Day: August 24, 2017

Cryptocurrencies’ ability to liquify into fiat has never been as efficient as it should, as the two battle against each other in separate worlds. But the demand for easy transfer of crypto into local currencies, and vice versa, has seen Qvolta try and step into the local Bitcoin and Ethereum market globally.

In a world where all the cryptocurrency action happens on popular exchanges, such as Coinbase in the USA, and Bithumb in Korea, for example, there is only really one alternative. LocalBitcoins operates as a peer-to-peer marketplace – but it’s a market with a lot of danger, and a lot of need for development.

Peer-to-peer power

Bitcoin, as well as the Dollar, Euro or Yen, can be traded in a peer-to-peer fashion. However, the cryptocurrency market isn’t yet fully prepared for this full level of decentralization. Currently, there are few decentralized platforms, such as exchanges, but their rules, fees and regulations make them feel a lot like banks.

Most of the cryptocurrencies action takes place on these semi de-centralized exchanges which have their own set of rules, regulations, and constraints. This system sse a lot of influence coming from the exchanges in controling their users’ experience.

Fiat money can be traded without strict control in the real world, but the movement of digital currencies mostly falls under the control of exchanges who take their cuts and implement their regulations.

An alternative that has been used to varying degrees of success is LocalBitcoins which sets up a localised market where buyers and sellers meet to trade their digital currencies in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Guarantor of protection

Meeting and trading Bitcoin with strangers on the internet is about as dangerous and fraught with danger as it sounds. Many schemes and scams have been witnessed in the LocalBitcoins market as buyers fall prey to con artists and thieves.

Qvolta, who believe that a neccssary middleman, that is not a centralising agent of money control, but rather an escrow-type guarantor could work in this instance. Without taking ownership of the fiat funds, the notion of local Bitcoin trading can succeed safely, and actually become a Global Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer market.

Buyer rather than trader

Bitcoin is still trying desperately to become a currency rather than a traded stock or commodity, but the fact that it is mostly bought on an exchange, with confusing candle graphs and constantly swinging prices is a concept that most currency users aren’t accustomed to.

Our sponsor Qvolta’s aim is to turn its platform into a true global marketplace. A seller of Bitcoin and Ethereum can buy tariffs within the amount of the tokens that he wants to sell. The buyer chooses the best offer and provides a profitable deal.

The escrow-type function of Qvolta means that they do step in, but not to hold the money, rather  to ensure the trade is effected. They also claim that their fees are far lower than that of exchanges.

Acting as the guarantor, a person can buy Bitcoin, rather than trade it on an exchange, and with that they can also receive their tokens instantly and avoid fees

Habitual payment system

Exchanges are also regulated and controlled by rules that limit buying power to one or two options, but just as in normal trading of goods and services, Qvolta can allow buyers and sellers to choose their payment system.

The monopoly of banks has been disagreed with within the digital currency community, but the exchanges are in danger of copying the same model. If people are to go back to trading their money, digitally or otherwise, directly, options like Qvolta could provide alternative arrangements to break the hegemony.

This is a sponsored article. The article does not necessarily reflect the author’s or The Merkle’s views.

On a scale from unknown to known, the UmbrellaCoin ICO appears to be very known. The new insurance startup, which launched the crowdsale of its UMC tokens on August 20, 2017, has already raised close to $436,000 worth of ETH. UmbrellaCoin intends to raise a total of 100,000 ETH (~$30 million) by the end of … Continue reading UmbrellaCoin ICO Live; Raises $436k in Four Days

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Bitwala becomes first New York Agreement signatory to back out of the agreement, citing user feedback.

In the very start of its whitepaper, Corion reminds crypto enthusiasts about the true vision of Satoshi Nakamoto for Bitcoin: to gain mass adoption. While Bitcoin and other blockchain projects continue to draw an audience by the means of its attractive long-term upward trend, they still lack the depth when it comes to making people understand … Continue reading How does Corion Revolutionize the Crypto Industry?

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Gaining 4,800% for the last 3 years, the market for initial coin offerings is now a large industry reaching $100 billion of estimated capitalization.

Considering the manifold of issues that emerged along its development, the market requires a new infrastructure to condition its future sustainability and growth.

Сentralization of crowdfunding platforms, lack of industry-wide standards, and increasing risks are some of the problems that the community should tackle.

Downsides of the growing industry

The majority of the existing crowdfunding platforms accumulate the capital raised over featured projects’ campaigns in their own accounts and transfer the funds to startups only once the investment round is complete. Therefore, both the startups and their investors have to rely upon honesty of the platform administration.

As a relatively young funding model, ICO is yet to become subject to governmental regulations. Until then, this model has the benefit of freedom from bureaucracy and restrictions, such as strict licensing and disclosure policies seen in the “classic” capital markets.

However, such freedom gives room to potentially malicious activities and makes it harder for inexperienced investors to assess coin offerings properly.

Presently, investors have to conduct independent research for every individual project they find interesting in order to make an investment decision. With ICOs gaining popularity, the pool of information to process is expanding rapidly, and is likely to become overwhelming for an individual investor quite soon.

Community sentiment is a valuable parameter to consider before making investments. Yet, the absence of reliable solutions to accumulate, watch, and analyze this sentiment impairs its accessibility and potential for positive output.

Aimwise Project to Introduce its Three-fold Solution

Aimwise project, the sponsor of this article, has a compound solution to aforementioned complications — a dynamic synergy of community wisdom, technology, and in-depth analytics. The team behind Aimwise project is an international ensemble of enthusiasts with considerable backgrounds in fintech, corporate law and finance, banking and blockchain initiatives, as well as PhD candidates holding academic experience in blockchain-related research.

As described by Leo Leu, co-founder and project manager at Aimwise:

“Aimwise creates a comprehensive and dynamic framework for collective wisdom maximization and community engagement in value creation. We strive to build an open and competitive environment that allows the detection of the most promising and investable Blockchain applications complementing the further adoption of Blockchain technology.”

The initiative suggests a combination of three main modules: ICO hosting platform, crowd-incubation framework and assisted portfolio management system.

ICO hosting platform

Aimwise introduces a decentralized ICO hosting platform with an alternative approach to disclosure standards, distribution of funds, and project selection.

Unlike the most of existing platforms that usually tend to list promising projects alongside with shady ventures and scam, Aimwise intends to employ a transparent and decentralised data-driven hosting mechanism based on high compliance standards and community feedback.

A startup, willing to get to the platform, should submit an application package — prospectus — covering numerous operational details about the business and the desired ICO, such as media coverage, potential user base or market opportunity. As an incentive for startups to provide more information, Aimwise offers a discount on the commission fees, depending on the percentage of aspects disclosed.

All received applications have to pass the independent due diligence conducted by an Oracle, an independent rating agency chosen among the nominees by the AIM token holders for each rotation period.

After a project gets the third-party approval, registered Aimwise users can submit questions to its developers, forming a public history of queries and answers.

The next procedure startups pass before getting listed is the community discussion and assessment. During this stage users generate and discuss ideas regarding the project in question. Subsequently the AIM token holders elect a group of delegates, board members, who will decide whether the project is going to be accepted and why.

At the final stage the whole Aimwise community votes for the rationality of board members’ decision.

Crowdsourced incubation

Aimwise incubation system is designed to organize and employ the collective wisdom. It is a tree-structured environment for online discussions, generation of ideas, crowdsourced market research and team formation.

The system allows any registered user to submit ideas and topics for discussion, initiate surveys, and post proposals to form or join an existing team gathered around the discussed idea.

Thanks to the sophisticated idea-mapping technology, the community output is refined into its most accessible and useful form and utilized to benefit all of its members.

Portfolio management

Aimwise portfolio management is an investment tool aiming to facilitate efficient and transparent fund allocation. The technology allows investors to predefine composition of the desired portfolio by a wide range of parameters including industry, capitalization, time horizon, and token price.

Integration with the ICO hosting platform gives access to valuable big data on featured projects, while also mitigating the risk of using inadequate input parameters, since all of the data is validated during the application procedure.

The team behind Aimwise project is an international ensemble of enthusiasts with considerable backgrounds in fintech, corporate law and finance, banking and blockchain initiatives, as well as PhD candidates holding academic experience in blockchain-related research.

Transition and Milestones

Aimwise has already passed through initial beta testing and facilitated its first ICO as a hosting platform. Now the developers are preparing the project’s native coin offering scheduled for September 2017 and have already initiated private presale procedures.

Decentralized blockchain solutions, just like the “classic” database applications, may require 5 to 10 years of adoption and adaptation to the consumer needs, in order to become a reliable solution entailing no risks of unexpected losses for the investors.

While any software solution will benefit greatly from the traditional testing, the means of sustaining a fair and transparent ecosystem with internal community-driven economy are perfected only by practical use within the living market.

Considering these conditions and highly sensitive matters addressed, it would be unreasonable for Aimwise to launch as a purely decentralized application, especially since the decentralization in blockchain restricts the means of bug fixing and updating. Therefore the developers decided to reach the ultimate goal of making Aimwise fully decentralized community-driven application in 3 stages.

Aimwise starts as a server-based platform, able to react to unexpected situations and prevent possible negative consequences. Over the first to stages more and more features will be distributed. Eventually the whole ecosystem will get to the third stage and become completely decentralized.

Hopefully, Aimwise will reach its ultimate goal before the addressed issues become too severe.

This is a sponsored article. It is not investment or trading advice, always do your own independent research.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban is investing in the cryptocurrency hedge fund 1confirmation, which aims to raise $20 million to be used in funding Blockchain technology-based companies.

Artificial Intelligence has always been treated as a game changer in financial forecasting. Many leading banks today rely on AI-based algorithms to predict the performance of an asset — even market as a whole. But up until now, AI technologies are mostly proprietary which benefit only the big firms. It is mostly inaccessible to the … Continue reading Cindicator, AI-Driven Crypto Forecasting Project, Announces ICO

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Vilnius – 24 August 2017 – Monetha, today announced a strategic partnership deal with the largest online retailer in the Baltic States, Pigu.lt.  The deal is the first of many to come, enabling online shoppers to purchase goods using Ethereum based tokens via a seamless checkout experience. Through the strategic partnership Pigu.lt have agreed for … Continue reading Monetha Signs Partnership Deal with Dominant Baltic Online Retailer

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If the Internet evolved into a communication platform, the Blockchain is rapidly growing as a decentralized organization tool for applications, platforms and financial service providers.

Distributed ledger startup Ripple is ramping up its competition with banking services provider Swift by launching a rival conference this fall.

The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), the first successful multi-million dollar initial coin offering (ICO) conducted on the Ethereum blockchain, was not able to carry out its vision due to severe security flaws that led to the loss of millions of dollars worth Ethereum from investors. Ultimately, losses of investors in the DAO were overturned and … Continue reading Inspired by DAO, Rocket Aims to Create Ethereum-Based Decentralized Startup Accelerator

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SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Coming out of stealth mode, doc.ai Incorporated (“doc.ai”) today announced the launch of its advanced natural language processing technology platform using the blockchain to timestamp its datasets and decentralize artificial intelligence. Envisioned and built by bright minds from Stanford and Cambridge Universities, doc.ai is well-positioned to help healthcare companies improve patients’ care and … Continue reading doc.ai Announces First Blockchain-Enabled Natural Language Processing Platform For Quantified Biology

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Companies the world over have been unsuccessful in their attempts to successfully rival Amazon when it comes to online shopping. It looks as if Walmart is trying to have another go at it by using Google’s AI shopping assistant. Whether or not this will be a successful venture remains to be determined. It is an interesting partnership for both Google and Walmart, even though dethroning Amazon will not be an easy feat by any means.

Fighting Amazon with AI is a Last Resort

Past approaches to challenging Amazon have proven vastly unsuccessful. Those efforts cost a lot of money and have not yielded any major results. Amazon seemingly operates on very thin margins, and no other company is willing to compete at this rate. If it does not make economic sense, there is no reason to even give it a try. Walmart is not giving up without a fight, though. In fact, it has come up with a solution that may have turned the tide in the battle.

By using the Google Express delivery service, Walmart hopes to provide a competitive shopping experience capable of rivaling Amazon. This AI-based service has been in use by other major companies including Costco and Target already. Being able to buy items with a voice command is quite similar to how Amazon’s Alexa works right now. Deliveries will be made to one’s home, which is a nice touch.

There is no additional charge for having items delivered to one’s doorstep. Walmart is on the same page as Amazon, and the site should have same-day delivery available as well for some goods. Although there is a minimum purchase requirement, there is no membership program similar to Amazon Prime. This certainly puts Walmart up in the convenience department, although there is seemingly nobody in the U.S. who does not have an Amazon Prime account.

There is also an option to have a more personalized shopping experience through linking one’s Walmart account with Google. Once a person has done so, the AI assistant can remind them which items they purchased last time and in what quantity. Alexa offers a similar functionality and Amazon has its “subscription” service in place for particular products as well. That being said, Walmart’s new venture has some nice features that could easily turn it into a worthwhile rival for Amazon over time.

This new service will not be available for a few more weeks. Interested parties can sign up for notifications regarding the launch date. Right now, the release is tentatively scheduled for late September, but the timeline could change before then. It is still a pretty competitive service, assuming everything works as planned. Only time will tell what the future will hold for Walmart and its new service.

All of this shows we can expect more artificial intelligence-based solutions in the e-commerce industry moving forward. Walmart is one of the first major players to have embraced the technology in such a manner. If this service can effectively provide the level of convenience users expect, Amazon will have a major competitor on its hands for sure. The bigger question is which company will launch an AI-driven shopping service next. There are still many opportunities waiting to be explored.