As you know, the world’s first crypto-currency was Bitcoin, launched in 2009. The developers aimed to create an independent digital currency for online payments. By the time the first altcoin with similar functionality appeared, almost two years had passed. Later, the idea of decentralized currency was accepted by many companies, which facilitated the issuance of new coins, based on bitcoin’s open code. Altcoins are characterized as similar to BTC in the term of functionality algorithms and are called to deal with bitcoin vulnerabilities. According to CoinMarketCap, Ethereum, Cardano (ADA), Polkadot, Uniswap, Litecoin, Enjin are the most promising altcoins in the term of market capitalization.

Altcoins differ in their functions and the sphere of the appliance. Operating on their unique blockchain, these networks are not just copies of the first cryptocurrency. Technically, altcoins do not depend on bitcoin, but their value obeys the law of supply and demand. However, it mainly refers to famous blockchain projects. Startups that haven’t managed to fill a niche and hold the community’s attention, react harshly to fluctuations in the rate of Bitcoin. However, to varying degrees, Bitcoin’s volatility affects the entire cryptocurrency market.

There are some bitcoin aspects that altcoins can solve or improve. For instance, transaction confirmation speed with bitcoin can take up to an hour, since some altcoins provide near-instantaneous validation speed! On the other hand, there are plenty of projects that look further and don’t focus only just on the crypto industry and financial sector. They develop the cloud storage, function in the gaming industry, or let’s say, work on decentralized applications. They strive to make cryptocurrency payments even faster and more secure, introduce innovative technologies in all spheres of life, and integrate the global economy into cyberspace.

However, we can conclude that crypto-currencies (altcoins) of the second and third generation became much more sophisticated and technically advanced compared to their famous parents. It gives us hope that more and more altcoins will find their place in areas of human activities to facilitate our life.

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Looking at the graph, we’ll see that Cardano came rolling down the last two months. Before the decline we had a big spike, which was during the release of Alonzo Fork back in September. This allowed Cardano to be able to compete with Ethereum and some other technologies in the Smart Contract as well as other technology areas. This ultimately positions Cardano to become one of the next up and coming cryptocurrencies and blockchain usage.

Although the spike in September pushed Cardano up to 4th on the list, the decline had it slipped down to 6th last day. The chart certainly is ill-looking if you take a peek over the last two months. However, now, with the new developments emerging, we see quite a few promising reasons to believe it will tick up.

First of all, we’re gonna see people start building on this currency. One of the big differences over other altcoins that slipped into oblivion is its real world use. Cardano has a fast blockchain, the prices and transactions are extremely reasonable compared to Ethereum and others. They also come with all same functionalities that they say more expensive cryptocurrenices and blockchain usages have.

This leaves us no choice but to believe that this will make Cardano one of the big players moving forward in the future — at least pushing it to 3rd or 4th on the list if not to the very top.

Moving forward, we’re seeing some big partnerships emerging to associate with Cardano. The cryptocurrency has already announced their partnership with Dish. The Cardano-Dish partnership enables Dish to give every single customer ID their own Smart Contract. So their ID will be ultimately stored in a Smart Contract. This will be an interesting play for an organization as large as Dish to be able to really begin utilizing the blockchain.

This contributes as one of the big differences that we’ve seen with many other altcoins that have drifted away over time. It’s one thing when there’s a lot of promises and it’s another thing when we see real partnerships with real large companies and real applicable usage. So when the applicable usages builds on, the cryptocurrencies aren’t going away, which is exactly how Cardano is surviving and would continue to.

If every one of Dish’s customer are stored as a blockchain number and Dish keeps on to use it that way, then we’ll have the potential of 200 other companies doing the same. This ultimately contributes the cryptocurrency to become stable and begin to launch from there.

This is really the big reason that you’ll see Cardano in a strong position, which is why we’re strongly building on top of this currency. Its strength, the speed, and its stability are all pretty convincing.

With reasons constantly adding on top of each other to support Cardano, we are now even hosting our own staking server. So please go and delegate your stakes with us.

smartcontractsez.com

Thank you all for sticking with me to the very end. Make sure to protect your kids with a CleanRouter and a CleanPhone to monitor, and keep them safe :)

If you’d like to learn more about the same, kindly check out this video:

Here is the weekly snapshot of what our team is working on, as well as a recap of last week.

Coming up:

Most of the dev team’s work this week involves the token, and e-commerce site modifications and integrations.

Previous weeks recap:

*EXCITING NEWS: Over 75 million BUY tokens have now been staked!

YOUR WEEKLY STAKING REMINDER: Staking is available for the ASA $BUY token!

To access the Staking Program page, please click HERE.

To access our staking guide, please click HERE.

Join the Buying.com Telegram channel for the latest updates on what the team is up to at this exciting time in our roadmap.

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Cryptocurrency did what fiat money and governments couldn’t — drive the economic upliftment of populations by making financial products accessible to all. In countries like Nigeria or Kenya, people prefer receiving remittances in cryptocurrency, rather than their native fiat currencies. Blockchain technology facilitates the real-time transfer of money — inexpensively and securely — helping people of these nations sidestep costly banking systems and remittance corridors. Accompanied with CICO Agent networks supporting cryptocurrency-facing solutions, even the unbanked can avail better financial services.

Last year, a blockchain-based, play-to-earn (P2E) game called Axie Infinity became the sole source of income for many households in the pandemic-hit Philippines. Even for people in Venezuela, the country with the highest annual inflation rate, Axie Infinity is considered a better career path than traditional jobs. With startups like Block Esports and Yield Guild Games loaning out expensive Axies, characters necessary to playing the game, to underprivileged players, many have started new careers in play-to-earn gaming.

While play-to-earn gaming has shed new light on the usage of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, the world has only seen the beginnings of its real-life applications. Below, we detail how the blockchain, with or without cryptocurrency at its helm, can improve and optimize operations in several domains.

The blockchain can help transform the retail experience by becoming the go-to for loyalty rewards: through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that come attached with their intrinsic uniqueness. Imagine a retail store that awards loyalty tokens to its customers in the form of NFTs: customers will get to enjoy an immutable claim to ownership, and also have the ability to resell these NFTs on an NFT marketplace for a profit.

In a 2020 report by the World Economic Forum, more than 1 billion people around the globe do not have a national identity — a major roadblock to availing basic governmental and financial services. The traditional identification system is fragmented and inaccessible for many in emerging markets. Blockchain technology is proving to be a viable alternative for managing identities. Governments can promote the development of self-sovereign identification portals where users only need to enter personal details on their mobile devices and generate the private keys and the public keys to attest the information provided. The public key associated with the distributed identifications, including additional data, can be anchored on-chain, thus helping governments consolidate identities cost-effectively, securely, and within a tamper-proof infrastructure.

In November, a cryptocurrency and open-source distributed ledger called IOTA introduced a beta version of its Data Marketplace, explaining that blockchain could be used as a marketplace to share or sell unused data connected to billions of devices and networks. Most of this data remains available to the big players in internet services, but small companies lose out on getting access to these. A distributed marketplace supported by blockchain the IOTA is leveraging can act as a mediator to store, move and recycle data and enhance its applications.

Copyright and royalty laws on music and other content have grown claggy in a world of unregulated internet access. Blockchain technology can be applied to safeguard those copyrights for digital content downloads, ensuring that the content creator gets their fair share. The protection of royalty and copyright through the blockchain is already seeing its application through NFTs. Artists, both established and up-and coming, are tokenizing their artworks: giving them the opportunity to get a fixed percentage of royalties for every resale of their content. Artists from India have seen their digital artworks sell for 3.9 Ethereum, opening them up to a broader audience and a new way of valuing and protecting their pieces.

Blockchain can improve digital voting because whatever is recorded on the chain remains immutable. So, if a bad actor tries to alter something on the network, the complexity of blockchain technology makes it practically impossible to do so.

Through traditional routes, if an individual sells land or buys a house or a car, they need to transfer or receive a physical title, through their local government offices. This is a system that has not been changed for decades, resulting in aged, damaged, or possibly, lost titles. Instead of managing the details related to the transfer of ownership on paper, blockchain can help store titles on-chain, enabling a transparent view of this transfer and exhibiting a crystal-clear picture of legal ownership.

Blockchain technology makes real-estate and private company assets that are large or illiquid easily accessible to small investors. These assets can be tokenized on-chain so that potential investors can buy them in fractions, therefore reducing the entry barrier.

One of the primary goals of blockchain technology and DeFi is to drive financial inclusion for the people who don’t have access to a bank account. For a majority of the population in emerging markets, maintaining a bank account is too expensive, and hardly competitive in terms of savings account interest rates, or in a lot of municipalities, impossible, due to the physical absence of a financial institution. DeFi protocols, like AAVE and Compound, on the other hand, have created a decentralized financial system that people can access even without a traditional bank account. These DeFi protocols are referred to as money legos owing to the cascading earning opportunities they create through composability, unlike a bank. Therefore, it is not surprising to witness the growing interest in DeFi, especially in developing countries. But how much of this world is really accessible? Is there a direct connection between the DeFi and the real world?

Interests earned on a decentralized lending service still cannot be directly used to pay to real-world merchants, despite early promises of adoption from major merchants. However, individuals from emerging markets often use cryptocurrencies, usually earned from play-to-earn gaming, to pay for real world utilities. To do that, they follow a roundabout path of converting cryptocurrencies to cash before they can use them in real life, with conversions sometimes failing. In a bid to alleviate this sore spot, XLD Finance is creating the necessary bridge between DeFi and CeFi to drive home true financial inclusion. XLD Finance’s ultimate vision is to integrate DeFi with on-ground financial rails in developing nations. The process kick-started with xSpend: a platform where individuals can use in-game tokens, like SLP, and stablecoin to buy mobile prepaid credits or pay utility bills.

Blockchain technology continues to show a wide array of real-life applications: spanning retail, identification, government services, and real estate, among others. A major hindrance from true mass adoption are institutions that have become set in their ways — but many new players have come out of the woodwork, implementing solutions to bridge the gap between DeFi and the real world.

XLD Finance is leveraging blockchain technology to bring about financial inclusion in emerging markets through its ecosystem of products and services, enabling the free, convenient, and safe movement of assets between DeFi and CeFi, reinforcing its goal in building a strong and inclusive financial infrastructure for the DeFi space and its adopters, especially in emerging markets.

To learn more about the XLD Finance ecosystem and be alerted for future updates, please visit our website, xSpend, or follow us on Discord, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and Telegram.

Günümüzde internet kullanımı o kadar yaygın ki internetin nasıl çalıştığı hakkında çoğumuzun bir fikri yok. 5G sayesinde Çin’in bir şehrindeki doktor, başka bir şehirdeki hastayı internete bağlı bir robot ile ameliyat edebiliyor. Bugünleri de gördük ama internet nasıl doğdu? Adı tam internet olmasa da bir ağ üzerinden sosyal bir iletişim kurma fikrini 1962 senesinde ortaya atan kişi MIT’li J.C.R. Licklider. Notlar halinde hayal ettiği bu sisteme “Galaktik Ağ” adını vermiş. Hayal ettiği sistem günümüzün internetinden çok farklı değil. Birbirine bağlı bilgisayarlarla, ağ sayesinde, kullanıcıların hızlı bir şekilde iletişim kurduğu ve istedikleri programları istedikleri zaman kullanabildiği bir konsept hayal etmiş. Licklider öğrencilerini epey ikna etmiş olmalı çünkü ondan sonra gelen MIT’li jenerasyon bu konsepti detaylandırıp bir deney bile yapmışlar. 1965 yılında Thomas Merrill ve Lawrence G. Roberts, Kalifornia eyaletinde telefon hatları üzerinden birbiriyle konuşabilen en büyük ağı hayata geçirmiş. Bu deney sonrası bilgisayarların birbirine bağlı olmasının işlemleri zorlaştırmadığını tespit etmişler. Aradan geçen 8 yıllık araştırma ve farklı ölçeklerdeki deneyler sonucu 1972’de Bob Kahn yönetimindeki ekip “Uluslararası Bilgisayar İletişimleri Konferansı”nda (ICCC) halkın da gözlemleyebileceği bir şekilde bilgisayarlar arası ağ teknolojisini sunmuşlar. Yine 1972 yılında “elektronik postanın” tanıtımı yapılmış. (Bu konu hakkında daha fazla bilgi için “ARPANET” projesini araştırabilirsiniz.)

İnternette gönderilen ilk mesaj “lo”dur çünkü araştırmacılar “login” yazmaya çalışırken sistem ikinci harften sonra çökmüştür.

1970’lerin başında Amerika’daki birçok araştırma okulu “ARPANET” sistemine dahil olmuşlardı. Daha sonra daha küçük yapıdaki okulların da çalışmaya katılması için bir fon kurulmuş. 1980’lerin sonunda 25 okul bu sisteme dahildi. Bu dönemdeki internet dediğimiz yapı sadece yazıdan oluşan bir sistem olduğunu da genç okuyucularımız için hatırlatalım. 1990’lara geldiğimizde CERN’de çalışan Tim Berners-Lee interneti bir sonraki aşamaya taşıdı: “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” (HTTP). Çok detaya girmeden bu sistemin birbiriyle konuşan bilgisayarlar olarak tanımlayabiliriz. Özetle bugün Google Chrome kullanıyorsak bunu Tim Berners-Lee’ye borçluyuz. HTTP’nin altında çalışan bir sistem olan “WORLD WIDE WEB” de Tim Berners-Lee’nin eseridir. Bu sayede üniversiteler, işletmeler ve hatta sıradan insan bile bilgisayarda internete giriyordu. “WORLD WIDE WEB” konsepti aslında bir devrimdir. Bu devrim sayesinde dünyanın herhangi bir yerindeki kişi, internete ulaşımı olduğu zaman hiçbir kurum ya da kuruluşun izni olmadan internete bilgi girebiliyordu. Merkeziyetsiz dünyanın ilk adımları WWW sayesinde atıldı. Adı “NEXUS” olan ilk web tarayıcı yine Tim Berners-Lee tarafından 1993 yılında kodlandı. Aynı senelerde “internette sörf yapmak”

terimini dilimize katan kütüphaneci Jean Armour Polly’i de burada anmak isterim. Kendisi internet hakkında yazılacak çoğu akademik yazıya ilham olmuştur.

Gelişmeleri zaman çizelgesinde incelemenin bir dezavantajı sanki gelişmelerin planlı olduğu yanılsamasıdır. Aslında süreç ilerlerken problem olarak karşımıza çıkan durumlara çözüm üretirken önemli buluşlar ortaya çıkar. Bu kırılma noktalarının biri ise “TLS” ve “SSL”dir. Ne olduğunu detaylarıyla bilmesem de, o derinlik mühendislere kalsın, genel olarak interneti şifrelenmesi durumu diyebiliriz. İletişimi güvenli hale getiren sistemler sayesinde internete ödeme sistemleri eklendi ve özel bilgiler ve yazışmalar yapılmaya başlandı. Bu önemli gelişmeler kriptografi bilimi sayesinde oldu. Kriptografi aslında şifreleme demektir. 3500 yaşında olan kriptografi Mezopotamya’daki uygarlıklardan beri gizli yazışmalarda kullanılan bir teknik: Tek fark artık dijitalde kullanılması.

2000’lere geldiğimizde ise internetin epey yaygın hatta mobil telefonlarda bile rahatça kullandığımız bir sistem olduğunu biliyoruz. Bu noktada bir sonraki aşama, üçüncü bir aracıya ihtiyaç duymadan A kişisinin B kişisine para göndermesi olacaktır ama bu konuyu Bitcoin altında konuşacağız. Şimdi blok zincirin kısa tarihine gelirsek, çoğumuz blok zinciri Bitcoin ile aynı sanıyor. Aslında blok zincirin tarihi çok daha eskiye dayanıyor. 1991 yılında matematikçi Stuart Haber ve W. Scott Stornetta tarafından “zaman damgası” içeren blok zincir ile kırılması imkansız bir sistem hayal etmişler. Zaman damgası; bir elektronik verinin üretildiği, değiştirildiği, gönderildiği, alındığı, kaydedildiği zamanın tespit edilmesini sağlayan elektronik bir veri. İlk duyduğunuzda belki bir şey ifade etmese de bu sistemin fabrikalarda, devlet dairelerinde, işletmelerde vb. kullanıldığını düşünün. Evrak ile yapılan arşivlemede dosyaların kaybolması, istenmeyen kişiler tarafından okunması hatta el ile değiştirilmesi kaçınılmaz. Standart internet sistemlerinde veri uzun dönemde çok yer kaplar. İşte blok zincirin alametifarikası budur. Girilen verinin geriye dönük olarak asla değiştirilememesi ve ölçekleme sayesinde az yer kaplaması. Tabii gelişmeye açık olan konu bu verinin güvenilir kimseler tarafından girmesidir. Bu konuya da daha sonra değineceğim.

Şöyle bir özet geçersek, önce birden fazla bilgisayar birbirine bağlandı. Daha sonra dünyada internete erişimi olan herkes bu sisteme veri girişi yapabilmeye başladı. Bu veriler kullanıcılar arasında güvenli şekilde şifrelense de blok zincir sistemine kadar hala güvenlik zafiyetleri vardı. Ayrıca önceki sistemlerin hepsi bir “admin” yani yöneticiye ihtiyaç duyarken, blok zincirin bir kontrol mekanizması yoktur. Artık tam olarak merkeziyetsiz dünyaya girmiş bulunuyoruz! Çünkü Blok zincir sayesinde girilen verinin değiştirilmesi de imkansız hale geldi. Bir de üstüne girilen verinin zamanı, yeri, giren kişinin bilgileri vb. bilgilerin olduğunu düşünün. 2009 yılına kadar pek ortalarda görülmeyen blok zincir, Bitcoin ile olan entegrasyondan sonra popüler olmaya başladı. Bu konunun detaylarına bir sonraki yazılarda değineceğim…

All opinions expressed on here are owned by the respective writer and should never be considered as advice in any form.

Opsya makes no representation or warranties as to the accuracy and or timelines of the information contained here. Keep in mind that a qualified professional should be consulted before making any financial decisions.