Cryptocurrency

Po.et – The Future of Content Marketplaces

Coin Overview

Note: This piece was ghostwritten for a client. It is uploaded here purely for portfolio purposes.

Introduction

The online world is filled with one big problem: content theft. Because the internet is essentially the modern wild west, it is easy for users to steal others’ work while remaining anonymous and still benefiting from it. PO.ET is looking to be the decentralized solution to content theft in an increasingly connected world.

Video for reference

What Is PO.ET (POE) & How Does It Work?

PO.ET is a decentralized universal ledger that allows creators to track, claim ownership of, and retain attribution for their creative assets. It does so via proof-of-existence, which is the first ever non-financial application of the blockchain.

Proof-of-existence allows anyone to upload and verify (hash) documents on the blockchain. They can do so without actually storing it, meaning they can stay anonymous while still proving ownership of content. It is based on the original Bitcoin blockchain hashing system.

Essentially, PO.ET is merging the publisher and the content creator by allowing users to license their creative work without reliance on a third-party. Creators can pick between an existing license template, or create their own based on their needs. Any deal is built into an immutable smart contract.

Because the blockchain is immutable, the first person to upload a piece of content will be named its owner. This solves the rising issue of content theft, as the original creator will be able to prove ownership of their work. Also, users can view the history of the content via the blockchain.

The proof-of-existence consensus algorithm is widely underused, so PO.ET taking advantage of it is a big plus. PO.ET has an ambitious goal, but it is an important one. Journalists, content creators, publishers, and anyone else who creates or curates content on the growing real estate we call the internet will benefit from this project’s success.

The Tokenomics

The PO.ET token is an ERC-20 coin used to show ownership of each piece of content uploaded to the blockchain. Coins are immutable, and one can be used to transfer ownership if that was ever necessary. Each one is timestamped and stores all sorts of metadata relevant to the piece it is tied to.

The Roadmap

Currently, the PO.ET authentication platform is in beta on the App Store. It launched in March of 2017, and since then has been working through its “Rosetta Era.” During this time, publishers began to integrate it, and the ICO went through.

Soon, they will enter the Gutenberg Era, which brings the portfolio, e-book registries, payment channels, and other forms of revenue sharing. The Alexandria Era is next, which will provide image and video support, a marketplace, reputation, and more. Alexandria should encompass the full release of the PO.ET application.

While what’s currently here is promising, the decentralized marketplace and support for image and video content are real game-changers for the PO.ET network. Assuming everything goes well, content creators and journalists will be incredibly motivated to switch over to this blockchain if they want to continue their careers without fear of theft.

The Team

PO.ET is a small but experienced team. The CEO, Jarrod Dicker, was once the vice president of innovation over at The Washington Post, while also starting the company RED, which was the Post’s research group. Otherwise, team members have a history in the blockchain space, marketing space, and development spaces.

Other members have years of development and product management experience. Also, the project is now partnered with AmaZix, Jaxx, and The Maven, with more partnerships on the way.

Community

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/poetproject/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_poetproject

Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/GKMQ1kOQSdXVZpN1Rygcdw

GitHub: https://github.com/poetapp

BitcoinTalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2027214.0;topicseen

The PO.ET Twitter is incredibly active, always sharing relevant links and communicating with followers. Otherwise, the subreddit is an excellent source of information, though the team isn’t very prevalent on there.

They manage their community well and spend time translating their projects into Chinese, as there is a big cryptocurrency market over there. Most projects fail to acknowledge this. That effort could mean the difference between the success or failure of PO.ET.

Exchanges

PO.ET is available on only a few exchanges, though Binance is one of them. As one of the worlds biggest exchanges, that’s a pretty good sign. As the project moves into its more viable stages, it is likely that we will see PO.ET on other exchanges like Kraken and Bittrex as time goes on.

Wallets

The PO.ET coin is ERC-20 compatible, meaning you can store it in a variety of wallets. MyEtherWallet, MetaMask, and hardware wallets like Trazor or the Ledger Nano S also work.

What’s Next For Them

Overall, the PO.ET project will bring a secure way for creators to prove ownership for their work while remaining anonymous if they so choose. It works for creators, publishers, and other artists while placing them on an even playing field. The technology is easily auditable on the blockchain and is incredibly flexible in what it can do.

It is a promising project with quite a bit to show already. On top of this, PO.ET has a few great partners, furthering the validity of the project. Regardless, content theft is a massive problem on the internet, and hopefully PO.ET can be a step in solving that issue.

Electroneum – Cryptocurrency for the Masses

Coin Overview

Note: This piece was ghostwritten for a client. It is uploaded here purely for portfolio purposes.

Introduction

Cryptocurrency is not easy to get into. There are all sorts of walls making it difficult for the general user to get involved. Some people want to remain anonymous, while others don’t have the time to look into the complex process. Electroneum is looking to solve these problems by making it easy for anyone to start mining and purchasing cryptocurrencies.

Video for reference.

What Is Electroneum (ETN) & How Does It Work?

Electroneum wants to make it easy for consumers to acquire cryptocurrency. Currently, there are tons of barriers surrounding token investment. Linking bank accounts, sending in awkward photos, waiting for verification – it all prevents the general public from getting into coin trading.

Built off of the privacy aspects of Monero’s code, Electroneum will allow for secure cryptocurrency transactions to happen across a decentralized blockchain. Transactions work via a “stealth address,” or a one-use key that doesn’t connect funds with the recipient’s wallet.

When a user purchases cryptocurrency, Electroneum’s ViewKey technology creates the one-use private key, which the holder can then use to spend their funds. Transactions on the network are quick, with fees based on network activity.

Electroneum has a mobile Android app that provides access to ETN wallets with the ability to create paper wallets. Here, you can send and receive the token. Also, the application is currently running a beta test for mobile mining. With the way it works, you won’t be confirming blocks, but you will still get rewards for participating. Instead, the mining section shows users how CPU power works in the overall mining process. The intention is to move mobile miners over to the desktop for the real deal.

The Tokenomics

The ETN token is intended to be used like Bitcoin: as a means to purchase goods and services with a digital asset. That said, Electroneum does a much better job at keeping these trades private and secure, which is one of the biggest issues with Bitcoin currently.

In the future, the Electroneum team would like ETN to replace currencies in online gaming. For example, instead of using gold in World of Warcraft, players would earn ETN. That ETN could then be used in-game or withdrawn to use it in other online games.

Gambling is also an interest. The team would like ETN to be used on online gambling sites as well as traditional currency and are currently working to get these partnerships established. The focused privacy features are great for this, as users can remain anonymous while gambling high amounts of money.

ETN can be mined, though it is resistant to ASIC machines. That said, it is pretty easy to mine with your CPU, and one can even join a mining pool to start out.

The Roadmap

The Electroneum team has little in ways of a detailed roadmap, but they have listed out their goals. Currently, they are working on solving transactional issues, expanding the team, and bringing mobile mining out of beta. Then, they are working on establishing partnerships and expanding into more exchanges than the few they currently inhabit. Finally, they are going to establish an extensive campaign for viral growth.

The Team

Electroneum is the first cryptocurrency to be considered a “British cryptocurrency.” It is run by a small team of 12, though each of them has extensive experience in the blockchain industry and development as a whole. James Atkinson, the head of the development team, has over 10 years experience alone. The founder, Richard Ells, helped to establish both SiteWizard and Retortal.com.

Community

Twitter: https://twitter.com/electroneum

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Electroneum/

GitHub: https://github.com/electroneum/electroneum/releases

Telegram: https://telegram.me/electroneum

The Electroneum team uses Twitter to post about news and other updates, but they don’t seem to communicate with the community often on the platform. Otherwise, the subreddit is incredibly active with the community posting questions and discussion on a daily basis.

Exchanges

Electroneum is pretty hard to find for now. It is available on smaller exchanges like Cryptopia, Kucoin, TradeOgre, and a few others. However, there is talk of it coming to Binance and Bittrex in the near future, so keep an eye out for this. Otherwise, it may be a while for it to come to other exchanges.

Wallets

Electroneum has its own official wallet called the Electroneum Wallet Manager. Through here, you can establish wallets either on or offline to store your ETN. Electroneum gives you the ability to print multiple paper wallets for your currencies. In case one is lost, you can print others to keep your coins safe.

What’s Next For Them

With Bitcoin being the standard path to digital assets as a currency, Electroneum has a big opponent to try and overcome. That said, ETN has accessibility on their side. By moving both the mining and trading process to mobile, they are opening up the idea to tons of users who have no experience in the field. Plus, they currently have a product to show, which is more than most cryptocurrency projects can say.

The coin needs to make its way to some bigger exchanges before we can say for sure, but so far the future of ETN looks bright. They have the likes of Bitcoin, Litecoin, and others to compete against, but the accessibility offered here is a massive advantage. Electroneum may very well be at the forefront of mobile cryptocurrency usage sooner than we think.

Ardor – Innovating On The Blockchain as a Service

Coin Overview

Note: This piece was ghostwritten for a client. It is uploaded here purely for portfolio purposes.

Introduction

Blockchain-as-a-Service is a unique and evolving idea that makes the arduous task of building a blockchain much simpler for teams of developers. Ardor is yet another one of these projects, but with a few extra pieces of the foundation that make it stand apart from others of its kind.

Video for reference.

What Is Ardor (ARDR) & How Does It Work?

Ardor is an open-source “blockchain-as-a-service” that connects with the Nxt blockchain platform. Nxt works as an asset trading exchange, a cloud for storing data, and offers voting/monetary opportunities. On top of this, it provides a creation kit for clients to create their own blockchain for usage on the Nxt platform.

The Ardor project is the next step. While similar to Nxt, Ardor fixes the standard issues with the blockchain, namely scalability, by separating security coins from standard transactions. The two networks are paired together into a parent/child architecture.

Ardor has a main chain that powers all of the child chains. This main chain processes child transactions by placing them into blocks, as well as distributes the ARDR token across accounts.

Child chains are created by clients, which is where the blockchain-as-a-service part comes in. These child chains can use the ARDR token or any token the client prefers. One set up, the child chain can trade and communicate with any other chain on the network. Teams can pick and choose which features their chain has, allowing them to use it for polls, trading assets, sending messages, and more.

The merging of child and main chains is called bundling. Bundling allows Ardor to keep its chains working together and allowing them to transact with one another, while still allowing for them to act separately as their own entities.

The Tokenomics

With ARDR, all coins are already in existence. Ardor works on a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. By staking the coin, users are holding their place in a child chain, and using extra coins to provide their chain with different features. ARDR is also used to pay for transaction fees on the network. Because all child chains are connected to the main chain, all ARDR goes through to the main chain.

This also factors into the governance system, where teams with the most staked have more say in the future of Ardor. That means all of the coins have already been “mined,” so mining does not exist on the platform. Instead, stakers are rewarded with more ARDR based on the amount they initially invested, alongside providing services to the network.

The Roadmap

Currently, there isn’t a whole lot on the Ardor roadmap. Right now, they are working on sharing data between child chains, launching more child chains on the main network, and merging features to the project that don’t necessarily rely on the child/parent relationship of the child and main chains.

After this, the Ardor team will be implementing more transaction types and fixing a few of the main net issues that plague the network.

Eventually, the team also wants to work on a decentralized exchange that will allow currency trading between the child chains.

The Team

Ardor and Nxt are owned and developed by a company called Jelurida B.V. This business is run by developer Lior Jaffe, who has been programming since he was 13 years of age. Another co-founder and developer is Petko Petkov, who has degrees in Informatics and Electronic Government. On top of this, Petkov has coded in multiple languages ranging from Java, Python, and C++.

Community

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ardorplatform

Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ardor/

BitcoinTalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1518497.0%22

Overall, the Ardor team publishes multiple posts relevant to their project on Twitter and does a little communicating with their audience. Otherwise, most information is posted on Reddit and discussed by a decent sized group of people.

Exchanges

Ardor is only available on a few exchanges. Bittrex, HitBTC, Poloniex, and UpBit remain the biggest. However, it is another one of those coins that may take off this year, so we may possibly see it on other exchanges like Kraken or Binance as time goes on.

Wallets

ARDR can be stored in the Nxt wallet, as it is currently an Nxt technology until the final launch of the mainchain.

What’s Next For Them

Because of the blockchain-as-a-service model, Ardor has a lot of potential. The real work comes from clients and teams that create child chains off of the main Ardor chain. All of these child chains connect to the main Ardor chain, which keeps the load off of it while it handles transactions and other network-wide tasks.

The appeal for multiple industries is vast, with the potential for teams to utilize the blockchain to further their businesses and ideas. However, Ardor is only one of many blockchain-as-a-service projects. That said, it has the Nxt network to help push things along – a big win in terms of competition. In fact, the Nxt network has never gone down since its implementation back in 2013. Also, Nxt supports Java and is even open-source.

Nxt has been around for years, and a lot of issues around it have been ironed out. Because of this, Ardor may be put at an advantage that other BaaS technologies simply do not have. We’ll have to wait and see.

VideoCoin – Decentralized Content Distrubution For The Masses

Coin Overview

Note: This piece was ghostwritten for a client. It is uploaded here purely for portfolio purposes.

Introduction

VideoCoin is a decentralized content distribution network that runs off of its network of users. The more one contributes to the network, the faster videos can be encoded, stored, and distributed to the world. This content will be uncensored and the network can scale to handle any and all amounts.

Video for reference

ICO Details

Name of the ICO: VideoCoin

Website: https://videocoin.io/

Token: VID

Hard Cap: 50,000,000 USD

Payment Methods: Unknown

Total CS: 780 million tokens

Technology: Open source distribution platform

Important Dates: Sometime 2018

Pre-ICO: $35 million

Public Sale: N/A

Whitepaper: https://storage.googleapis.com/videocoin-preico/VideoCoin-Whitepaper.pdf

The team behind VideoCoin are working on a decentralized video storage, encoding, and content distribution network (CDN) running on the blockchain. It is predicted that 79% of all global internet traffic will be internet video by 2020. By that same time, there will be over three trillion minutes of video uploaded every month.

Because of this growth, centralized video distribution platforms are having a hard time keeping up. Networks are slowing down, and scalability is becoming an issue. VideoCoin wants to replace these platforms with a decentralized one with open APIs and a community-centric open-source development plan.

Project Use Case

Essentially, VideoCoin takes advantage of their networked computers to devote resources towards encoding, processing, and storing content with a focus on video. With this technology, the project is sort of like YouTube or another content distributor, but with privacy features, worldwide scalability, and free of censorship.

This platform will reduce encoding, storage, and distribution costs from 50 to 80%, with users participating to earn tokens. A user could be a company providing their data centers, a person sharing their cloud storage, and a consumer subscribing to content creators. It is a proof-of-stake network, meaning that the more one contributes to the network, the higher their reward will be.

Team

VideoCoin is headed by Halsey Minor. Halsey is an internet entrepreneur who has founded or worked on projects like CNET, Google Voice, Salesforce and Live Planet. Otherwise, you have Devadutta Ghat who founded Intel’s Video Transcoding Service (which is the foundation for Facebook’s video platform.) Finally, the team has the Director of the Television Academy and two-time Emmy Award recipient Seth Shapiro.

This team has a lot of technological power behind them, but it remains to be seen if the idea here is unique enough to stand out from the competition. It’s hard to say until we have more information provided to us.

How Does The Token Work?

The token will work in two cases: as a form of payment and as a reward for different forms of mining. For payment, clients will spend their VID to rent video foundation services or to develop new sharing platforms. On the other hand, the consumer consists of either a content creator or a customer. Creators will earn tokens by creating, while customers will use tokens to pay for their subscriptions.

There are four different types of miners on the VideoCoin network: storage, distribution, compute, and relay miners. Storage miners earn tokens by pledging storage to the network. The more they pledge, the more they are rewarded. Distribution miners earn by sending videos to viewers. The more videos they deliver, the more bandwidth the network supports, and these users are rewarded. Computer miners provide transcoding to the network, and relay miners are rewarded by providing third-party storage to VideoCoin.

How Will The Investor Make Money?

The VideoCoin network is built entirely on a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. As an investor puts more money into the network, they are providing more service to keep things running. The more this service is used, the more the investor is rewarded for their help. Miners also earn transaction fees based on their work.

Opportunities & Risks

VideoCoin will be built with a full stack video protocol layer. As time goes on, more applications will be built to add to the network. There is a strong group of teams and advisors with tons of experience in 4k streaming and live content distribution. While other projects are working on content distribution, none of them are highlighting video as much as VideoCoin.

The team is incredibly active in Telegram, answering any and all questions asked by the community. Also, there are a large amount of big-time crypto investors behind this project.

However, a lot of essential project information is being kept secret from the public for now. This could be a red flag for potential investors. Plus, a ton of projects talk about their solutions for scalability, but a lot of these are pure speculation for now. Most of them haven’t gotten far enough for actual testing, and VideoCoin is in the same position. Finally, VideoCoin’s focus on peer-to-peer distribution could lead to illegal content being shared on the platform.

Overall Thoughts & Conclusions

Video quality is only going to rise as time goes on. With that, so will video sizes. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and other technologies are a large factor in this. Sports networks, visual projects, and news outlets are looking to immerse their viewers as much as possible. With the power of the blockchain, VideoCoin’s encoding, storage, and distribution methods can greatly outclass the ones we see today.

That said, there are other blockchain projects focusing on data storage that are a lot further along, with way more backing than VideoCoin. Should these bigger coins switch their focus to video, they could run VideoCoin into the ground in no time. However, VideoCoin has some big backers behind it, so the project may be able to fight back. As more details are revealed, we will be able to form a more informed opinion on the matter.

Ratings and Sentiments

Community: 2 Stars

Prototype: 2 Stars

Tokenomics: 4 Stars

Team: 3 Stars

Idea: 3 Stars

50% Positive