It is becoming increasingly difficult for investors to ignore cryptocurrencies as their prices and reach continue to rise. This has been driven by several factors led by the outstanding performance of the cryptocurrency asset class relative to any other asset class on the planet.

Smart money is finally waking up and allocating its portfolios to crypto as a portfolio diversification strategy. These days, family offices, hedge funds and traditional money managers have a very different perspective on cryptocurrency products and services, with an eye-watering $17 billion worth of institutional capital flooding into the space this year alone.

In recent years, a wide range of options has become available to those who are interested in crypto’s profitability potential. For example, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust ( now valued at around $20 billion) allows investors to speculate on various cryptocurrencies such as ethereum, bitcoin, chainlink etc without the need to buy the crypto directly.

MicroStrategy’s outspoken founder Michael Saylor has been one of bitcoin’s biggest champions in recent years arguing that it will soon be on the balance sheets of cities, states, governments, companies, small and big investors as well as the core to tech innovation at Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. Whether or not you agree with Saylor, his leadership on the topic is clear for everyone to notice and bitcoin maximalists have adopted Saylor as one of their own.

World over, crypto-dedicated investors are trading derivatives on the leading exchanges or participating in the booming decentralized finance (DeFi) space, mainly through staking, lending and borrowing with over $70 billion in Total Value Locked in the DeFi ecosystem.

This new adoption drive is resulting in gains for all sorts in terms of prices of crypto assets, helping break barriers all across the board.

While at the moment, paying for things in cryptocurrencies does not seem to make sense for most people right now, more retailers accepting payments might change that landscape in the future. It will likely take a bit longer before it starts to be a smart financial decision to spend Bitcoin on goods or services, but further institutional adoption could bring about more use-cases for everyday users. This will, in turn, have an impact on crypto prices.

Nothing is guaranteed, but if you buy cryptocurrency as a long-term store of value, the more real-world use cases it gets, the more likely demand and value will increase. The increasing institutional adoption, growth in emerging global markets and booming developer activity all suggest that the rise of crypto assets is having a fundamental impact on the near future. It appears safe to say that 2022 will mark additional gains — financial, technical or otherwise — for the cryptocurrency space.

2021 has been a pivotal year for Bitcoin acceptance and adoption. El Salvador served as a major catalyst when it became the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021.

Meanwhile, inflation has been on the rise globally with no signs of abating, thrusting cryptocurrencies as a store-of-value asset into the spotlight. Billionaire investors Paul Tudor Jones, Ray Dalio, and Peter Thiel have all touted Bitcoin and the crypto industry as a whole as a store-of-value asset in the current rising inflationary environment, in some cases preferring digital gold to the precious metal.

Some Top CEOs, like JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, continue to voice scepticism about the digital currency asset class, yet sophisticated Wall Street traders are increasingly turning to the opportunities presented by digital assets.

Investors have demonstrated not only a willingness but a desire to make room for crypto in their portfolios. In addition, mainstream cryptocurrency acceptance has become a cross-generational phenomenon, with baby boomers increasingly interested in gaining exposure to crypto investment products. The launch of a Bitcoin futures ETF was a major milestone that investors have shown a massive interest in. The applications for the approval of a spot-based Bitcoin ETF are still pending.

Your money goes a lot farther than it would in traditional finance (tradFi).

I’m not talking about cryptocurrencies. I’m talking regular money like US dollars. You can invest without worrying about crypto’s crazy price swings.

But even if you want to, you might not be able to. Most of DeFi runs on the Ethereum blockchain where a single transaction can cost $200!

Below I show you 2 cheap options on how to try using DeFi for the first time.

Legal disclaimer: This is not financial advice.

That said… In DeFi you can earn 10%-20% on your US dollars with very high certainty. Far better than your “high interest” savings account giving you 1% per year. Or the 1–2% you get from bonds. Or an average 10% in the US stock market, which isn’t even guaranteed.

Here are two places that I think are best for someone to try for the first time.

Terra is the 2nd biggest blockchain that can support defi. There’s $19 billion worth of money in there right now.

And Anchor is the most popular defi project on Terra.

What it does is simple:

You deposit US dollar stable coins.

Your money grows at 20% per year.

20% is amazing. If you want to know how it’s even possible and the risks involved, check out my other article.

To use Anchor, you just need UST. That’s the US dollar stable coin on the Terra blockchain. You deposit it into Anchor and that’s it. You can withdraw at any time. When the time comes, just click on a button that says “withdraw”.

Getting set up for the first time is the hard part.

These are the major steps:

Watch my video to go through all those steps in 8 minutes.

Aave is one of the biggest defi apps. Its site looks a little easier to follow, but still not so intuitive.

For starters you can lend your stablecoins to earn an interest rate several times more than your bank will ever give you.

When you lend money on Aave, your money goes into a pool so that other people can borrow it. You earn a variable interest rate, meaning it changes everyday. Right now, it’s at 7% for Tether (USDT). From my experience, variable rates on USDT ended up giving me close to 10% after a year.

The big picture is simple. All you need to do is deposit your stable coins and that’s it.

There are many USD stablecoins on Aave: DAI, USDC and USDT. Even though they’re all pegged to the US dollar, they have different interest rates. Right now USDT happens to be the highest.

The actual steps involved in using Aave:

When it comes time to withdraw, Aave has an extra step. You need to withdraw rewards tokens. Aave’s interest rate has two components. When I said USDT had a 7% interest rate, that was made up of roughly 3.7% base interest plus another bonus 3.3% paid out in MATIC tokens. Those need to be withdrawn separately.

Here’s a video run through of using Aave.com for the first time. https://youtu.be/goGUtGTAtM0

Defi is a lot more than just depositing stablecoins into Terra or Aave.

Borrow on Aave:

You can take things a step further. Try borrowing money. Aave allows collateralized loans. If you have already invested in MATIC and you want to hold it for the long run, you can deposit those into Aave just like you would with USDT. You’ll earn interest in MATIC.

But by depositing, you earn the right to borrow other coins. You can borrow USDT. When you borrow, you also earn reward tokens in MATIC. Taking that into consideration, the net interest rate now is about 1%. Better than a mortgage rate.

So you can let your MATIC earn a small interest rate while you use it as collateral to borrow USDT. You can then deposit that USDT back into Aave to earn interest.

The only risk here is liquidation. If the price of MATIC drops below a certain threshold, your MATIC can get partially sold off to protect the lenders’ USDT you borrowed. The key is to borrow an amount that’s well below that threshold.

Try Binance smart chain

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) was the reigning #2 blockchain in terms of total value locked until Terra surpassed it recently. It is slightly more expensive to use than Polygon or Terra, but still very cheap.

But it has way more defi and dapp options to choose from:

Pancakeswap is the largest decentralized exchange (dex) on BSC. You can try to earn money as a liquidity provider.

Beefy Finance is a yield aggregator where you can see many defi investing options on one page.

Venus.io is a defi app that is much like Aave. There are many more variations of lending.

Whatever you do, stay safe. Do not ever tell anyone your wallet seed phrase. Don’t share your screen with strangers. Don’t trust strangers that message you, especially if they say they are customer support.

My thoughts on DeFi

I spent countless hours playing with DeFi. But even for me, a techie, defi was hard to understand in the beginning. Just navigating any defi web app was confusing enough.

A few people around me want to try it but don’t feel comfortable trying.

That’s why I want to build something that simplifies the entire process. A user of DeFi should not have to try so hard to figure out how all this works. It should be easy enough as online banking.

Follow me to be one of the first to try:

twitter.com

substack.com

In my opinion, Bitcoin is infrastructure.

For one, Bitcoin is indirectly (digital) infrastructure. In other words, since the internet is infrastructure and Bitcoin is related to…

The cryptocurrency market has followed a 4-year cycle for the past eight years. Typically, there is a yearlong bull market where most cryptocurrencies reach new all-time highs. Subsequently, there is a 3-year bear market where the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies falls by 50–75%, if not more, and leads to some projects never recovering. This exact pattern has happened twice before, in 2014 and 2017, and could be happening again in early 2022.

At first glance, this analysis would make sense, as the three years following 2017 saw lackluster price action and Bitcoin reaching a low of around $3,000, only to shoot up to over $60,000 in 2021. If history repeats itself, as it often does, early 2022 will look similar to early 2018 and be the beginning of a massive bear market lasting until 2025.

Though this may be a believable theory, it fails to fully capture the current state of the cryptocurrency market. Unlike 2018, 2021 saw massive mainstream adoption and marketing efforts, which brought more investors into the cryptocurrency space than ever before, along with the general public’s knowledge of NFTs and Dogecoin. Some believe that this newfound adoption will help prop up the cryptocurrency market in a way that was not possible in 2018, and thus history will fail to repeat itself and cryptocurrencies will continue to climb. Additionally, whenever a pattern is found in the world of investing, many people try to make money by playing the patterns and following trends. However, this style of investing rarely works, as patterns in investing tend to not repeat themselves once they have been discovered and taken advantage of. This optimistic viewpoint could help explain why this recent price decrease is merely a dip, and why Bitcoin is still on a trajectory to reach $100,000 in the short term.

The truth about the current state of the market is likely somewhere in the middle of these two perspectives. While it is true that history does not repeat itself in finance, it is also true that the perception of an impending bear market may scare investors off, leading to negative price action. On the other hand, the amount of development, venture capital, and adoption in the cryptocurrency space will also help to ensure that the cryptocurrency market stays afloat, even during times with negative sentiment.

This most recent price dip can be attributed to the resurgence of COVID-19, specifically the Omicron variant, around the world. This highly contagious variant has caused a massive spike in both infected individuals and ICU beds being used, which has consequently caused labor shortages and a lack of essential workers. With all of this uncertainty surrounding the world, both the stock market and the cryptocurrency market have taken a hit, as investors move to safer assets and do not feel comfortable taking high risks.

If Omicron proves to not be a major issue, and the world quickly returns to normal, this dip may be bought up quickly as investors regain confidence. However, if there are continued labor shortages and even the possibility of stay-at-home mandates again, investors will continue to lose faith in the markets and prices will continue to drop.

Even though it is impossible to predict what the market will do with complete accuracy, an informed and well-researched take can help prevent downside risk. Any cryptocurrency investor should only invest an amount they are comfortable losing, and must accept the high volatility required to achieve the massive gains that they ultimately want.

By Lincoln Murr

You should read this article if you’re curious to know more about Crypto.com strategy and Crypto:CRO (token) and its current and future utilities. This post is NOT a paid partnership;

We will divide the article exploring:

Crypto.com or CDC is a centralised cryptocurrency exchange app founded in June 2016 by Kris Marszalek, Rafael Melo, Gary Or &Bobby Bao, based in Singapore. The slogan behind the platform, which at the time was called “Monaco Technologies GmbH”, is:

— — — Putting Cryptocurrency in every wallet — — —

The company was renamed crypto.com in 2018 after acquiring the domain owned by Matt Blaze, a cryptography researcher, for an amount that is estimated to be between 5 and 10 million US dollars. The amount of money places crypto.com in one of the TOP 25 most paid domains on the world wide web.

At the time of writing the crypto.com platform has Ten million users and more than 3,000 employees and multiple features including an integrated app platform, an exchange, a non-custodial wallet, last but not least, a lending service and crypto deposit earning.

Crypto.com is known for its aggressive marketing strategy and the multi-million dollar sponsorship that varies from the UFC, Formula One, Serie A, and recently the nomination of Matt Damon as a brand ambassador.

In 2021, the company won the naming right for Staples Center in Los Angeles, paying around 700 million to change the arena’s name to crypto.com.

At the time of writing, the three main focus points of the platform are:

A strong community and the ability to trade more than 200+ cryptocurrencies using a more than simplistic User Interface and a very curated User Experience; UI and UX are fundamental to achieving the company’s vision. So far, they are doing a fantastic job!

A credit card that gives you benefit! Think about your Qantas point if you’re Australian, but convert it into CRO. Also, add all the benefits like “FREE” Spotify from the low tier cards.

An earning program that allows you to make up to 14.5% yield on the cryptocurrencies you’re holding!

Now that we know more about the CRO creator, let’s dip into how and why you should use the CRO token inside and outside the crypto.com platform.

The idea behind the CRO token is to exploit the nature of the blockchain to offer a bridge between a merchant and cryptocurrency users, offering instant and low-cost transactions within a secure and safe environment.

If we want to summarise this in a single sentence, crypto.com is trying to become the new Paypal of the crypto space!

The idea is to offer up to 50.000 transactions per second and use the decentralisation concept to make crypto payment the mainstream option; The goal of crypto.com is to give the ownership, and the management of the payment flows starting from the authorisation for the transaction up until the final settlement.

CRO is crypto.com’s official/native coin based on the Etherum Blockchain (ERC20 token). It provides CDC users with many benefits within the ecosystem and trades the cash for other crypto coins or FIAT currency.

As a native coin for the public crypto.com blockchain, CRO tokens are principally used for settlement, meaning that every transaction that occurs in the chain needs to be backed by CRO to pay for the block transaction fees.

Tokens are mainly earned as rewards for processing and verifying transactions. Each node can stake a fixed amount of CRO tokens in exchange for the right to participate in the network’s operations.

The principal use of the token is for settlement allowing you to pay for real-life products and services with your Crypto by converting them into FIAT currency in real-time.

Crypto.com CARD is the tool they use to allow the user to do this transaction seamlessly; charge your card with cryptocurrency, and behind the scene, the platform will convert your tokens into FIAT currency at the time of purchase.

CRO is hosted on Ethereum and is a PoS (Proof-of-stake) blockchain network. For Staking the token and having a healthy blockchain, the everyday user can stake their coin by the delegated-proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus protocol.

Clients can delegate to a Validator an amount of CRO tokens used to validate transactions on the Crypto.org Chain Network; In return, the platform will reward them with CRO block rewards distributed across the delegators after discounting the validator commission.

As we previously mentioned, the crypto.com chain utilises the Ethereum blockchain, enabling ERC20 compatibility. The network uses a (PoW) Proof of Work algorithm by the Ethash function that requires that the hashing process output create a hash value lower than the threshold that the network has tweaked to ensure blocks minting executing at an appropriate rate.

Crypto.org chain utilises a structured approach of identifying and prioritising potential threats to a system and determining the value that possible mitigations would have in reducing or neutralising those threats.

This ensures that the network can adequately predict, identify, and protect the blockchain against threats using the STRIDE model, which focuses on:

The architecture of the blockchain subdivides nodes into different categories, and each one of them has a precise task:

Council nodes

Council nodes get rewards for each transaction they process as they are responsible for validating settlements and managing the trades in general.

Acquirer nodes

Merchant and customer acquirer nodes provide escrow services, manage settlements for other users, and provide other services and verification related to merchants’ transactions. Acquirer nodes get a percentage of the reward based on each trade they process.

Settlement agent nodes

These nodes sell CRO tokens for stable currencies and settle their operations to ensure merchants access stable price conversion options post-settlement. Settlement agent nodes get a flat-rate fee for each fiat payout they process.

Community nodes

Community nodes help customers and merchants to complete direct transactions. These nodes also serve as a home base for other users wishing to monitor various operations.

The amount of confirmation needed to establish a successful transaction is 35. A completed transaction is irreversible as it will be officially “printed” into the blockchain, and as you know, the blockchain is immutable.

Purchasing the coin is not the only way to own it; The vision of crypto.com is solid and wants even everyday users to acquire CRO in different forms such as:

One of the first methods to earn CRO is to use a crypto.com VISA card for your day-to-day;

There are five cards available to crypto.com’s users; Each one of them requires you to stake a certain amount of CRO token in the platform and rewards you with multiple benefits. I’ll do another article explaining the aftermath of having one of these cards; In the meanwhile, the most crucial information is the CRO Rewards that is the cashback (in CRO) obtained for the purchase made with the card*;

For example, if you purchase a coffee in Sydney where the average is $5.00, you will get rewarded ~0.50 in CRO. Moreover, the more exclusive the card is, the more benefit you will get (e.g. with the Ruby Steel, you will get 100% cashback on your Spotify subscription).

To obtain the card at the time of writing, you must stake CRO coins. Staking CRO coins will give you rewards, too. Therefore it is a win-win.

*Not all the transactions will accumulate rewards.

The Crypto.com EARN is a new product that facilitates the rewards of the cryptocurrency while you’re holding your crypto coins in your wallet with the minimum effort.

Make sure that before you use this product, you understand that some of the offers will lock your coins for a certain period, where you cannot sell them.

The term staking means locking and securing your Crypto holding for a defined amount of time to obtain rewards/interest. Being Crypto.com chain the official chain of the platform, you can imagine that staking CRO is the best reward activity.

The platform gives you benefit such as having very high APY and at the same time getting access to the more advanced VISA CARD that would open you more benefit in return.

PoS (Proof of Stake) is a consensus mechanism used to validate the undergoing transactions. With this type of system, any CRO holder can decide to stake their token to help the network validate a new block of transaction and get rewarded in return.

Stay up-to-date reading the https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-org-chain-intergalactic-roadmap/ CRO’s roadmap. With the aggressive marketing and the more people using the platform, crypto.com is becoming one of the first centralised Crypto exchanges globally. Be sure they will not miss the opportunity to become one of the most used blockchains.

The CRO token had no pre-sale, public sale, or ICO; The token itself is 100% decentralised.

Qantstamp and Certik have audited the smart contract used for daily distribution and the ERC20 Token.

A little over 25B are currently in circulation, and the remaining 5B are used for mainnet staking rewards over the next 10’ish years (now ~173m have been distributed). The coin’s total supply was 100B; the difference between the entire supply and the max supply suggests a deflationary currency.

These figures are fundamental when evaluating a crypto project; Due to the basic principle of supply and demand, the supply of coins significantly influences the currency’s price.

The biggest burning event took place after the lunch of mainnet, where crypto.com burned 70 billion CRO. This event is the most extensive burn ever occurred in the crypto space when writing. (Do you remember when I told you about aggressive marketing? you can take this event as an example, having crypto.com in all the headlines)

The situation after the burn looks like this, where 5.9B will be used for mainnet block rewards for chain validator.

The market capitalisation at the time of writing is:

Why is Crypto.com paying rewards for staking the CRO token? Because the Crypto:CRO is what powers the Crypto.org blockchain that, as we discussed before, is a Proof Of Stake network; The PoS (Proof of Stake) needs people staking coins to be able to mint/forge a new block; With the creation of a new block, the node/validator gets all the fees associated with the transactions inside, and part of those will be transferred to the delegator (crypto.com’s CRO stakers / EARN users)

The number of contributors is relatively small if compared with other blockchains:

And this could be reflected by the low amount of commits:

github.com.

FacebookCrypto.com has around 400k people following Facebook, with more than 350k liking their page.

TwitterTwitter is one of the de-facto social media for cryptocurrencies, and Crypto.com has a blast with 1.5M followers.

LinkedinBecause crypto.com is a centralised exchange, the best metrics to check on LinkedIn is the number of employees: 2000+

RedditThe Reddit community of Crypto has almost 150k members

This article is not an investment guide or financial advice; if you want to invest in this token, please DYOR (Do Your Research).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this publication. You get curious about the CRO and the crypto.com platform; If you think of investing money, use only the money you can lose; cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and can cause huge losses.

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To effectively manage the liquidity pools, Soku Swap leverages Automated Market Maker or AMM. The AMM is a collection of well-defined and complex smart contracts that maintain the equilibrium of the digital money market and provides an efficient trading ecosystem.

Soku Swap creates such liquidity pools for both ERC20 and BEP20 tokens. Therefore, considering the underlying technological concept behind the two, Soku Swap offers a unique choice to the end-users of completing a trade either algorithmically or using the order book mechanism.

These liquidity pools allow users to become liquidity providers and earn significant yields. Apart from this, the platform also offers the possibility of arbitrage using flash loans in a seamless way.

What makes Soku Swap the choice of the crypto community is the fact that it addresses the most important pain point which is the high gas fee in the ecosystem. Gas efficiency is one of the core components of Soku Swap achieved through the use of optimized AMM smart contracts. This allows Soku Swap to provide a 10% lower gas fee as compared to other exchanges. This gas efficiency is shared by all the platform-supported cryptocurrencies that can be swapped.The addition of the Binance Smart Chain for making swaps makes it even more gas-friendly. Even in the current market flooded with NFT trades, Soku Swap allows users to enjoy low gas fees for their transactions.

The liquidity of the user in the Soku Swap pools is managed through SOKU LP, the liquidity tokens issued by the platform. In essence, these tokens represent the liquidity of the user in the Soku pools. If the user stakes on Ethereum, they will receive ERC20 type SOKU LP tokens and for the users providing liquidity on Binance Smart Chain, the token is of BEP20 type.

The purpose of having Liquidity Tokens is to provide further liquidity to the users as they can use these tokens to perform various financial activities without actually taking their liquidity out of the liquidity pools. This helps in two ways:

a. It allows users to gain interest on their staked amount while still being able to use the liquidity through the tokens issued

b. It will maintain the liquidity of the protocol.

The platform creates a truly decentralized environment through the availability of SOKU, the governance token that allows the Soku Swap platform to be truly decentralized. Anyone holding SOKU will be allowed to vote in critical decisions of the protocol such as upgrades or the future of exchange.

Furthermore, for the loyal or constant users who stake SOKU LP and complete a few trades on the exchange each week, a small portion of the trading volume will be allocated to them. This acts as an incentivization model of the platform. With the growth of the exchange, the loyal users of the platform will also enjoy growth in their profits with the added trust of a truly decentralized environment.

To participate in the upcoming ICO from May 3rd to May 7th and learn more about Soku Swap’s plans, team, goals, visit the website at https://sokuswap.finance