One of the great things I must thank PUBLISH0X for is the many new friends I made around the world for allowing me to write here. Every day, minute by minute, something new is learned at Publish0x. It is logical, we are in one of those historical moments of a technological paradigm shift, and it seems unavoidable that these things happen.
What kinds of technologies are being investigated? What do the investors who are going to fund these investigations think? What distribution pattern should we expect for these new venture capital allocations? I believe that hours of panic must be living in the main international financial centers since the slightest mistake in betting on a crypto project can lead to disaster.
A few days ago, chatting about these things with one of my new friends here, @PopPopPrego, the highway example came up. This is an example that is used in chaos theory to analyze the behavior of several individuals that make up a population.
When you are driving your car alone on the highway, you drive your car and you are the owner of all your decisions. When the highway is packed with cars and the traffic is totally blocked, then it is this traffic that drives you. You are no longer the owner of your decisions, but you follow all the reports of the traffic, which, now, took control of your vehicle and your life.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
We all recognize situations that fill anguish like a highway full of cars, and we sometimes feel the sense of helplessness that this causes.
Image by ? ? from Pixabay
How do you resolve these situations of not being able to process all the projects that appear day by day in the crypto-sphere, and manage our FOMO?
In this legendary REM clip of one of his most beautiful songs, a solution is shown at the end.
This would probably have been the solution proposed by the Austrian School of Economics with its methodological individualism.
I imagine that today it must not be easy being a VC assigned to look at projects, protocols, and platforms of the crypto-sphere. The market is flooded! Like a highway full of cars!
Another example that I like to use to describe what the authors of the Austrian School of Economics called "human action" is the growth of mold in the forest.
When there is enough food for everyone, the various mold specimens are evenly scattered throughout the landscape, leading a carefree, quiet life and doing routine things.
Image by Tim Hill from Pixabay
The issue changes when food becomes scarce. Then the mold specimens begin to "collaborate" with each other and come together, forming patterns that follow a natural algorithm totally unknown at the moment in the scientific environment, which belongs to the world of "fractals", and which shows well-defined shapes. Individual specimens "come together" forming collaborative communities to survive.
Image by Nacymac from Pixabay
This is what we coiners are doing at this stage. Those of us who understand that this is not a game to get rich next month and that, on the contrary, the crypto-sphere means the largest quantum leap that humanity has probably experienced in its entire history, we know that we cannot lose sight of the common enemy. What is the common enemy? Well, none other than the system devised some 200 years ago by corporations, banks, and international organizations that legislate so that the 1% of the world's elite (who have as much wealth as the other 99%), do not lose their privileged positions.
If we restrict cryptocurrency analysis to the price of BTC or ETH on cryptocurrency listings, we are looking at the tree and not the forest. In that case, we are using the same model as the previous system. If we only looked at the prices of cryptocurrencies to see if we made or lost money, we would not be "changing" the system, but simply "adapting" it so that it can be used with smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and this is not what Satoshi Nakamoto dreamed of.
Decentralization is the return of power to those who could never have power in the previous system, that is, the 99% of the world population that does not belong to the controlling elite.
We are organizing ourselves like forest mold in circumstances of lack of food. We form communities around different protocols, platforms, and ecosystems. But we must not lose the north that means eliminating the corporate cancerous tissue that governs us. The fear of uncertainty, instability, and the fact of not being able to control our destiny and that everything is always in the hands of a series of charlatan politicians who respond to the interests of these elites, is what paralyzed us for a long time, and it is precisely the crypto-sphere, even in its most tender infancy, that can unravel all this dominating tangle diseased with power.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
With that said, let's move on to today's two tokens.
CHZ
https://www.chiliz.com/en/
https://www.socios.com/
rank CoinGecko #53
Chiliz is a tokenized platform that allows sports fans to become influencers for their favorite team. Chiliz's vision is to provide a currency with which sports and eSports lovers can buy direct voting power in their favorite football clubs. Fans can influence the decisions of their favorite team and also have a say in the league. His/her status would go from being a mere spectator to being an active participant in his/her beloved team.
The Chiliz ERC-20 (CHZ) token is also used as the native digital currency for the “socios.com” platform, where users can purchase custom fan tokens (FTOs) of their favorite teams.
The CHZ token allows access to FTO Fan Tokens. Fan Tokens are digital assets that represent your right to vote in club polls and give you access to exclusive rewards. Each club has its own limited supply of Fan Tokens. Your Fan Tokens are never "spent", your balance will only decrease if you decide to sell. Fan Tokens, like any cryptocurrency, are fungible, that is, they can be exchanged for other 'goods' such as VIP experiences, official products, free tickets, and more.
CHZ was generated in October 2018, and after distribution to early contributors, CHZ was publicly listed on major cryptocurrency exchanges including Binance, BITMAX & KuCoin. Socios.com was launched at the end of December 2019; Juventus was the first club to produce their Fan Tokens ($ JUV), hold a Fan Token Offering, and give their fans the chance to vote on the blockchain.
CHZ powers Socios.com, a consumer-facing product and the first scalable, mainstream hub for fans to buy tokenized voting rights in their favorite teams. The app counts many of the world's football clubs and esports teams, including FC Barcelona, ??Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico de Madrid, AS Roma, Galatasaray, OG, Team Heretics, UFC, Apollon Limassol, Trabzonspor, BSC Young Boys, Sint -Truidense VV, PFL, Novara Calcio, Natus Vincere, Istanbul Basaksehir, Team Alliance, Universidad de Chile, and AC Milan, among its partners. Socios.com allows sports teams to issue digital assets, known as ‘Fan Tokens’ onto the Chiliz blockchain via ‘Fan Token Offerings'. Fan Tokens are issued on Socios.com’s own Proof of Authority side chain. All fan influence polls are executed as smart contracts on the PoA side chain as well.
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
At first, the participation of the fans was rather unidirectional, limiting themselves to cheering the team and praising the best athletes. Later, forward-thinking sports clubs began to involve their supporters in some decisions.
Fan Tokens belong to a particular team or club. Their number is limited and they are fungible digital assets. The more tokens a partner user owns, the more weight his/her vote will have. However, there is a clear antitrust mechanism so that no one can accumulate an excessive amount of tokens and force others to leave. Fans can buy CHZ crypto Fan Tokens or get them as a reward for certain club-related activities.
Sports fans can use their Fan Tokens to vote in the polls. They can be binding or non-binding, but in any case, the surveys influence the policies of the teams.
As of today, Chiliz is 80+ team members strong, across 29 different nationalities. The company has a Malta HQ, runs a development office in Lyon, France, and has active operations in Turkey, Spain, South Korea & Brazil, with team members also active in the UK & Sweden.
As for the Chiliz management team, we have as main figures: Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO, Emma Diskin, COO and Max Rabinovitch, CSO.
Source https://www.chiliz.com/en/
Conclusion. Sport is entertainment and passion. When these two characteristics are combined, a market of colossal dimensions can be produced. In fact, there is no corner in the world where there is no entertainment, sport, and/or passion.
Chiliz is currently in ongoing talks with Formula One and if the team can incorporate popular sports teams from the US, the project could be well-positioned to see further growth as blockchain technology and NFTs become more entrenched in the sports industry.
The NFT market, which includes artwork, sports memorabilia, and collectible cards, grew to more than $ 250 million last year.
Basketball legend Magic Johnson is joining a major sports licensing company that welcomes the rise of the non-fungible token market.
Former baseball player Micah Johnson sold $ 1 million worth of non-fungible tokens in just one minute on Nifty Gateway.
Various reports indicate that there were more NFT sales in the last 24 hours than during the entire year of 2020.
Although NFTs have been around since ERC-721 was invented in January 2018, the sector remained largely darkness outside of cryptocurrency circles until the latter part of 2020. In the second half of 2020, NFT sales increased by 200%.
The NBA is arguably the largest corporation to adopt non-fungible tokens, partnering with CryptoKitties creator Dapper Labs to launch NFT collectibles in the form of NBA Top Shot "moments" over the past year.
With the typical mess of the early days, the sport's NFT ecosystem begins to shape a market of extraordinary dimensions, in which fans will be able to interact much more closely with their sports idols, collect indelible moments and create value with all these assets. Never has humanity faced a situation of this size with regard to wealth creation. Let's hope that projects like Chiliz and CHZ can be managed in such a way that the decentralization and transparency that blockchain technology grants are not put at stake, and can also end with the concentration of power of the corporations that handle sports and entertainment everywhere in the planet.
ALGO
https://algorand.foundation/
rank CoinGecko #38
I must admit that up to now I had neglected the Algorand project a bit. I always had it in mind to analyze one day, but I had not given it enough attention. But talking these days with another friend that I made thanks to Publish0x, @MikeZillo, I decided to study it a little more thoroughly. And it is really very attractive.
Algorand is a new generation high-performance blockchain. It has the native token ALGO, which is used as a transfer of value in the network, and uses a consensus algorithm called Pure Proof of Stake or PPOs, and also has pseudo-random functions to prevent malicious attacks.
Algorand's founder is MIT professor Silvio Micali. Professor Micali has received the prestigious Turing award (the highest accolade for computer scientists) and many of his developments have had a direct impact on the cryptocurrency scene such as probabilistic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, verifiable random functions, and many of the protocols that are the foundation of modern cryptography.
Professor Silvio Micali, Source https://www.algorand.com/Blockchains have three main characteristics: decentralization, scalability, and security. These constitute the so-called Blockchain Trilemma. It is very difficult to get all three at once and most blockchains make a compromise between them.
It would be relatively easy to create a decentralized network with tough security, but it would not be scalable. Similarly, a blockchain that is decentralized and scalable will have little security in principle ...
To try to overcome the Trilemma, Algorand opted for a Pure Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism that focuses on the recognition of property rights over assets as its main mode of operation.
Pure PoS is touted as a unique consensus algorithm, developed by Silvio Micali himself. It is characterized by a significantly reduced demand for computing power, as well as the ability to settle transactions within a few seconds. The system is capable of reaching consensus without the need for a central authority, with tolerance for malicious users as long as the majority of bets are held by honest users.
A user can read each block and has the opportunity to write a transaction to a future block. Users can influence the selection of a new block based on the size of their stake in the system, which is measured in a number of ALGO tokens. Users are selected discretely, based on the principle of randomness, and are allowed to propose blocks and vote on block proposals, the probability of being chosen to be proportional to their stake.
The ALGO token was injected through a series of “Dutch auctions”. These auctions were held in the form of Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs) on Binance. The Dutch auction is a public offering auction structure in which the bid price is set after accepting all bids to determine the highest price at which the total bid can be sold. In this type of auction, investors bid for the amount they are willing to buy in terms of quantity and price.
The first auction was held on 06/19/2019, where 25 million tokens were sold at a cost of USD $ 2.4. Participants, whose application was successful, received tokens in the wallet after completing the tender. After that, ALGO began to be officially offered on exchanges. There is a return policy for all participants in the Dutch auction. The redemption program allows auction buyers to sell tokens to the foundation, so it works as a mechanism to reduce supply if demand falls.
Rather than requiring a 100% consensus from all validating parties, Algorand conforms to a two-thirds majority consensus. This means that to attack Algorand, it will be necessary to buy more than a third of Algorand's total supply, which would be uneconomical.
Following the launch of Algorand MainNet, the network was reported to be capable of processing 1,000 transactions per second, bringing it closer to the performance levels of payment networks like VISA, which is said to handle approximately 1,700 transactions per second.
In the Algorand network, there are no centrally delegated users, nor a fixed committee that proposes blocks. All users are randomly, secretly, and continuously selected to participate in the Algorand consensus protocol.
The block confirmation process on the platform consists of two stages: the proposal stage and the voting stage. During the proposal stage, a token is selected at random and its owner suggests the next block to confirm. At the voting stage, 1000 token owners are randomly selected to form a committee to approve the proposed block.
In addition to the technologies already in place, the Algorand developers continue to work to introduce several new features that will further enhance the current capabilities of this Algorand platform. Some of these novelties are the following:
- Vault is proposed as Algorand's solution to the problem of blockchain storage. As blockchains grow in size, storing all of their blocks can become a serious problem. Algorand's Vault technology aims to promote better scalability through the efficient onboarding of new users. These users will only have to download and update a single piece of information and will begin to participate in the creation and storage of blocks as soon as they join the network.
- The Pixel digital signature scheme is the technology with which Algorand intends to reduce its bandwidth demand through an innovative system based on the ability to add multiple signatures of the same message and convert it into a compact signature of the same length. At the same time, malicious users are prevented from spoofing the signatures of previous messages.
- Self-validating transactions are based on the separation between consensus and storage. Users will be able to check the validity of payments without the need to maintain balances for the verification of blocks and individual payments.
Source https://algorand.foundation/about-usThe Algorand Foundation is a Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG) with the incorporation issued by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) in the Republic of Singapore.
Regarding the management team, the main executives are Sean Lee, Jason Lee, and Massimo Morini.
Sean Lee, the CEO, is an accomplished leader with extensive go-to-market experience working with start-ups and global technology companies in North America and Asia.
Jason Lee, COO, was recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2018 list-maker. He was a FinTech startup co-founder, ecosystem builder, and Wealth Management executive with Standard Chartered Bank, having worked with partners across 30+ cities throughout his career.
Massimo Morini, Chief Economist, is Algorand Foundation's Chief Economist and also serves as head of Rates and Credit Modeling, and Coordinator of Model Research, at IMI bank. He is a Professor of Fixed Income at Bocconi University and teaches Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies at Swiss Finance Institute Lugano.
At the end of 2019, Algorand, Inc. proposed two new solutions to implement on Layer 1 of its platform:
- The generation of new fungible tokens
- The execution of multiparty atomic transfers (AMPT).
These proposed solutions are essential for the development of DeFi applications such as the tokenization of financial assets; such as derivatives, options, swaps, and other securities.
Conclusion. Algorand is working in line with the evolution of the crypto-sphere. It seems to me that it is definitely aiming at DeFi and optimizing the functioning of this ecosystem. But it is also entering the field of NFTs and there are several developments proposed to work new marketplaces on the Algorand mainnet.
Algorand has surpassed 10 million accounts on its network. Since MainNet launch less than two years ago, Algorand has continued to provide a high-performing, stable, 3rd generation blockchain that has unique Layer-1 capabilities, advanced smart contracts, low transaction fees, and regular protocol upgrades to introduce powerful new features.
Algorand is a super-fast and efficient network optimized for cryptocurrency, named tokens, NFTs, and other financial primitives. Based on a Pure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, it achieves very high performance and scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security. The team behind the project consists of world-renowned cryptographers from MIT and other universities combined with seasoned technology entrepreneurs who have a track record of building substantial businesses.
Algorand, together with Polkadot, are shaping the new highways on which the most advanced DeFi applications will run. It is something that we are going to see in the coming months, as we continue to search for the “killer app” that sustains the crypto-sphere and definitely leads us to mass adoption.
As usual, none of the things written in this post are financial advice and are not intended to replace personal research.
Thank you for reading!
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