Crypto Diaries: An Overview of the IFO & a few promising blockchain startups
Find out about a new trading instrument Initial Futures Offering (IFO) & Sia Network, Anchorage, NEAR Protocol & Chia Network
I wrote about Polkadot Protocol last month — an open-source “para chain (parallelized chains)” framework that provides scalable & seamless interoperability between different networks. It intends to create a decentralized economic hub where data of blockchains, applications, and money could be shared in a secure, scalable & decentralized fashion. Later last month, in a private sale it sold 500,000 Polkadot’s DOT tokens, in line with the $1.2 billion valuation given by the Wall Street Journal earlier in the year.
More recently, World’s first physically delivered cryptocurrency futures exchange CoinFLEX has announced the launch of Polkadot’s DOT tokens via its novel concept of Initial Futures Offering (IFO). CoinFLEX is creating a Futures market for digital coins that don’t exist yet.
It launched back in April with four futures contracts including Bitcoin & Ether and issued its own native token for the platform dubbed FLEX earlier this month. Trading is live in its flagship IFO as we speak — where up to 300 FLEX token holders have access to “discount” contracts priced at $75 per DOT. The exchange also plans to offer Binance coin (BNB) & Tron (TRX) futures later this year.
Sia Network
Boston-based Nebulous is the creator behind Sia Network — a decentralized Cloud storage platform. Sia has created a permissionless, distributed, redundant & affordable storage marketplace. Just to give you an example, storing 1TB of files on Sia costs only about $1–2 per month as compared to $23/month on Amazon S3.
The open-source nature of the project ensures the development of innovative applications on the network while the decentralized marketplace provides you the most cost-effective storage solutions for you with the storage providers competing for your business.
Anchorage
This company provides Crypto custody solutions for Institutional Investors. Anchorage claims of bringing together the World’s most advanced & proven security architecture to the digital assets class. Any given transaction is subject to a 3-step process — two members of the organization must approve any given transaction followed by Anchorage’s analytics review.
Only after these two steps have been completed, their hardware security modules (HSMs) process the transaction. Recently concluded $40 million Series B funding by the company would help it in its goals of supporting all digital assets in the future, enabling participation in generating returns for investors & providing a full range of financial services beyond custody.
NEAR Protocol
The company comprises of programming veterans from big techs like Google, Facebook and Niantic. Technically speaking, NEAR Protocol uses the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm coupled with the sharding technique to increase the throughput drastically, allowing the network to scale up as it grows.
Near is building a platform where developers can write, test and deploy scalable decentralized applications (dApps). The team recently launched a beta program that will provide support to a select few projects. To be considered, you need to join the beta before July 31st. The developer-friendly platform has also recently concluded $12.1M venture round funding.
Chia Network
This San Francisco-based blockchain company has set out to solve the problem of reducing the massive carbon footprint produced by mining the cryptocurrencies via the traditional Proof of Work (PoW). The most prominent case is of Bitcoin blockchain whose incentivization scheme requires engaging loads of computational power.
Chia network has been designed to be more efficient & eco-friendly by implementing what’s called Proof of Space (disk space as the main resource) and Proof of Time (decentralized validation of transactions) consensus algorithms. To engage the wider community of developers, Chia has initiated a competition worth $100,000 of prize money to build applications using its newly introduced algorithm.
Wrapping it up here with the mention of Tether (USDT) releasing on the fifth blockchain — a pure Proof of Stake (PoS) network dubbed Algorand — Tron, Ethereum, EOS & Omni being the other four. Tether has been notorious for being embroiled in one controversy after the other — the most recent one of it accidentally minting and subsequently burning 5 billion USDT tokens on the Tron (TRX) blockchain. Despite all this, the ever-expanding ecosystem for the biggest stable coin in the World, speaks volumes of its importance as an exchange mechanism in the Cryptoverse.
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