Will Bitcoin Become Bullish? Or Continue Its Bearish Trend?

Internet of Coins, as a part of its CoinStorm campaign, has announced the launch of an ICO. The crowdsale, that started on March 21, 2017, is organized in association with the OpenLedger Decentralized Conglomerate (DC) – the world’s first blockchain powered conglomerate that facilitates investment in crypto-projects for better returns and cross promotion of projects.

[Note: This is a press release]

Internet of Coins is on a mission to start a “blockchain freedom revolution”, where people can use all cryptocurrencies seamlessly. The Internet of Coins acts as a multi-blockchain wallet that allows users to store and trade cryptocurrencies and smart contracts without having to rely upon centralized exchange services. The platform comes at a time when centralized exchange platforms are considered as points of failure in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, prone to cyber attacks, thefts and even undue influence on cryptocurrency prices at times. The decentralized exchange model allows users to trade crypto-assets with anyone in the world without the involvement of a third party.

The easy to use intuitive interface makes it much easier for both existing cryptocurrency community members and newbies to adapt to it in no time. One doesn’t need advanced technical knowledge about cryptocurrencies to use the Internet of Coins platform. In addition, it also acts as an interface for smart contracts systems, decentralized communications, and distributed notary functions.

The Internet of Coins team has factored in existing cryptocurrencies and wallets during the development. The existing blockchains and value systems can be easily connected to the platform without making any changes. All these factors have made Internet of Coins a Hybrid asset platform serving two main purposes:

1. It provides a coherent store of value across multiple blockchains, diversifying risk in the process.
2. It acts as a vehicle to swap value between the different chains they are registered on, without a centralized third party like exchange platforms.

The Internet of Coins encouraged the cryptocurrency community and investors to join its CoinStorm campaign by offering attractive early bird offers. Investors who joined the ICO before its official launch were offered a 5% discount on their token purchases. The crowdsale participants will receive the HYBRID tokens on July 1, 2017. Investors can choose the blockchain on which they want to receive the HYBRID tokens. They can start trading the tokens once they receive them.

Images courtesy of Internet of Coins, AdobeStock

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The new decentralized game CryptoKitties launched last week, with the purpose of the game to collect, bred, and trade electronic cats. Due to the game’s unbelievable popularity, the Ethereum network has been seeing record rates of transaction backlog.

Cat-Based Trading Game

CryptoKitties launched at the end of last month as one of the first games based on a decentralized blockchain. A kooky combination of Pokemon meets Beanie Babies on the blockchain, the goal of the game is to buy virtual cats and collect them. Each cat has is unique and has its own “DNA” that is recorded on the blockchain. Once you start acquiring a decent number of cats, you can start breeding them to create new, rarer cats. These cats have a value on the open marketplace, with the first cat created dubbed the “Genesis Cat” fetching upwards of $110,000 in ether.

These cats are traded via Ethereum transactions, and it is quickly taking over the network. At the beginning of the weekend, CryptoKitties trades amounted to roughly 4% of the network’s transaction volume. Today they account for almost 15% of the transaction volume. It has gotten to the point where the team behind the game has announced that they are doubling the fees needed to birth a new cat to make sure the transaction can get processed in a timely manner.

We’re beginning to see cracks in the second biggest blockchain in the world, adding an urgency to scaling solutions that blockchain technology desperately needs. bitcoin has been experiencing full or near full blocks for over a year now. With Ethereum soon to be hitting its capacity, research into new options to help decentralized technology scale are needed soon.

Fixing the Problems at Hand

Some people are requesting that miners increase what is known as the gas limit, which is like blocksize in bitcoin. Gas is a measure of computational effort, and each operation has a set amount of gas attached to it. Operations can be things like adding numbers together, calculating a hash, or sending a transaction. The limit is the maximum amount of gas that can be included in a block. With this limit in place, it can cap the block size and the speed of propagation around the network. These two things are essential to maintain the decentralized nature of blockchain technology.

Unfortunately, miners are unlikely to change this parameter as it has its own adverse effects as well. A statement made on Reddit by the operator of EtherChain, a large Ethereum mining pool, has stated

The network uncle rate has already reached levels (~30%) comparable to the Network DoS attacks during October 2016. This means that currently every 3rd Block get orphaned. Increasing the gas limit will likely make the current situation even worse. Without substantial improvements on how those large blocks are processed by the current implementations and distributed through the network I don’t think increasing the gas limit further is feasible right now. While high end systems are still able to validate heavy blocks within several 100 ms, low end systems already take up to a few seconds to validate and distribute a block.Bottom of Form

A solution is needed for the current levels of congestion, as some transaction fees are hitting close to a dollar, a level that the Ethereum Network was never supposed to hit.

What do you think about this new game? Do you own any crypto kitties? Let us know in the comments below!

Images courtesy of CryptoKitties.co, BitInfoCharts

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