cryptocurrency and numbers confirm this, yet there is no special way for any of us to benefit of of this. Everything is open source and people make everything for free.
Proposed solution: Introduce mechanism so that community members can earn money of holding NANO.
​
Conclusion: Nano is an amazing currency, but there are many things that need to fall in place in order for it to stop falling behind the market.
It's sad that investing in what is called a "safest" altcoin Ethereum, would've made you much better gains than even buying NANO on the all time low would.
This post is meant to be constructive criticism and to in the end open peoples mind on current problem NANO has in the space.
Please share this post so more people and hopefully devs can see it and so that we all as a community can start working towards our goal of NANO becoming one of most utilized cryptocurrencies in the world.

What is Cardano?

Cardano is a Blockchain project, also called 3rd generation Blockchain because of its scientific philosophy, designed and developed by a team of worldwide scientists and engineers. The aim of the project is to develop a technology that is secure, flexible and scalable and can therefore be used by many millions of users.
In contrast to other projects, Cardano pursues a policy that seeks to reconcile the needs of the user with those of the regulatory authorities, combining privacy with regulation. Cardano’s vision is that the project will lead to greater global financial integration for all people by providing all people with open access to fair financial services. Cardano wants to create a technological platform on which financial applications can be developed and executed.
It has basically great similarities with Ethereum. Cardano is a platform such as Ethereum, EOS or NEO that enables the creation of new tokens and decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts. From a technical point of view, however, there are major differences which we will discuss later.
The cryptocurrency of Cardano is ADA. Like any crypto currency, ADA allows the user to send assets within the Cardano network seamlessly over the Internet in a secure and fast manner. You can find the current price of ADA on our chart page.

Cardano History

Cardano was founded by Ethereum co-founders Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood after both left the Ethereum project after a disagreement over further development. While the later Cardano founders wanted to create a commercial enterprise behind Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin’s group was able to assert itself by setting up a charitable foundation behind the project.
Logically, Hoskinson and Wood founded a company, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), to manage Cardano’s research and development. Between September 2015 and January 2017, Cardano conducted a public ICO that raised a total of 62 million US dollars. About two thirds of all Ada tokens were sold.
Cardano was officially launched on 29 September 2017. Currently the project is still in its bootstrap era (“Byron”). In the bootstrap era, when people buy or sell Ada, the transaction is automatically delegated to a pool of trusted nodes that manage the network. They do not receive block rewards in this phase of the project. IOHK is currently working on numerous improvements and features. The next phase “Shelley” is to be introduced in 2019. In this phase, the project will grow into a fully decentralized and autonomous system.
This will be followed by the “Goguen” era, in which the integration of smart contracts is planned. This is followed by the “Basho” phase, which is intended to improve performance, and finally the “Voltaire” phase, which is intended to add a treasury system and a governance model (“Liquid Democracy”). The complete roadmap can be seen here.

The organization behind Cardano

As already written, Charles Hoskinson has decided to found the company IOHK in order to guarantee a coordinated and planned development of the project. IOHK is responsible for the design, development and maintenance of the Cardano platform until 2020.
In addition, however, there were originally two other institutions that took care of the Cardano project: Emurgo and the Cardano Foundation, based in Switzerland. Emurgo is a Japanese company that is also currently pushing partnerships with other commercial companies and organizing Cardano’s business development.
In particular, the Cardano Foundation was entrusted with administrative tasks. Otherwise the Foundation was responsible for public relations, trademark law, lobbying and cooperation with governments and regulators. In October 2018, however, there was a break between IOHK/ Emurgo and the Cardano Foundation. Among other things, Hoskinson has accused the Cardano Foundation under the direction of Michael Parsons of inaction. As a result IOHK and Emurgo decided to take over the tasks of the foundation.

Cardano: 3rd generation blockchain

Charles Hoskinson has recognized that 2nd generation blockchains still have many open problems to be successful in the long run. These are in particular scalability, interoperability and sustainability. Cardano has (partly) developed new concepts and technologies for this purpose.

Scalability

In terms of scalability, there are three challenges for Cardano:

1. Transactions per second (TPS)
2. Network / Bandwidth
3. Data scaling

Transactions per second

The Transactions per Second (TPS) measure how many transactions per second can be written to a block. According to Hoskinson, however, this is only part of the problem of scaling. While Bitcoin 3-7 TPS and Ethereum 10-20 TPS create, this is far from enough to host millions of users. The solution to this problem is Cardanos Ouroboros Proof-of-Stake algorithm, which we will discuss later.

Network

A further challenge is the network, which will also have an exponentially increasing demand for network resources with millions of users as the demand increases with the number of transactions. The demand will grow in size regions of several hundred terabytes or even exabytes.
Therefore, it will be impossible to maintain a homogeneous network topology in which each node forwards each transaction and message. Not every node will have the necessary resources. To solve this problem, Cardano intends to use a technology called RINA.

Data scaling

Since the blockchain has to store the data forever, there will be an enormous and constantly growing amount of data to be scaled (“Data Scale”). The problem is obvious. If every node has to keep a complete copy of the entire blockchain, this will not be possible for every node from the point of view of resources. The solution is that not every node needs all data. The solution approaches therefore include in detail:

• Pruning
• Subscriptions
• Compression.

Interoperability

Charles Hoskinson believes that there will not be a single crypto currency to be used in the future. Therefore Cardano aims at enabling the different blockchains to communicate with each other. Cardano’s vision is to create an “Internet of blockchains” in which there is no intermediary.
A solution to this problem should be for Cardano, Sidechains. The concept has been around in crypto space for quite some time. Simply put, sidechains are parallel blockchains that can communicate with the main blockchain.
In addition, Cardano tries to comply with all existing compliance rules: KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti Money Laundering), ATF (Anti Terrorist Financing). In order for this to work, Cardano provides metadata to each transaction.

Sustainability

According to Hoskinson, sustainability is the most difficult challenge. Basically, it means that continuous developments must be carried out on the system. This requires financial resources. Both a patronage and an ICO do not make sense for Hoskinson. Patronage leads to centralization, while ICOs provide short-term resources for the ecosystem, but at the same time produce a new, useless token.
For this reason, Cardano is oriented towards Dash’s treasury system. Each time a block is added to the block chain, a portion of the rewards is added to the Treasury. If funds are needed for development, they can be allocated.
To this end, Cardano has developed a governance model (“liquid democracy”) in which stakeholders can vote on a proposal for the distribution of funds.

Ada: Ouroboros Proof-of-Stake

Similar to Ethereum’s future proof-of-stake (PoS) “Casper”, Cardano also relies on a PoS. This means that there are no miners within the Cardano network responsible for validating transactions. A new proof-of-stake algorithm called Ouroboros was developed for Cardano. The basic difference between Ouroboros and Ethereum’s Casper or other similar algorithms is how block premium recipients (validators) are selected.
The core idea of the Ouroboros Proof of Stake is that a node is selected to create a new block with a probability proportional to the total number of Ada. This means that the more Ada a stakeholder has, the more he can earn over time.
In principle, each node with an Ada credit balance greater than 0 is referred to as a “stakeholder”. When a node is selected to create a new block, it is called a slot leader. The slot leader writes the transactions into a block, signs this block with his secret key and publishes the block in the network.
A fundamental problem in this electoral process is randomness. To achieve this, Cardano uses a Multiparty Computation (MPC) approach in which each voter independently performs an action called coin tossing (Coin-Fllipping Protocol).

'''
As the world’s leading regulatory compliant digital asset exchange, Coinbase sets one of the most stringent requirements for digital asset listing which includes technical evaluation of projects, legal and risk analysis, market supply and demand analysis, and crypto-economics. Coinbase holds a strong reputation in the digital asset industry, and thus the “Coinbase Standard” is considered as the industry benchmark for other digital asset projects, and the market has even seen the “Coinbase effect”.
On July 25 2020, Coinbase quietly launched the pricing chart of a decentralized oracle project, NEST Protocol (NEST), into its portal. Although Coinbase has yet to announce the inclusion of the project in its evaluation list, it represents a keen interest in the DeFi sector, and particularly in the DeFi price oracle projects.
NEST Protocol is the rising star in the decentralized price oracle sector
Decentralized financial services offered by the current mainstream DeFi platforms such as MakerDAO, Compound, dYdX, etc. rely heavily on the market data provided by the oracle projects. Oracle projects act as reliable information sources to feed these price data to other DeFi Projects, connecting the price data from the centralized world to the DeFi space. As such, the price oracle is an integral part of the decentralized financial services infrastructure.
Traditionally, the price oracle collects data from different platforms and feeds these data points to the DeFi space to create data reference points to enable them to function properly. However, many problems currently exist in the DeFi space, for example, blockchain network congestion, malicious attacks, wild market fluctuations, and other factors that may cause the data given by the price oracle to deviate from the true market data. These ultimately cause users to trade on wrong information in the DeFi space and increases such transaction costs.
Decentralized finance requires a fast, secure, and reliable price oracle. The birth of the decentralized price oracle is the embodiment of the blockchain industry’s thinking, and the current market projects offering decentralized price oracle services which includes NEST Protocol, Chainlink, Band Protocol, Tellor, Witness, Oraclize, and many others.
The innovation of NEST-Price is that every data point has been agreed upon by market validators, in line with the blockchain consensus mechanism. NEST-Price synchronizes the off-chain price in a highly decentralized manner, creating real and valid price data on-chain. This is the unique differentiator between NEST-Price and other price oracles.
Compared with other price oracle projects, NEST also has other features and advantages, such as the proposed peer-to-peer quotation matching as well as its unique verifier verification structure, making NEST more resilient to malicious attacks, resulting in a more decentralized network, and it’s on-chain prices closer to the fair market price. All of this has resulted in the NEST Protocol becoming a rising star in the DeFi price oracle sector. HBTC.com selects high-quality projects to list and partnering with NEST to promote the development of DeFi ecosystem
During the selection of quality assets, exchanges like [HBTC.com]¹ and Coinbase adhere to the principle of a rigorous selection of assets from different projects to enable a proper range of digital assets. At the same time, in order to solve existing pain points in the digital asset industry, which currently lacks a market-making management solution, HBTC.com also has launched its own “coin listing crowdsourcing [liquidity initiative]² “, redefining the exchange market making model.
HBTC.com, through its coin listing strategy, effectively reduces the problem of low liquidity in the early stages of high-quality projects, ensuring the smoothness of the user experience, and achieves a win-win situation for traders, the community, and the respective trading platform. These initiatives, coupled with reliable user protection and a responsible attitude, have earned a positive reputation among users.
Since its inception, the HBTC.com exchange has been committed to the discovery of both quality and promising digital asset projects. At a time when DeFi is growing rapidly, HBTC.com has a unique perspective for the decentralized price oracle sector and has prioritized NEST as a premium partner to debut the project alongside with its global branding upgrade. In addition, HBTC.com has [100% proof of reserves]³ for traders to validate the existence of assets via the Merkle tree, which brings transparency to the extreme.
In May 2020, NEST token delivered a 883.29% of return, at its peak, after its global debut on HBTC.com. At present, HBTC Exchange addresses holding NEST token accounts in a total of 141 million, ranked first in the overall network. At the same time, the HBTC Exchange network exclusively releases NEST staking mining and data show that NEST 24-hour turnover has reached $20.4 million.
Post-listing of the NEST token, HBTC.com has also listed DeFi projects such as DF, OKS, NEST, SWTH, JST, NVT, and other DeFi projects with market potential; some projects have achieved astonishing performance in the secondary market.
HBTC.com’s path to DeFi: developing public chains to prepare for the future ecosystem breakout.
In terms of the DeFi product and ecosystem infrastructure, HBTC has deployed HBTC Chain since launched in 2018, an infrastructure designed for decentralized finance and DeFi business with patented Bluehelix decentralized cross-chain clearing and custody technology.
The HBTC Chain is the DeFi ecosystem infrastructure that the team has spent a significant amount of effort to build. It is based on decentralization and community consensus and integrates cryptography and blockchain technologies to support decentralized association-based governance capabilities at the technical level. Based on decentralized key management, combining various cryptography tools including ECDSA, commitment, zero-knowledge proof, and multi-party computation, It implements the distributed private key generation and signature for cross-chain assets among all validators. On top of that, this technology can realize light-weight and non-intrusive cross-chain asset custody. On the clearing layer, HBTC Chain employs BHPOS consensus and horizontal sharding mechanisms to achieve high-performing transaction clearing, and implementation of OpenDex protocol to help the development of the DeFi ecosystem.
In addition, with the success experience of Bluehelix Cloud SaaS and white label solutions and the HBTC Brokerage system, HBTC’s public chain also innovatively supports CEX+DEX mixed matchmaking model and OpenDex protocol and proposes the three-tier node system which consists of standard node + consensus node + core node. This structure provides HBTC public chain certain advantages in terms of performance and cross-chain transactions. Users can easily establish a DEX with OpenDex protocol at nearly zero cost, and all DEX will share the liquidity and support customized user interface and trading parameters. The trading experience can be completely comparable to centralized spot exchanges.
With the launch of its test network, it is now possible to develop various DeFi applications on the HBTC public chain, such as decentralized swap, so that private keys are not controlled by any party; no KYC, which can prevent personal information leakage; and asset security through the setting of invalidation, cancellation of transactions and other functions, cross-chain asset mappings, such as the ability to issue cross-chain cBTC or other chain tokens, fully decentralized asset mapping contracts, and 100% reserves.
Conclusion
In the past few months, the DeFi market has been extremely active, the price of DeFi tokens has been rising, and a new round of competition with the centralized exchanges has started. HBTC Chain relies on the powerful technology of Bluehelix and [HBTC.com]¹ , giving all public chains the ability to interconnect, and put into both DeFi and SaaS levels. Undoubtedly, as one of the first exchanges to build the DeFi ecosystem, HBTC is leading the breakout in the current DeFi craze and has now become the first choice of users to engage with quality DeFi projects.
​
From BITCOIN news([[link]⁶ )
'''
Building the Infrastructure for the Future Decentralized Financial Market, Coinbase Included HBTC.Com Debut DeFi Project - Nest Protocol
Go1dfish undelete link
unreddit undelete link
Author: Nest_Fan
1: *btc*com/ 2: m*diu**com/hbt***ficia*/hbt*-launches-ba**liquidi*y***owd*unding-li*ti*g-plan-redefine-t*e*exch*nge-*i*tin**m*d*l***6*58f*f1d* 3: hbtc.ze**e*k*co*/hc/*n-us/a**icles/3***46287754-HBT*-10*-*ro***of*Reserve 4: hb*c.co*/ 5: n*ws.bitcoin.c*m*bu*ld*ng-t**-infr***ructur*-f*r-the*fut*re*decen**ali**d-*inanc*a*-market-coi**as*-*ncluded-h*t*-*o*-*ebut-de**-p*oject-n*st-**otocol* 6: n**s.bit*oin*com/building-th*-infrast*u*ture*for-t*e-fut****decen**a**zed**inancia*-m*rket-coinbase-**c*uded-*b*c-c***deb***defi-**oject-*est**r**ocol/]^^5
Unknown links are censored to prevent spreading illicit content.

Bitcoin's little brother Ethereum has been surprisingly stable in recent weeks. In the opinion of a crypto expert, however, this could soon be over.
Since the price slump in March caused by the corona panic, Ethereum has so far recovered well.
Although the cryptocurrency is still far from the 52-week high that it reached in July 2019, the cyber device is still on the up.
In the past few weeks, internet money has shown surprisingly little volatility and only fluctuated within very narrow ranges.

Chart technique indicates Ethereum price decline

However, crypto expert Edward Morra recently warned on Twitter that the sideways movement could soon be over.
Morra uses an Ethereum chart to explain this, which he believes shows the formation of a "Chuvashov fork". According to him, the Ethereum price could drop to around $ 175 if this fork broke and the Ethereum price fell below the $ 220 mark.
That would correspond to a slump of around 30 percent compared to the current price. For this reason, the Ethereum expert advises put options to minimize the risk. This is also recommended as these are currently very cheap.

Active Ethereum wallets at two-year high

But even if the Ethereum course could go downhill in the short term, the acceptance of cyberdevise seems to continue to increase.
As data from the blockchain analysis portal Glassnode, which are available from BTC Echo, show, the number of active Etherum wallets has only recently reached its highest level in two years.
It is also interesting to see that the number of active Ethereum addresses correlates less and less with the price of an Ethereum.
Glassnode data show that the number of active wallets has increased significantly since the beginning of the year, whereas the Ethereum price remained within narrow ranges.

More scalability is urgently needed

However, as BTC Echo points out, the upcoming Hard Fork Ethereum from the proof-of-work process to the proof-of-stake process could prove to be vital for the cyber device.
This is the only way to achieve the necessary scalability that would help Ethereum to remain relevant to the "decentralized financial system" (DeFi).
After all, there are already other cryptocurrencies that would rely on a mechanism without a miner from the start and would already be efficient enough to be used on the DeFi platform.
Cardano is a prime example of such a cyber device. Cardano has only recently seen a rapid upturn and is currently in seventh place in terms of market capitalization among e-currencies.
The future of Ethereum also depends on the extent to which the cryptocurrency continues to develop in order to keep up with the progress in the crypto market.

What important crypto events happened last week?
📌 Block number 10,000,000 was mined on Ethereum on the 4th of May 2020 setting the number of blocks mined on the second-largest blockchain over 15 times more than Bitcoin despite being 5 years younger. Congrats! Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin spoke about the expected reduction in the annual Ethereum issue from the current 4.7 million coins to 100 thousand-2 million after switching to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The rejection of Proof-of-Work in favor of Proof-of-Stake is due to the desire to reduce inflation in the blockchain. Speaking about Ethereum, ConsenSys, the leading Ethereum dApp development studio is adjusting to the conditions of the devastating crisis of COVID-19 and will present Ethereal Summit completely virtually on May 7-8. Such an event takes place virtually for the very first time. And from May 29 to June 16, the Planet Wide SOS online hackathon will take place. The participants will share business ideas to overcome the global crisis. The best of them will receive financing for implementation. The event will be opened by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Singularity.Net CEO Ben Herzel.
📌 Well, it's all about the upcoming Bitcoin halving right now. The experts say that BTC is now the most profitable investment by far, rising 21% from $7,203 at the start of 2020 with equities suffering big losses in 2020 and gold up 7.83% on the year. The price of Bitcoin is around $9,000, after last week's impressive 20% rally in a single day. All seems to be going well. However, there is one chart view that suggests that BTC may still be in a downtrend. Following the price recovery trend, the whales are actively accumulating Bitcoin. According to Glassnode, from the beginning of March 2020, the number of the largest bitcoin addresses grew by 11% and reached 111, the highest since the beginning of August 2019.
📌 Ripple has published a financial report for the first quarter of this year. During this period, the company sold XRP for $1.75 million. In the last quarter of 2019, this figure reached $13.08 million. The drop in sales was a record 87%, and this is the worst Ripple record ever. The decline is due to a sharp decrease in direct institutional sales, as well as a prolonged pause in sales to cryptocurrency exchanges.
📌 Owing to the drastic economic effect of coronavirus in Italy and also a way to survive these hard times, a small Italy town, Castellino del Biferno, with 550 residents, began minting their local currency dubbed “Ducati”.
📌 Global Digital Assets (GDA), the first merchant bank in North America to focus on blockchain and digital assets, announced that it will be joining the DigitalBits ecosystem to further enterprise adoption for branded cryptocurrencies.
📌 The ever-entertaining John McAfee is 99% certain he knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. McAfee claims that linguistic analysis of the whitepaper is all that is needed to uncover Satoshi’s identity. But he won't name this person.
📌 In honor of its seventh birthday, CoinMarketCap organized the so-called roast challenge, inviting the participants of the crypto community to sincerely hook on the popular analytical service in the comments under the Twitter post. Happy Birthday, CMC! And yes, the comments are so good they deserve your attention.

What important crypto events happened last week?
📌 Well, it's all about the upcoming Bitcoin halving right now. The experts say that BTC is now the most profitable investment by far, rising 21% from $7,203 at the start of 2020 with equities suffering big losses in 2020 and gold up 7.83% on the year. The price of Bitcoin is around $9,000, after last week's impressive 20% rally in a single day. All seems to be going well. However, there is one chart view that suggests that BTC may still be in a downtrend. Following the price recovery trend, the whales are actively accumulating Bitcoin. According to Glassnode, from the beginning of March 2020, the number of the largest bitcoin addresses grew by 11% and reached 111, the highest since the beginning of August 2019.
📌 Ripple has published a financial report for the first quarter of this year. During this period, the company sold XRP for $1.75 million. In the last quarter of 2019, this figure reached $13.08 million. The drop in sales was a record 87%, and this is the worst Ripple record ever. The decline is due to a sharp decrease in direct institutional sales, as well as a prolonged pause in sales to cryptocurrency exchanges.
📌 Block number 10,000,000 was mined on Ethereum on the 4th of May 2020 setting the number of blocks mined on the second-largest blockchain over 15 times more than Bitcoin despite being 5 years younger. Congrats! Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin spoke about the expected reduction in the annual Ethereum issue from the current 4.7 million coins to 100 thousand-2 million after switching to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The rejection of Proof-of-Work in favor of Proof-of-Stake is due to the desire to reduce inflation in the blockchain. Speaking about Ethereum, ConsenSys, the leading Ethereum dApp development studio, is adjusting to the conditions of the devastating crisis of COVID-19 and will present Ethereal Summit completely virtually on May 7-8. Such an event takes place virtually for the very first time. And from May 29 to June 16, the Planet Wide SOS online hackathon will take place. The participants will share business ideas to overcome the global crisis. The best of them will receive financing for implementation. The event will be opened by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Singularity.Net CEO Ben Herzel.
📌 Owing to the drastic economic effect of coronavirus in Italy and also a way to survive these hard times, a small Italy town, Castellino del Biferno, with 550 residents, began minting their local currency dubbed “Ducati”.
📌 Global Digital Assets (GDA), the first merchant bank in North America to focus on blockchain and digital assets, announced that it will be joining the DigitalBits ecosystem to further enterprise adoption for branded cryptocurrencies.
📌 The ever-entertaining John McAfee is 99% certain he knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. McAfee claims that linguistic analysis of the whitepaper is all that is needed to uncover Satoshi’s identity. But he won't name this person.
📌 In honor of its seventh birthday, CoinMarketCap organized the so-called roast challenge, inviting the participants of the crypto community to sincerely hook on the popular analytical service in the comments under the Twitter post. Happy Birthday, CMC! And yes, the comments are so good they deserve your attention.

What important crypto events happened last week?
📌 Block number 10,000,000 was mined on Ethereum on the 4th of May 2020 setting the number of blocks mined on the second-largest blockchain over 15 times more than Bitcoin despite being 5 years younger. Congrats! Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin spoke about the expected reduction in the annual Ethereum issue from the current 4.7 million coins to 100 thousand-2 million after switching to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The rejection of Proof-of-Work in favor of Proof-of-Stake is due to the desire to reduce inflation in the blockchain. Speaking about Ethereum, ConsenSys, the leading Ethereum dApp development studio is adjusting to the conditions of the devastating crisis of COVID-19 and will present Ethereal Summit completely virtually on May 7-8. Such an event takes place virtually for the very first time. And from May 29 to June 16, the Planet Wide SOS online hackathon will take place. The participants will share business ideas to overcome the global crisis. The best of them will receive financing for implementation. The event will be opened by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Singularity.Net CEO Ben Herzel.
📌 Well, it's all about the upcoming Bitcoin halving right now. The experts say that BTC is now the most profitable investment by far, rising 21% from $7,203 at the start of 2020 with equities suffering big losses in 2020 and gold up 7.83% on the year. The price of Bitcoin is around $9,000, after last week's impressive 20% rally in a single day. All seems to be going well. However, there is one chart view that suggests that BTC may still be in a downtrend. Following the price recovery trend, the whales are actively accumulating Bitcoin. According to Glassnode, from the beginning of March 2020, the number of the largest bitcoin addresses grew by 11% and reached 111, the highest since the beginning of August 2019.
📌 Ripple has published a financial report for the first quarter of this year. During this period, the company sold XRP for $1.75 million. In the last quarter of 2019, this figure reached $13.08 million. The drop in sales was a record 87%, and this is the worst Ripple record ever. The decline is due to a sharp decrease in direct institutional sales, as well as a prolonged pause in sales to cryptocurrency exchanges.
📌 Owing to the drastic economic effect of coronavirus in Italy and also a way to survive these hard times, a small Italy town, Castellino del Biferno, with 550 residents, began minting their local currency dubbed “Ducati”.
📌 Global Digital Assets (GDA), the first merchant bank in North America to focus on blockchain and digital assets, announced that it will be joining the DigitalBits ecosystem to further enterprise adoption for branded cryptocurrencies.
📌 The ever-entertaining John McAfee is 99% certain he knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. McAfee claims that linguistic analysis of the whitepaper is all that is needed to uncover Satoshi’s identity. But he won't name this person.
📌 In honor of its seventh birthday, CoinMarketCap organized the so-called roast challenge, inviting the participants of the crypto community to sincerely hook on the popular analytical service in the comments under the Twitter post. Happy Birthday, CMC! And yes, the comments are so good they deserve your attention.

What important crypto events happened last week?
📌 Well, it's all about the upcoming Bitcoin halving right now. The experts say that BTC is now the most profitable investment by far, rising 21% from $7,203 at the start of 2020 with equities suffering big losses in 2020 and gold up 7.83% on the year. The price of Bitcoin is around $9,000, after last week's impressive 20% rally in a single day. All seems to be going well. However, there is one chart view that suggests that BTC may still be in a downtrend. Following the price recovery trend, the whales are actively accumulating Bitcoin. According to Glassnode, from the beginning of March 2020, the number of the largest bitcoin addresses grew by 11% and reached 111, the highest since the beginning of August 2019.
📌 Ripple has published a financial report for the first quarter of this year. During this period, the company sold XRP for $1.75 million. In the last quarter of 2019, this figure reached $13.08 million. The drop in sales was a record 87%, and this is the worst Ripple record ever. The decline is due to a sharp decrease in direct institutional sales, as well as a prolonged pause in sales to cryptocurrency exchanges.
📌 Block number 10,000,000 was mined on Ethereum on the 4th of May 2020 setting the number of blocks mined on the second-largest blockchain over 15 times more than Bitcoin despite being 5 years younger. Congrats! Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin spoke about the expected reduction in the annual Ethereum issue from the current 4.7 million coins to 100 thousand-2 million after switching to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The rejection of Proof-of-Work in favor of Proof-of-Stake is due to the desire to reduce inflation in the blockchain. Speaking about Ethereum, ConsenSys, the leading Ethereum dApp development studio is adjusting to the conditions of the devastating crisis of COVID-19 and will present Ethereal Summit completely virtually on May 7-8. Such an event takes place virtually for the very first time. And from May 29 to June 16, the Planet Wide SOS online hackathon will take place. The participants will share business ideas to overcome the global crisis. The best of them will receive financing for implementation. The event will be opened by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Singularity.Net CEO Ben Herzel.
📌 Owing to the drastic economic effect of coronavirus in Italy and also a way to survive these hard times, a small Italy town, Castellino del Biferno, with 550 residents, began minting their local currency dubbed “Ducati”.
📌 Global Digital Assets (GDA), the first merchant bank in North America to focus on blockchain and digital assets, announced that it will be joining the DigitalBits ecosystem to further enterprise adoption for branded cryptocurrencies.
📌 The ever-entertaining John McAfee is 99% certain he knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. McAfee claims that linguistic analysis of the whitepaper is all that is needed to uncover Satoshi’s identity. But he won't name this person.
📌 In honor of its seventh birthday, CoinMarketCap organized the so-called roast challenge, inviting the participants of the crypto community to sincerely hook on the popular analytical service in the comments under the Twitter post. Happy Birthday, CMC! And yes, the comments are so good they deserve your attention.

Harmony Protocol
This is a continuation of the thread here https://www.reddit.com/CryptoMoonShots/comments/ezpn0j/harmony_one/. As some of you have requested for more information on Harmony. Here you go:
What is Harmony?
Harmony is a sharded blockchain, similar to Ethereum 2.0, but with several differences e.g. randomness algorithm, consensus mechanism and etc. Currently, Harmony mainnet contains 4 shards and a total of 1,000 validator nodes. Out of the 1,000 nodes, 680 of them are operated by Harmony team and 320 of them are operated by external validators including our foundational node runners.
The 4 shards are indexed with 0, 1, 2, 3 respectively and shard 0 is the beacon chain. Right now, the nodes in shard 1, 2, and 3 are synchronizing and maintaining an updated copy of shard 0 (beacon chain) in preparation for the upcoming features such as cross-link verification and staking.
Reference: https://nodes.harmony.one/harmony-overview/mainnet
Why sharding is key?
To solve the scalability problem without sacrificing security and decentralisation.
“Given Ethereum and Bitcoin’s performance limitations, many blockchain projects proposed various solutions that attempt to increase transaction throughput. Various blockchains proposed to replace Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus with Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. Other blockchains like EOS use Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), where block proposers are elected by voting rather than by an on-chain algorithmic process. Projects like IOTA replaced the chain-of-blocks data structure with a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) data structure, which breaks the limitation of sequential processing of transactions.
However, these proposed solutions cannot make significant performance gains without sacrificing other critical aspects, such as security and decentralization. The scalability solution that both preserves security and decentralization is sharding, which creates multiple groups (i.e. shards) of validators and lets them process transactions concurrently. As a result, the total transaction throughput increases linearly as the number of shards grows”
Reference: https://harmony.one/whitepaper.pdf
Current status?
Mainnet with 4 shards launched in June 2019
Mainnet token swap with exchanges ongoing
Open staking on testnet
Reference: https://medium.com/harmony-one/harmony-milestones-2020-1-highlights-and-lowlights-36dea37a271b
Competitors?
Ethereum
Eth 2.0 Phase 0: Launch of Beacon chain for POS with no smart contract functionalities (expected 30 July 2020)
Eth 2.0 Phase 1: Launch of shard chains with verifiable delay functions (unknown timeline)
Eth 2.0 Phase 2: eWASM new Ethereum virtual machine for sharded blockchain (unknown timeline)
Eth 2.0 Phase 3: Continued improvement e.g. cross-shard transactions, light-weight clients, super-square charting and closer ties (unknown timeline)
Optimistically speaking, you can probably get the official launch of phase 1 by mid/end of Year 2021.
Reference: https://www.bitcoinsuisse.com/outlook/ethereum-and-its-transition-to-ethereum-2/
Reference: https://medium.com/swlh/a-comprehensive-view-of-ethereum-2-0-serenity-5865ad8b7c62
Reference: https://docs.ethhub.io/otheethereum-2.0-ama/
Other competitors like Elrond and Multivac still do not have their full mainnet launch with their own blockchain tokens.
Conclusion
Sharded blockchain is complex and no project has managed to implement network, transaction and state sharding. Harmony will be the first working sharded blockchain to do so as compared to the unknown timeline for Eth 2.0 Phase 1.
Harmony is a team of infrastructure engineers in Silicon Valley, now with 4 PhD’s, 8 ex-Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook, 2 Harvard MBAs, and Stanford/Berkeley AI graduates (reference: https://medium.com/harmony-one/welcome-9-new-harmonauts-to-team-24d71ee8d79b). I believe they have the experience, brains and technical competency to roll out the sharded blockhain.
As mentioned by one community member, “The advanced test beds leading the way before the established chains, this will attract more developers, interest and investment.”
With its first-mover advantage, I am excited to see how this platform will influence the adoption of blockchain technology by other companies.
Disclaimer: I am still holding my stack at 60 sat. I did not take participate in the IEO. Recently bought a small amount at 60 sat. Never invest money that you cannot afford to lose. 😊

Latest Bitcoin News:
Bitcoin Will Follow Ethereum And Move to Proof-of-Stake, Says Bitcoin Suisse Founder
Other Related Bitcoin Topics:
Bitcoin Price | Bitcoin Mining | Blockchain
The latest Bitcoin news has been sourced from the CoinSalad.com Bitcoin Price and News Events page. CoinSalad is a web service that provides real-time Bitcoin market info, charts, data and tools. Follow us on Twitter @CoinSalad.

I'm writing this to present the case for Tao as the real deal. It's been mentioned on this sub before, but today is the big day and I want to lay out a cohesive explanation of why I've been happy to own Tao and why it's one of the best shots out there for real Moon(™) status.
Tao launched in 2016 to serve the music industry. The developer recognized that the way most people are approaching the idea of bringing crypto to serve musicians was all wrong, as he explains in this short video (all Twitter videos I’ll be linking to are about 2 minutes each)
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1176242929838350337
When he first developed Tao he looked at all of the different forks of Bitcoin out there and picked all of what he saw as the best features, added a couple of his own, and gave it a generous block size limit, and made it Turing complete like Ethereum — creating what he likes to call the Swiss army knife of crypto:
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1176625734162345984
​
One of the first people officially involved with the project was Peter Rafelson
Here is a quick video explaining who he is
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1174119584804175873
and here is the Billboard official podcast interviewing him which is mentioned in the above video
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/podcasts/8517903/madonna-peter-rafelson-interview-open-your-heart-chart-beat-podcast
(interview starts at around 30 minutes in)
Between the two links you will see Peter is very well connected in Hollywood and the music industry. He also owns a multi-million dollar recording studio in Hollywood.
These connections are important because what the Tao project(s) are doing is designed to work for artists and the music industry, not to “disrupt it” from the outside or approach it as a Silicon Valley style project, which makes it more attractive to people in the existing industry.
​
The developer and his team have lobbied and met with members of Congress and the SEC, as told in this video:
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1174795731141480453
Everything they are doing and have been doing since 2016 is fully regulatory compliant to such a degree that the currently underserved 13 years old and over market of teen music fans will be able to use their platform.
The entire idea is to make it easier for indie artists to monetize their fanbase and let the fans connect with the bands they love. This required an exchange, the AltMarket which launched several months ago and the final piece of what they’ve been building, FanMix, which is launching with their first band sometime in the next 24 hours.
​
What is FanMix?
FanMix lets fans earn crypto - which they just think of as rewards points, without needing to know or care anything about cryptocurrency. They can refer other fans and earn rewards and the bands themselves can earn more revenue by using referral links to get their fans onboard OR extra passive revenue by getting other bands to sign.
These two short videos explain a little more about it:
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1173707710530871296
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1173726808329486336
Each band gets to raise funds and their fans are rewarded with Tao AND they get branded artist tokens which they can later trade (exclusively traded against Tao).
The AltMarket and the Tao team have already launched official Wu-Tang Clan coin ODBcoin as a beta test of the “Initial Artist Offering” or IAO process - the artist tokens - and in the process they helped launch Ol Dirty Bastard’s son Young Dirty, including appearing with Wu-Tang on NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts
https://giphy.com/gifs/npr-wu-tang-tiny-desk-gEx9kqPkamf7DlkPsL
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/04/673291531/wu-tang-clan-tiny-desk-concert
FanMix.com is designed to be the single place a band can go to sell their albums (digital but also physical, signed, etc.) and other merchandise as well as exclusive fan rewards for their biggest supporters.
They are introducing their first band sometime in the next 24 hours. With the first band and with every one that follows, Tao will be bought automatically off of the AltMarket for every dollar spent by fans on their artist.
Buy the album, Tao is bought off the market and held for staking to generate the rewards funds for the fans. The more fan money spent, the more Tao is bought off the market and kept off the market to stake. That’s automated buy pressure driven by music fans, the first crypto whose price will be driven by pure use case regardless of traders or speculators. True adoption.
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1150167087182012416
In fact, since Tao is an essential asset for the AltMarket/FanMix (AM/FM, get it?) business model, they have an incentive to buy a lot of it off the market before the price is driven up and up by the fans. FanMix is selling equity in the company with an overseas SRO raising $10,000,000 - they have a verbal agreement and are just waiting for the contracts to arrive.
What the CEO of AltMarket & FanMix has promised is that after they close on the $10 Million raise, they will spend $1,000,000 - one million dollars in a single gigantic buy order for Tao at $1 or whatever the current market price is, whichever is higher. Even if the price has gotten over a dollar per coin before this happens, it’s in their interests to buy as much as possible.
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1183270025085407232
The market cap of Tao is only about $2.9 million as I type this, recent trades were 8.7 cents per coin. So if they buy $1 million worth at $1 that’s a nice ~11.5x return, but once this is in full swing next year with a growing number of artists and fans, not to mention when Infiniti Festival happens next summer, this could be one of the be one of the biggest moon shots since those lucky people bought BTC when it was just a few cents.
It’s late here so I’m going to post this but will check back in several hours and will be happy to answer any questions I can.
A few additional links:
fanmix.com
Tao trades on
https://qtrade.io/market/TAO_BTC
and its official home at
https://exchange.alt.market/
Join us on Slack: https://taonetwork.typeform.com/to/hnuAj0
or Telegram:
https://t.me/TaoCryptocurrency
Kasey Win developer interview part 1
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1174469837000589312
Kasey Win developer interview part 2
https://twitter.com/taoblockchain/status/1174766521890951168
ODBcoin - bringing fans and artists together - interview with Young Dirty about ODBcoin and “Proof Of Fan”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q04mKxybgtg
Naomi Brockwell and Taylor Swift coin
first link is short edit that boils it down to basically an elevator pitch for artist branded coins (Taylor Swift is not making a coin to my knowledge, it was just Naomi’s example since she’s a Swift fan)
http://acgimg.s3.amazonaws.com/Naomi%20Brockwell%20Taylor%20Swift%20coin%20twitter%20ediit.mp4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9\_9UkerJ-M

Hi there new ETH investor and/or new /ethtrader community member! Glad to have you aboard. We are a pretty lively bunch around here; inside jokes, memes, and jargon run rampant.
​
I figured I would create a sort of glossary to help you figure out what the actual fuck we are talking about.
​
Acronyms (thanks decronym)
​
BGD: Big green dildo, as in a big green candlestick on the price chart.
​
BTFD: Buy the fucking dip.
​
ATH: All time high, the highest price of a thing ever, 1400ish for ETH.
​
FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out, the urge to jump on the bandwagon when prices rise.
​
DeFi: Decentralized Finance, MakerDAO and Dharma and stuff. Loans basically.
​
CDP: Collateralized debt position. A DeFi thing.
​
FUD: FeaUncertainty/Doubt, negative sentiments spread in order to drive down prices.
​
MEW: My Ether Wallet, a website to make and interact with wallets.
​
TA: Technical analysis, predicting the future of the price based on the past.
​
2FA: 2 factor authentication, its a security thing, a second password of sorts.
​
ERC20: The standard for tokens built on ETH.
​
POS: Not piece of shit, or point of sale. Proof of stake, the new consensus mechanism coming to ETH soon™.
​
ICO: Initial coin offering, the birth of a new crypto, usually an ERC20. Like an IPO.
​
IEO: Initial exchange offering, like an ICO, but typically a bit more scammy.
​
EZPZ: e_z_p_z_, more on him later...
​
BAT: Not the animal, Basic Attention Token
​
OMG: Not oh my god, well sometimes oh my god, but mostly OmiseGo. Pronounced OH-ME-SAY GO btw.
​
MKR: MakerDAO.
​
REP: There is too many tokens to list here, just google it you will figure it out.
​
DYOR: Do your own research. People want to steal your money. Make sure you know what you are buying.
​
LN: A silly bitcoin thing.
​
GDAX: The old name for Coinbase Pro.
​
​
​
Jargon
​
Bull: Confident the price will go up.
​
Confidant: misspelling of confident from e_z_p_z_. More on him later...
​
Bear: Confident the price will go down.
​
Cuecomber: Cucumber, another EZPZ classic. Can be used as in cool as a cucumber, or as in BGD (see? now you know what BGD means, damn this guide is helpful.)
​
The ratio: The trading pair ETH:BTC.
​
The flippening: The ETH marketcap being bigger than the BTC marketcap. Coming soon™ .
​
Soon™: The release date for everything crypto related.
​
Donuts: Like reddit karma but /ethtrader specific, and infinitely more valuable. Legend has it that if you get 10 million donuts Vitalik sends you 10 ETH for every 1 ETH you send him. The name comes from cyounessi's post here.
​
Moon: The price where you can buy a lambo.
​
Mooning: The price increasing rapidly. Maybe exposed butts depending on how you choose to spend your money.
​
Moonboy: A hopelessly optimistic/greedy person.
​
$13: The price was stuck here for a long time. Dark days for /ethtrader.
​
$420: The top of the bull market before last. Also weed dude hehehe.
​
$300: The price was stuck here for what seemed like forever. Oh how easy we had it back then...
​
$324: EZPZ's number. More on him later...
​
$80: The bottom of the previous bear market. We will definitely never see this price again.
​
HODL: Hold. From here.
​
SODL: Sold, same as above.
​
BUIDL: Build, you get the pattern.
​
Golden cross: Moving averages of prices crossing. A TA thing.
​
FIAT: Not the car. Fiat Money. USD, euros, pounds and so on.
​
Sharding: An ETH scaling method. Don't make sharting jokes, they anger Vitalik.
​
Ramen: The meal of choice when the price goes down.
​
Pamp: Pump
​
Bogdanoff: This. Just... Don't ask...
​
Weeks not months: In reference to Joe Lubin's prediction for ETH futures coming out. It has been 75 weeks since he said this.
​
The Winklevii: Founders of Gemini Exchange, the facebook guys.
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Updoot the diddly: Or anything with that vague collection of letters, Upvote the daily discussion.
​
JT's fire pit: jtnichol posts pictures of food he is cooking in his backyard fire pit. Those posts make you hungry.
​
The DAO: Tumultuous times in ethereum history to say the least.Further reading here.)
​
Personalities
​
vbuterin: The founder of Ethereum. We really really like him.
​
Joe Lubin: Co-founder of Ethereum, founder of ConsenSys. Memes aside. We like him.
​
carlslarson: Creator of /ethtrader. Overall good guy.
​
jtnichol: A mod of /ethtrader. Overall sweetheart.
​
The rest of the mods: Too many to list. It's a great group of people. They won't give you any trouble if you aren't being a dick.
​
dcinvestor: DC is a smart guy with good opinions. We really like him.
​
E_Z_P_Z_ the undisputed meme champion. A genuine crazy person. Made a bad sell on the way up, and wrote lengthy posts about how ETH was going back to $324 multiple times a day for months, often times with terrible spelling and grammar. When ETH did hit 324 he became something like a local hero. He is the heel of /ethtrader and we all love to hate him.
​
lamboshinakaghini: A fool, not to be trusted.
​
scienceguy9489: He used to regularly post TA. Sometimes he was right, sometimes he was wrong. The crucial thing was that he was memeable. He started to get a bit of an ego going, and was deleting his posts that were wrong, and keeping the correct ones. He recently made a return to /ethtrader and made a post that ETH was going to moon on a certain day and it ended up not being correct, which was just fuel on the meme fire. He goes by etherdamus now and runs a private TA group which has a fee to join.
​
singlestateserenity: He posts a haiku in the daily every day until we flippen bitcoin. Reading a nice haiku is a pleasant way to start your morning.
​
Everyone else: Well you will see them around and catch the vibe. There are just too many lovable and hateable people to list.

Harmony Protocol
What is Harmony?
Harmony is a sharded blockchain, similar to Ethereum 2.0, but with several differences e.g. randomness algorithm, consensus mechanism and etc. Currently, Harmony mainnet contains 4 shards and a total of 1,000 validator nodes. Out of the 1,000 nodes, 680 of them are operated by Harmony team and 320 of them are operated by external validators including our foundational node runners.
The 4 shards are indexed with 0, 1, 2, 3 respectively and shard 0 is the beacon chain. Right now, the nodes in shard 1, 2, and 3 are synchronizing and maintaining an updated copy of shard 0 (beacon chain) in preparation for the upcoming features such as cross-link verification and staking.
Reference: https://nodes.harmony.one/harmony-overview/mainnet
Why sharding is key?
To solve the scalability problem without sacrificing security and decentralisation.
“Given Ethereum and Bitcoin’s performance limitations, many blockchain projects proposed various solutions that attempt to increase transaction throughput. Various blockchains proposed to replace Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus with Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. Other blockchains like EOS use Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), where block proposers are elected by voting rather than by an on-chain algorithmic process. Projects like IOTA replaced the chain-of-blocks data structure with a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) data structure, which breaks the limitation of sequential processing of transactions.
However, these proposed solutions cannot make significant performance gains without sacrificing other critical aspects, such as security and decentralization. The scalability solution that both preserves security and decentralization is sharding, which creates multiple groups (i.e. shards) of validators and lets them process transactions concurrently. As a result, the total transaction throughput increases linearly as the number of shards grows”
Reference: https://harmony.one/whitepaper.pdf
Current status?
Mainnet with 4 shards launched in June 2019
Mainnet token swap with exchanges ongoing
Open staking on testnet
Reference: https://medium.com/harmony-one/harmony-milestones-2020-1-highlights-and-lowlights-36dea37a271b
Competitors?
Ethereum
Eth 2.0 Phase 0: Launch of Beacon chain for POS with no smart contract functionalities (expected 30 July 2020)
Eth 2.0 Phase 1: Launch of shard chains with verifiable delay functions (unknown timeline)
Eth 2.0 Phase 2: eWASM new Ethereum virtual machine for sharded blockchain (unknown timeline)
Eth 2.0 Phase 3: Continued improvement e.g. cross-shard transactions, light-weight clients, super-square charting and closer ties (unknown timeline)
Optimistically speaking, you can probably get the official launch of phase 1 by mid/end of Year 2021.
Reference: https://www.bitcoinsuisse.com/outlook/ethereum-and-its-transition-to-ethereum-2/
Reference: https://medium.com/swlh/a-comprehensive-view-of-ethereum-2-0-serenity-5865ad8b7c62
Reference: https://docs.ethhub.io/otheethereum-2.0-ama/
Other competitors like Elrond and Multivac still do not have their full mainnet launch with their own blockchain tokens.
Technical analysis?
Satoshi level remains consistent at 60+ sat level. Accumulation at this level for already close to 7 weeks. Lowest low is around 52 sat. No pump yet as it is largely neglected while other coins are pumping massively.
Token details
Current Market cap (CMC): $30m
Current price: 0.006048 (around 1.9x from IEO)
IEO price: 1 ONE = 0.003175 USD
Current supply: 4,977,696,588 (see link below)
Unlock schedule:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/143qpsVaezh9sY_pDhNK-cffwgEdRojWa38-rqBwKI7c/edit
Max supply: 12,600,000,000
Assume fully diluted market cap (DMC): $76m (12,600,000,000 x 0.006048)
My target market cap: $300m (to match platforms like Qtum, ICX, vechain) (10x from current CMC) (4 x from DMC). Key catalyst that may propel token price to this market cap would be (speculative):

1. Binance’s strong support for its IEO. Highly likely that Binance would want to shill its successful IEO when open staking is ready (especially it is the first platform with network, transaction and state sharding)
2. Partnerships (both in SF and China) and Defi projects

Conclusion
Sharded blockchain is complex and no project has managed to implement network, transaction and state sharding. Harmony will be the first working sharded blockchain to do so as compared to the unknown timeline for Eth 2.0 Phase 1.
Harmony is a team of infrastructure engineers in Silicon Valley, now with 4 PhD’s, 8 ex-Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook, 2 Harvard MBAs, and Stanford/Berkeley AI graduates (reference: https://medium.com/harmony-one/welcome-9-new-harmonauts-to-team-24d71ee8d79b). I believe they have the experience, brains and technical competency to roll out the sharded blockhain.
As mentioned by one community member, “The advanced test beds leading the way before the established chains, this will attract more developers, interest and investment.”
With its first-mover advantage, I am excited to see how this platform will influence the adoption of blockchain technology by other companies.
Disclaimer: I did not take participate in the IEO. Recently bought a small amount at 60 sat. Never invest money that you cannot afford to lose.

Guide for Noobs

Simple and Not A Lot of Money

• setup an account on coinbase.com, buy your coins, walk away until next year or later, fees are ~1.5% which is $1.5 USD for a $100 USD of coin
• note coinbase does have an option to buy via credit card instead of a bank account, fees are ~4% when you do that, your credit card company may charge more if it considers it a cash transfer

Guide for Not Noobs

Less Simple

-setup an account on coinbase.com, move dollars into your account, setup an account on gdax.com (same company, same login), move your cash from coinbase to gdax, buy your coins on GDAX at Market, fees are cheaper 0.25% versus 1.5%
-consider buying alternative coins supported by coinbase

No Fees

-all of the above but use GDAX's Limit/Buy, zero fees, but you have to wait for the market to dip below your buy price

More Money Available

-setup several Limit/Buy orders at different price points to capture dips when you are away

More Control but More Complex

-it's possible coinbase could go out of business, move some or most of your coins to a personal hardware wallet like a Trezor or Ledger Nano S, made in Czech Republic and France respectively
-consider using other exchanges with different fees and coin support
-consider buying other alternative coins supported by other exchanges

You Are Very Responsible

-create a paper wallet, put it in a safe, be warned it's like a visual bearer instrument, if you lose it or someone takes a picture of it...it's gone, but you have complete control over your money/asset

DO NOT EVER

-buy more than you can lose, it's early wild west days, the market could easily come crashing down
-panic sell, the market fluctuates regularly by 20%, thus far it has ALWAYS recovered, people that try to sell during a fall/dip and buy at the bottom usually miss time it and lose
-store your keys on your computer or phone unless its small amount, these are the two most vulnerable routes to hacking and simple hardware failure resulting in loss
-attempt to daytrade and time the best prices unless your real life job is day trading
-get addicted to watching the market, pay attention watch for dips, but don't let it crowd out your work or free time
-keep a LOT of cash or coin in an exchange, it is very easy to mistype and buy or sell far more than you meant to, exchanges can disappear with your coins
-buy a hardware wallet from anyone other than the company who makes it, i.e. do not buy one on Amazon, it is possible some third person hacked it and could steal your coin

PROBABLY DON'T

-limit sells until the far future when market volatility is down, flash crashes have happened and recovered, if you had all your coin in limit sells it would be gone
-margin trade unless your real life job is day trading
-stop buys or stop sells unless your real life job is day trading

DO

-hold your coins, your coin may be worth x10 or more in value in the future, e.g. if bitcoin replaced gold, bitcoin would be worth ~x70 the current value
-buy small amounts over time DCA, this might not seem intuitive but it spreads your risk out, reduces risk of buying at all time highs (ATH) and more likely to catch lows (dips), a fluctuation of $100 in price is small if the eventual value is worth x10 or more in the future
-keep a small amount of cash on an exchange always, when there is a lot of traffic/trading which happens during dips, you are much more likely to be able to make trades on an exchange rather than with your own wallet

REMEMBER

-if you don't have your coin in your own wallet, it's not your coin. this is not a problem until you have a lot of value and you want to keep it safe from a bankruptcy, unscrupulous people/exchanges, or unforeseen acts. if it's a small amount compared to your income it's an acceptable risk, if not then move it to a wallet
-in the days of fake news not everything you read is true, in fact there are armies of people shilling for 'pick a random coin'; some are malicious, some uninformed, and some willfully uninformed
-if your value starts to become large, dig deep into how your asset/currencies work just like you would for any other purchase, understanding how it works helps you understand if it will be a success, e.g. understand the difference between PoW vs PoS or what a hard fork is
-some coins especially newer ones are scams, a good indication of if it is not a scam is how long the coin has been around
-most bitcoin hard forks so far have not been successful with some exceptions
-btc is the accepted short-name for bitcoin on most (but not all) exchanges, xbt is also common in EUR-land

Other Risks

-holding your own coin requires personal responsibility, it is easy to lose and not be able to recover it if you are not careful
-again, do not buy more coin than you can lose
-transaction speeds which are slow are a serious problem in bitcoin scaling
-there is less innovation and more argument going on in bitcoin than some other coins, bitcoin is large enough that consensus is difficult, future change is less likely than with some other coins, there are other side solutions to bitcoins problems that may not require bitcoin to change much
-bitcoin.org IS the generally accepted bitcoin website, NOT bitcoin.com
-important other risks compiled by themetalfriend
-coinbase has insurance up to $250k USD for you USD Wallet which DOES NOT cover your bitcoins or other crypto currencies, they claim to have separate insurance for your crypto currency but it is unclear how much

Community

there are a lot of memes
-hodl, GameKyuubi mistyped hold and it spread
-to the moon, where everyone hopes the price will go
-coin on a rollercoaster, it is highly volitile market you will see this during fluctuations
-this is gentlemen, via Liquid_child , here
-lambo/roadster, a car people want to buy when they get rich
-the cost of pizza, early days someone bought a pizza for 10,000btc which is worth over ~80million USD today
-tesla/vehicle with a bitcoin chart, cytranic posted a picture that spread
-intersting guide by stos313 , here. I do not agree with everything but it has a lot of useful information.

CORRECTIONS

Edit: Adding in user comments.
Edit: Crosslinking to a more Beginner Version.
Edit: Note in an earlier edit of this guide I said.
note that most of the development on bitcoin is by employees of one company, it is open source but their priorities may not align with the community
This is not true. Blockstream appears to have a high representation but not an overwhelming amount. You can compare blockstream's employee page and bitcoin's commits in the last year. Thank you to lclc_ , trilli0nn , and Holographiks for pointing this out. See this for a detailed break down.
Edit: Clarification that FDIC insurance does NOT cover crypto currency/assets.
Edit: Clarity on who owns bitcoin.org

Good Luck and Hodl.

Please comment if your experience is different. Or call out things I missed.

Dear Pundians,
Thank you for participating in the AMA session with Pundi X co-founder and CEO Zac Cheah.
For those of you who may have missed it, the live recording of the AMA session held on July 3 at 10:00 am GMT+8, tackling Q2 progress and addressing questions and concerns by the community members, can be viewed here. A side note that today’s AMA video quality and setting was not ideal. We acknowledge this situation and will make improvement for our next AMA session.
You may also find a summary of the Q2 progress presentation as well as all the detail Q&A below.
## Pundi X Q2 2019 Highlights
* Pundi X has integrated more public chains into our products. In Q2, we completed integration of Binance Chain. NEM chain is in the work. As of today we’ve launched BNB, the Binance Chain native Coin and XEM, NEM native coin on Pundi X payment platform. We will integrate at least one more public chain in Q3.
* The transactions on XPOS for Q2 is 15.5 million in USD, which is close to 300% quarterly growth. The number of transactions is 29,367, which leads to a 11% growth QoQ.
* XPOS has successfully received FCC and KC certifications. A new certification for Latin American market is on the way. * To expand XPOS footprint, Pundi X’s integration with a new leading mainstream point-of-sales device is in the work. Stay tuned for the announcement.
* Pundi X Open Platform was launched in May, 2019, which now supports ERC20 and BEP2 token listing. Moving forward, we will continue to support tokens from other public chains.
* A 3,000 XPASS order from DigiX, a gold-based token, and a 10,000 XPASS order from BitCobie this quarter.
* XPOS is spread in use in over 30 countries. We’ve published a map of XPOS location of self-report XPOS merchant directory. You can find a list of selected XPOS merchants at [https://www.pundix.com/products\](https://www.pundix.com/products). * The QoQ growth of XWallet is tremendous at 43%. In the previous quarter, we have less than 20k users, whereas in Q2 we have hit 297k XWallet users.
More updates on XWallet:
* Supported BNB and NEM tokens; 2FA, face ID, and optimized SMS serviceAvailable on iOS, Android as well as in Samsung Galaxy Store
New features coming up in Q3:- DApp integration - Decentralized wallet- In-app crypto payments - Chat service, which will be compatible with a commonly used chat app- f(x) testnet features to be rolled out first in XWallet
## Other notices coming up in Q3 2019
* The Q2 token removal will take place on July 14, 2019, which will involve in total 34 billion of NPXS and NPXSXEM (22 million worth in USD) removal. In the past 365 days, we’ve removed a total of 36.1 million US dollar worth of NPXS and NPXSXEM.
Before Q2 removal, the total supply of NPXS ERC20 is 266,962,422,906.53 and NPXSXEM is 95,816,218,929. [See Q1 removal here.](/pundix/recap-of-ama-with-zac-on-july-3-and-q2-report-a23de165dd28)
* [NPXSXEM will be ported to Binance Chain from July 20](/pundix/npxsxem-will-be-on-binance-chain-c6485f17726b). * XPhone pre-order will start in late July with a new product name. Stay tuned. Check out the teaser video that we are releasing it across our communication channels. ## Q&A
## On XPOS
* **Where are we on official global location of XPOS?**
Zac: We have made a map on our official website that merchants can self report and feature their locations. It’s at [https://www.pundix.com/product\](https://www.pundix.com/product). We’ll be increasing and updating the map once we have permission form the merchants to update their locations.
* **The marketing from pundi has shifted from 100,000–700,000 xpos units by 2021 to 100,000. I understand the bear market has affected this but please share the strategy moving forward to hit your goal. How do you feel about hitting this goal?**
Zac: The 100K XPOS target has always been the initial goal and it’s stated in our whitepaper. And we are still working on achieving the goal by the end of 2021. Part of our growth strategy is to also explore the possibility to port our platform to traditional POS manufacturers to increase the adoption, which is ongoing at the moment.
* **1 year ago you sent 5000 XPOS somewhere. When, at least half of them, will be working? 3 year target was 100,000 by 2021. Now we have only 150 units, how do you expect to reach this goal?**
Zac: Yes, we have shipped thousands of XPOS to over 30 countries in the world. The 150 you’ve mentioned are the featured merchants which are published on the map. The active XPOS devices are deployed over 33 countries and we are actively talking to B2B partners to have higher wholesale and big deployments.
* **How many XPOS are live and used?**
Zac: We have gone through a very serious bear market, and some of the initial inbound requests for XPOS are not delivered. However, we are working slowly but surely with our Business Development team to not just roll-out into individual buyers, such as what we did on Pizza Day, but also to B2B partners. With the certifications approved, that will also help us to officially roll out to some of the key markets.
Individual merchants can use XWallet collection feature to accept crypto payment with QR code. For the merchants who have physical offline storefronts, they can use XPOS to enable the instant crypto transaction seamlessly. Moreover, as mentioned previously, we are exploring the integration on leading traditional POS terminal so that their distributors have option to enable crypto transaction feature. As for the challenge to adopt XPOS, it is the regulatory compliance in different countries. For this, our legal team think ahead and encourage our merchants to complete KYC.
I must be very honest to say the activation takes longer time than we expect but it will be worth at the end.
* **What’s the average number of transactions per xpos in use?**
Zac: The transaction number has increased very well. The number of each XPOS differs, due to the frequency of using crypto currency to purchase item or crypto assets. There’s no standard answer to this, but overall we see the transaction number and volume are going up.
* **How do you plan to reach the target of 100,000 by 2021?**
Zac: One of the challenges that we have is regulatory compliances in different countries. There are certain markets that do not allow crypto currencies and some require a clear approval for us to deploy XPOS. We are working on both challenges by talking to governments and applying for certifications. So how we plan to reach 100,000 XPOS user by 2021 is to work with distributors, B2B partners on a government / business level, and with existing POS companies to integrate our software solution into the system.
* **We understand as there was bear market and hence Xpos usage demand was low. Are you guys seeing growth of Xpos usage with current market conditions. Can you guys put some statistics comparison like last 30 days Xpos usage vs any month from bear market usage?**
Zac: It is very clear that as we moved out from the bear market, the demand for XPOS has been increasing. As we’ve shared just now both the transaction number and volume of Q2 have beaten Q1. We’ll be able to share more transaction numbers once we receive approval from our XPOS merchants.
One exciting thing is that, with the listing of different tokens, we also see users using these tokens as a way to transact on XPOS, which means we will be having more ways to transact and this is a growth point for XPOS.
* **When will there be more details for XPHONE and XPOS HANDY?**
Zac: For XPOS handy, we have finished production and it will be released in Q3
* **When will the iOS version of XWallet and XPOS be fully translated to other languages?**
Zac: Right now, the XWallet has Traditional Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German and English. With the latest version update, it now includes Portuguese. XPOS also comes with many languages and we hope to finish with more language, either working with professionals or volunteers. If you’re interested in volunteering, please contact us.
* **When will the Merchant back office have Product Registration and SKU id ability and also integrate with other POS software?** * **When will the top-up feature go away for XPOS to allow liquidity for XPOS**
Zac: We constantly update features in XPOS and merchant backend to make it easier for distributors and merchants to use. We understand that one of the ways for mass adoption is to enhance our distributor management system. With that, the distributors can manage manay XPOS at one time with different merchants.
Please stay tuned as we announce more and more functions of this feature.
## On Dubai
* **When will we see the deployment of the XPOS in Dubai?** * **Can we spend NPXS on the Dubai XPOS?**
Zac: As with all big projects there are a lot of moving parts, that includes working very closely with the local government, in Dubai’s case, the Credit Bureau of the Finance Ministry. Things are progressing for the Dubai project but due to confidentiality agreements with the parties involved, we cannot reveal much. All we can say is that we and our Dubai partners are working hard to have XPOS roll-out in the Dubai market and the UAE.
We are also discussing aggressively with Dubai partners whether to include crypto assets in the XPOS in Dubai. That clearly will involve local compliance and legal for that to happen.
* **Your system upgrades expect merchants to have downtime on their XPOS terminals, can you explain if you plan to run a business why this would be considered feasible (specially at the rate you have been doing your upgrades)?**
Zac: Yes, the benefit / strength of the XPOS is that most of the updates can be done on the fly. For example, when we have a token update on our XPOS where developers submit their tokens on Open Platform, the updates of this token are on the fly, which means that once we approve the token on our Open Platform, it will automatically appear on XPOS without any software updates.
The great thing that we believe about XPOS is not just the support of crypto assets, but also the ability to update most things on the fly, which means that whenever we have a good feature or a new token, the updates will be done instantaneously.
* **Can you guys arrange at least a community voting which is the next blockchain we would like to see next in XPOS? Voting will help to prioritize to chose the projects.**
Zac: One of the reasons why BNB is being listed on the XPOS is simply because of its popularity and also our user demand, in a way that we are already answering to our community’s request.
Right now, our main focus is getting all the tokens submitted on Open Platform to be listed on the XPOS. The submission process includes legal and compliance valid, so our legal and compliance teams are working hard to make sure that we have more tokens to roll out onto Open Platform, which means that they will be on XPOS, XWallet, and XPASS.
As to a specific voting mechanism, we’d like to consider that and hopefully we’ll be able to run a specific voting for the chain which users would like to see.
* **While comparing Xpos handy to Square POS devices at least with mobile it’s very cheap like under $30 and easy to use. When can we expect such light weight and cheaper version for XPOS? Is team working on such devices ?**
Zac: There are different POS companies around the globe and pour focus is to work with these POS companies with our software, so that a crypto sales feature will be part of the existing POS system. The more support of crypto asset usage using our software on existing POS, the better it is for global adoption.
We actually strongly believe that the pricing of our POS system is competitive in the market. And one of the great features of the XPOS is that the merchants will not need not to pay a certain percentage to existing acquirer but to be able to earn certain percentage from each transaction. That is the key differentiator for merchant to want to adopt this.
* **From the website with some of the key Countries for XPOS adoption looks great. However, the concern is for Venezuela, there is no reference link like the others have. Can you guys add the link with details to clear the ambiguity?**
Zac: Let’s give a little bit more patience so that we can actually release more information about our Venezuelan partnership. The good news is that we expect concrete news from Venezuela in the coming 2 weeks. So stay up-to-date about our Venezuelan roll out on XPOS, the best way is to subscribe to our telegram group for Venezuela.
## On Partnerships
* **Are there some major partnership in the works? I’m also interested in how you do immediate transactions? Do you anticipate scaling issues?**
Zac: The way XPOS is being designed is that when you use your crypto assets to purchase, it will have instantaneous confirmation because the action is an off-chain process. An on-chain action happens when a user who owns crypto assets in our system transferring the assets out of the Pundi X ecosystem to their own wallets; or to transfer crypto assets in Pundi X from an off-chain to a private wallet, which we will have very soon on XWallet itself.
That is why we are able to handle scaling. When a person wants to use crypto currency to buy a coffee, the transaction will happen instantaneously.
For specific partnership, especially with B2B partnership, we oblige to the NDA that we have signed. But if you follow us closely, you’ll know that we go to different parts of the world, talking to major companies to try to land more deals so that NPXS usage will increase dramatically.
* **Any big partnerships for making xphone or using the software for xBlockchain?**
Zac: These partnerships are also subjected to NDA, so please be patient for us to release more news.
* **When will XPOS have approval to process Visa and MasterCard payments?**
Zac: We have met representatives from these players including some of the key management people. They are obviously looking into crypto currency attentively, and we hope that there’s something we can do with MasterCard and/or Visa.
This is something that the community has suggested and we agree fully. Please allow us with some time to work on this. We have also showcased XPOS to the CEO of MasterCard. For what or when will anything happen, please wait for our official announcement.
* **What’s the status on Quantum fund and their contribution or involvement with Pundi’s project?**
Zac: We announced last year that we are creating a fund to invest in projects beneficial to our ecosystem. We’ve identified some interesting projects, and we have invested in at least 1 project. The reason why we’re investing in that project is because of the services that it will bring onto the Pindi X ecosystem. So the purpose of the investment of the companies is that these companies in turn will benefit on our ecosystem. This is our key consideration.
The team has evaluated the projects that will benefit the Pundi X / Function X ecosystem. Vic and his team will be able to reveal more details on the companies we have invested in and how they will contribute to our ecosystem in Q3.
* **Recent update on NPXSXEM is highly ambiguous as mentioned that it will be now BEP token and later once FX goes live it will get back to Fx platform. Why you guys had so rush to use Binance chain only for few months? Isn’t you guys switching to much in a short time span?**
Zac: Liquidity and utility have been an issue for NPXSXEM. Due to the design philosophy and the limit of token that can be created on NEM’s smart contract, we are only able to create a small number of tokens on NPXSXEM. By moving into the Binance chain for NPXSXEM, the BEP2 token version will be able to support all the NPXSXEM tokens, which means that we’ll migrate and also be able to make sure all the NPXSXEM tokens are under the same contract address.
We believe with the strong liquidity, we will be able to give our NPXSXEM token holders a good reason of what the token holders have been waiting for. We hope to bring NPXSXEM to match the level of NPXS.
* **When #XRP?**
Zac: Our OpenPlatform is a currency agnostic platform, which means that we will work on integrating public chain as well as tokens that are most requested by the users. We’ll also be looking into the listing of different tokens that are being mentioned by the community.
As said, we will have at least one more public chain integration in Q3, perhaps even more.
* **Are you as a company going to try and connect with libra? If they have said they want to be a payment remittance service, have Square, PayPal, Visa on board I as an investor would prefer you try to join them rather than beat such large competitors**
Zac: Of course, we’ll be delighted to work with Facebook and also the Libra coin. Pundi X and XPOS is a currency agnostic / currency neutral platform, if there’s opportunity to list Libra coin or work with Facebook in different ways to promote crypto currency adoption, we’ll certainly look into that and work on reaching out to them.
## On Trading
* **Can you confirm during AMA, Pundi team is not involved with any trading with their own token like selling over time to manage the fund to run the company.**
Zac: All the wallet addresses of the team holdings are disclosed and transparent. This is one of the first things that we did after ICO. Hence, our token holdings are transparent and everyone can monitor our fund transactions. Also, we have strict internal financial regulation and compliance, shows that we are here to build a long-term project.
The best way to make NPXS or the NPXSXEM to rise is real daily life use case.
* **When will you stop manipulating NPXS chart?**
Zac: Our focus has always been and will be building great products. The more product usage, the demands for NPXS and NPXSXEM will increase. Let’s address again that, Pundi X the company is NOT involved in any manipulation of the NPXS price.
There are trading teams, market makers, financial institutions that profit from the drop and rise of token prices in the crypto market. The good thing about NPXS is that we have managed to create a high liquidity by listing on 40+ exchanges and having global trades and demand from all over the world. We hope this and coupled with the fact that we are a solid product and roll out the use cases, the demand of NPXS will only continue to rise and will be able to deter any of the traders or speculators there is for NPXS.
These traders gain profit from manipulating tokens whether BTC or other tokens. In fact, the traditional financial markets have similar challenges as well. What I want to stress is that, we at Pundi X, do NOT speculate or manipulate the price. We work very hard to create demands for NPXS and as a company, it is only beneficial for us to see the prices of NPXS and NPXSXEM rise.
* **Can we please address the elephant in the room which is the Binance bot with huge sell walls and buy walls causing huge distress and concern among users?**
Zac: First, I cannot confirm nor deny that whether Binance has a bot. I think this is something that you need to ask Binance. We need to work with Binance because Binance has one of the biggest liquidities, if not the greatest liquidity, for NPXS. The best way to counter manipulators is to create more use case, more demand and more acceptance of our tokens.
* **Why on almost all exchanges do you not offer a USDT trading pair?**
Zac: We have USDT trading pairs on Bittrex, Bittrue, and more. In addition, we have fiat pairs in Korean Won, IDR, INR, and Turkish liras. We will continue to work on adding trading pairs for NPXS to make it more liquidate.
* **Why don’t you offer a stable coin sell and purchase on the xpos to help with adoption? Places in Africa with volatile currencies would go crazy for this.**
Zac: It’s a great observation. This is a request that’s been asked from many users. We’re working on stable coin listing on XPOS and hopefully it’ll come soon. Stable coin requires a greater compliance and legal validate, which we have been working on since months ago and we hope to have the stable coin up in XPOS soon.
* **When will you add an active tracker for coin burn, whether its measured in usd, NPXS or whatever you choose. The community has been asking for this on twitter, reddit and telegram for this entire year.**
Zac: It will be hard for us to have a daily tracker of the coin burn, but what we might be able to work on is a tracker which have shown all of the tokens that have been removed from the usage. Thank you for giving us this great suggestion and we will work on it in some form.
Zac: Our token supply has always been specified in our white paper, and as promised in our white paper, we will continue to remove tokens through usage and use cases, which we’re working on all the time.
* **Price movement. When will NPXS go to which price?**
Zac: We cannot comment on the change of the price. Our focus is on building products. We hope by doing that the NPXS value will go up. Again, there’s no way that we can comment on the price.
**I believe that burning tokens every 14 weeks keeps the price suppressed and will only lead to huge pumps and dumps. Imo, If the burns were more frequent, the price would move organically.**
Zac: We continue removing tokens quarterly per advised by our legal and compliance team.
**Is it mandatory npxs swap? What happens for token we have in binance?**
Zac: No it’s not a mandatory NPXS swap for FX.
**How many NPXS or NPXSXEM was converted?**
Zac: In Q2, we will remove 29B NPXSXEM and 9B NPXS.
## On XWallet
* **Why not put in XWallet like the place where we can buy and sell like restaurants and shops?**
Zac: You are correct. In fact, if you look at XWallet, there is a merchant feature, whereby you can register as a merchant. By becoming a merchant, you will be able to print out your QR code and stick it on your restaurant. People are able to make payment through this QR code. This will act like a mini-XPOS.
* **In addition to that having multiple different blockchain in XWallet will increase the XWallet adoption. Hence, we would like to see aggressive game plan and execution from the team and would like to hear that**
Zac: That’s a great suggestion. Every day we want to increase use cases for XWallet. In fact, our XWallet update is one of the most frequent in the market. Within 5 months, we have over 10 updates on iOS and Google Play. This does not include soft update which happens every several days. In my view, the effort is very tremendous.
* **Is there any plan to add Swap option within XWallet so that people can trade the coins within XWallet?**
Zac: Yes, there’s such plan and in fact there is an upcoming feature that people will be able to use coins in XWallet to exchange into other things. The exact form and format have not been reviewed. We hope to share more when we have concrete example. But what you suggested is what we are planning for months ago.
* **When will XPOS and XWallet have fiat on ramps?**
Zac: This is a good question. It’s not only involved with regulatory compliance but also involved the technical part. This is also something we are planning for months. Once approved, hopefully we are able to support fiat currency on ramps and off ramps on XWallet.
**On Others*\*
* **How is the internal organization doing? Currently how many employees work for Pundi? Currently how many job positions are open?**
Zac: Pundi X has grown tremendously. We are now having over seven offices around the globe. I’m sitting in the Singapore office. We have office in Jakarta, Taiwan, Tokyo, Shenzhen, São Paulo and London. These are the places we have physical offices and house approximately 100 full time employees of Pundi X.
The positions open from Pundi X are legal associate in Singapore and other offices. We are looking for more R&D people, especially in Taiwan. We are looking at marketing and PR people in different parts of the world. And we are looking for POS distributors. As a POS distributor, you will work with our business development team and also our technical team to roll out many XPOS which you have a network to control in your local market.
* **Would you consider removing the KYC to allow u.s. holder to stake and be rewarded?**
Zac: We would love to have more users, including US. However, our compliance and legal advisors have not allowed us to accept US holders to stake and be rewarded.
I’m sorry to say that but this is after serious consideration to make such a decision. In fact, it is a very hard decision because we have healthy user base in the US.
will continue to monitor the situation in the different markets and be compliant. There are also ways to be rewarded when using XWallet service without KYC. We are looking into to explore more on this and launch new features. Hopefully we are able to bring the beta version for you to test this week or next.
**On XPhone*\*
* **Where are we on pre-sale announcement of Xphone? It was highlights of Q2 goal. If we are getting delay, that’s ok. But at least community will have some clarification why it’s getting late and when approximately it coming?**
Zac: Pre-sale order will start this month. It’s likely the end of July. Pre-sale will take place in different channel including the official website and XWallet. Apart of our own channel, the pre-sale will go live on a 3rd party channel. People will be able to pre-order crypto either in crypto or in fiat.
* **Can you discuss in AMA, is participants can pay with Crypto or Credit/debit card or in both ways?**
Zac: As a crypto company, we prefer payment in crypto, but fiat, Visa, MasterCard, and other traditional payment methods will be accepted on different pre-order channels. Stay tuned for pre-order which will happen in late July.
* **Will the Xphone be open to purchase in all regions of the world?**
Zac: Yes, pre-orders will be able to be done on-line, and products will be shipped from our offices to users in different parts of the world.
* **Will the blockchain mode on the Xphone be operable during the testnet or will this function not work until mainnet?**
Zac: XWallet and XPhone are the first channel and avenue for Function X testnet, so once the testnet is operateble, we will start to engage certain services on XWallet and XPhone into Function X testnet, and ultimately into mainnet. Slowly but surely.
* **Does Xphone have hard protective cover,extra Sim slot, also is it enhanced with ip68 water rating?**
Zac: XPhone will not be waterproof, so please do not submerge XPhone into water. XPhone will definitely be eavesdrop-proof because we’re using a blockchain mode, only you and you control your own conversation.
* **Which country accept the Xphone?** * **Will I also be able to use the SIM-card?** * **The blockchain modus will work in every country (what in the absense of nodes)?** * **Will the XPhone I buy now support updates in the future?**
Zac: People from any country will be able to buy XPhone on-line. You will be able to use a SIM for we have built a SIM slot. Wherever you are, the XPhone can be turned on to become a node.
Will XPhone support future updates? Yes, of course. Just like the XPOS, we support silent update. It will be like how we support XPOS, many updates. The updates will always be supported on XPhone.
**On Function X*\*
* **When is the detail white paper coming for FunctionX? Why the team is very resistive to have well documented white paper? We need scientific approach and well documentation on FunctionX to have developers to be more involved.**
Zac: Yes, developer involvement is a key criterion of the growth of Function X. We have done 2 things, one is that we have set up Function X Foundation which is led by David Ben Kay and will involve third party adviser and board members. Second, we have set up a developer relations team led by one of our own members as well. This team will work on creating developer documents, developer demos and sample, so that excellent developers can tap into working with Function X resources.
The first version of developer documentation is ready in English and Chinese. We are still polishing up the documents and hopefully to release them soon.
We are also working with third party developers, and are engaging at least 2 third party developer companies, so that we can help create their services on Function X and also XWallet.
We are hoping to showcase a smooth and usable service to the audience, we think this is the key criterion of the Function X growth.
Thank you for this suggestion. We need to update more often on github developer documentation as well.
As for the white paper, we did not have one per se because Function X did not do an ICO. But we will continue to update our white paper and include not only technical details, but also details on the chain and how we can get more developers and users so that the future hardware will be added as a node and you will be rewarded financially, at least through our ecosystem genesis fund. Please stay tuned and there are a lot of things going on in the company. Each and one of us is working hard.
* **Why does the FX ecosystem need a decentralized OS?**
Zac: The mantra of Function X is decentralization and having private control of your data. A full private control of your data comes with a decentralized system not just in transmission of your data, but with the operating system built fully for decentralization , which includes a transmission protocol replacing http. The apps uploaded into Function X will be decentralized as well as the data that is stored on the app, which means that how BitCoin or crypto assets are verified on different nodes will also be part of the way we store data and content.
The decentralized OS is key to fulfilling a decentralized environment for a more private and free usage.
* **What about FX are you most excited about?**
Zac: We are actually creating a shift of how people view of blockchain and how decentralization is not just about transacting commercial commodity, but also data, including your identity, are all decentralized. That is what we are most excited about.
The only way for us to achieve this is to have developer support, for we need the developers to build on the foundation we have to offer those exciting services.
* **We understand that developing a new blockchain is time consuming. As a community we are in a dark space to understand where exactly the development of FX right now.**
Zac: We are working hard on creating the testnet and eventually the mainnet. For the latest updates of Function X, what I can encourage you to do is to go on and subscribe to the Function X telegram group where discussions are made. We have formed the Function X Foundation and created the developer relations team, so that the Function X progress will go smoother and with more partnership from outside, whether it’s developers, third party companies, teleco, etc.
* **When FX goes live on the mainnet, will FX coin be used to stake and earn NPXS? how will staking work on that new mainnet?**
Zac: The NPXS/NPXSXEM staking will last till March 9, 2020 as announced. What we are committed is to create more use cases. For FX tokens, the use cases will be focusing on the Function X Chain and the use cases on Function X that include DApp on Function X and different hardware/software services.
* **When fx testnet will be available?**
Zac: First I would like to thank you for your constant support. In Q3, we plan to open Function X testnet so that we will be migrating and creating certain use cases that can be used on Function X testnet, starting with our own XWallet. Which means, the XWallet will migrate some features into Function X testnet, and slowly followed by our other Pundi X products, including XPhones, XPASS, Open Platform and Function X own developer related products from third parties.