Day: February 10, 2018

Regulators may be talking more about ICOs, but the technology is advancing anyway. Here’s 7 ways it could change in the weeks and months ahead.

There are quite a few interesting blockchain projects out there which are hardly ever talked about. We frequently see existing blockchain projects introduce “child chains” as a way to promote the benefits of their technology. Ignis is one of those child chain projects which is linked to the Ardor blockchain. As a result of being a child chain, it inherits all functionalities of both Ardor and NXT, while adding some unique tools to the mix.

What is Ignis Exactly?

Some people may recall that Ardor wants to become a next-generation blockchain focusing on child chains. The Ardor parent chain processes transactions and offers security and scalability to “offspring” such as Ignis. It is important to note the child chain has its own native currency, which was distributed through last year’s Ignis ICO. The main reason this project was created was to bring functionality to the Ardor ecosystem, as the parent chain will only offer very basic functionality. It has all of the NXT features built in except for the “forging” of currencies.

So What Makes Ignis Unique?

On paper, finding the main use case for Ignis is not all that easy. The project encompasses a lot of different features and tools, ranging from an asset exchange and a marketplace to coin shuffling and composite phasing. Since none of these functions are available to Ardor natively, it seems the Ignis child chain will provide a lot of extra features while retaining the security and underlying technology found in NXT. It is all a bit complicated to understand, as this is a very technical project first and foremost.

The coin shuffling aspect of Ignis is well worth taking into account. While it does not provide complete anonymity, it is a privacy feature which lets users mix their funds quickly and efficiently through random mapping. It is built on similar NXT technology available today. This shuffling is closely linked to the Ignis monetary system, which lets users create and trade user-defined tokens on its child chain. All of these “currencies” can be traded freely using the decentralized exchange feature or through external exchanges.  It is a feature well worth looking into for any company which will need its own native currency in the future.

The phasing aspect of Ignis allows transfers to benefit from deferred execution regardless of any conditions associated with the transfer. For example, running a crowdfunded VC firm on Ignis is certainly possible. Company shares can be sold on Ignis to raise money. The phasing element can also influence how payments are made between the crowdfunding VC firm and the ventures in which it invests. Payments could only succeed if a majority of asset holders approve them, for example. Such specific conditions allow for many different business models in which most consensus-oriented processes can be decentralized completely.

Is there an Ignis Roadmap?

There is a roadmap for the Ardor project, which will undoubtedly have an impact on Ignis as well. For now, the plan is to introduce more child chains and exchanges to allow for freely trading these new currencies and assets. Pruning features for Ardor and its child chains will be introduced in Q2 of 2018 on the testnet, and will go live on the mainnet a few months later.  Other than that, very little is known about the future of Ignis specifically, but it is logical to assume the developers will release more information as it becomes available.

New Opportunities for Banking 

Around a decade ago, when a blockchain was making its first steps it was hard to predict how powerful it would become in the upcoming years. Today, the future is here and every day new industries adopt this technology.

A growing hype around the blockchain is connected with smart contracts and new horizons they open to deal-makers. Currently, blockchain-based smart contracts not only about digital cash – with their help you may buy, sell, exchange, literally, any goods, tangible and intangible. At the same time, the potential of smart contracts in banking is significant. Hence, there is no surprise that one of the most acute questions is the following – how to use smart contracts in banking and to create a transparent and efficient bankchain.

Currently, numerous speculations, myths, and inadequate excitement surround blockchain and smart contracts. Let’s make it clear what is special about smart contracts, why they could be beneficial for banking, and how they could change the face of the modern financial institutions.

Smart Vs Physical Contracts  

When it comes to banking, every action and deal has to be based on a contract that defines rights and duties. However, traditional contracts written on paper seem to be outdated in the modern digital era: their issuance is time-consuming and inefficient, they are easy to forge and destroy. Human factor plays a crucial role in their enforcement: people sign contracts and monitor whether all the conditions are being fulfilled. But the problem is that humans are not as attentive and sincere as machines are – they make mistakes and break promises.

When you use blockchain for smart contracts you can forget about these irritating imperfections. Smart contracts are software, codes that include rules and penalties around an agreement as traditional contracts do, but when the conditions are fulfilled the smart contract is enforced automatically.

Source: What is the future of digital banking?

Hence, both types of agreements give guarantees to the sides and ascribe duties. However, smart contracts reduce risks, cut the administrative expenses, make the enforcement processes run more efficiently.

As we clarified a bit why traditional contracts are no longer the best option in banking, now, we will focus on how banks can use smart contracts.

Financial Industries to Benefit from Smart Contracts 

Smart contracts in the banking industry are easily applicable. With their help clients can exchange money, shares, property or whatever else. Why would banks give preference to this type of contracts over traditional ones? Let’s name just a few obvious benefits:

• Lower risks
• Real-time transfers
• Lower expenses due to fewer intermediaries  
• The growth of trust and transparency
• No more inefficient processes

The most exhaustive insight into the application of smart contracts to finance services was made by Capgemini Consulting in their report.

Source: Smart Contracts in Financial Services: Getting from Hype to Reality

The following smart contracts use cases outline how smart contracts come in handy within the industry:

• Investment banking and capital markets

When it comes to syndicated loans, the clients could expect settlement periods to be shorter. Instead of 20 days, they would be reduced to 6, for instance. It would lead to an increase in annual income and to a reduction of operational expenses.

• Commercial and retail banking

Within mortgage loan industry, the lower operational costs of every loan would reduce expenses for banks and cut fee expenditures of the clients

• Insurance

For insurance deals, smart contracts would bring cost savings due to the reduced

The Future of Smart Contracts in Banking 

Today, a few banking startups already make their way in the market. One of them is Polybius, a digital bank based on the Ethereum blockchain. Their ICO technically supported by Ambisafe Software was extremely successful – they collected BTC 12,380 (over $31,00,000, as of 2017).  

Even though the benefits of the new technology for the financial sphere is pretty obvious, the future of smart contracts in banking remains unclear. There are several issues left to consider before smart contracts may be widely used in banking:

• Smart contracts cannot initiate wire transfers from one account in a regular bank to another
• There are no interfaces that would bring together blockchain-based banks, tax regulator, and compliance monitoring institutions
• The data stored on the public blockchain has no privacy. When it comes to financial operations, not all the clients would be happy about it
• The legal status of smart contracts is not as clear as it should be
• The blockchain is vulnerable to some extent

When these issues are resolved, we may expect a shift towards blockchain in the banking industry. However, it’s likely that banks would keep on working with traditional contracts and fiat money but gradually introduce cryptocurrency solutions and smart contracts.

Neblio may prove to be a rather interesting blockchain solution in a few years from now. The team positions their project as being the next blockchain platform for enterprise applications and services. It is evident that security and scalability are two key aspects of Neblio in its current form. There is also the NEBL token, which acts as the native Neblio cryptocurrency. It is a rather interesting currency, as it can be used for many different purposes.

What is the Neblio Cryptocurrency?

Every blockchain-based project has its own native cryptocurrency these days, and Neblio is no exception. The developers created NEBL, a proof-of-stake digital token which is native to this particular ecosystem. It is mainly used to power the Neblio Blockchain Network and acts as a form of payment between the members of this blockchain ecosystem. In a way, it is somewhat comparable to other proof-of-stake currencies, yet it unlocks specific features native to the Neblio blockchain.

How can we use the Neblio Cryptocurrency?

The main use case for the Neblio cryptocurrency is sending and receiving money to and from other network participants. Another option is to view it as an investment and trade it on centralized exchanges in the hopes of seeing its value go up. However, the question of whether the Neblio cryptocurrency will appreciate in value is difficult to answer.

The proof-of-stake aspect of Neblio automatically rewards users who hold and stake their Neblio cryptocurrency for longer periods of time. The tokens themselves are used to complete network operations. According to the project’s whitepaper, no one should consider the Neblio cryptocurrency to be an investment vehicle or security. Anyone who holds NEBL should have “no expectation of influence over governance of Neblio and their value is limited.” After all, the tokens are used to create, distribute, and operate distributed applications on the blockchain network.

While this doesn’t explain much about the actual use of the Neblio cryptocurrency, things will become more apparent once developers start creating decentralized applications on top of this blockchain. For now, there isn’t much one can do with it other than hold or stake the coins. Whether or not this will diminish the chances of success for Neblio remains to be seen.

The Neblio Cryptocurrency Roadmap

While there is a proper roadmap in place for Neblio itself, it remains to be seen how it will affect the Neblio cryptocurrency. An official Electrum lite wallet as well as mobile apps for Android and iOS will provide additional convenience to users. No real-world use cases for the tokens are to be expected in the near future, although the roadmap doesn’t focus on the Neblio cryptocurrency directly. The big question is whether or not developers will flock to Neblio over other blockchain solutions to build their decentralized applications.

NY Fed economists discuss how crypto solves problems of trust, but are skeptical of its mainstream adoption as a currency. #NEWS

DJ Gareth Emery has no problem selling out shows. Will he have the same success launching an ICO for his new crypto asset?

Web application development requires a long list of professional skills. To build an app from scratch that will be user-friendly, maintain high performance and stay secure at the same time is a long and hard process. In addition to that, all developers know that there is always one area that operates partially beyond the creator’s control, and that is web application security. You just can’t ever be sure who is on the other end of the HTTP connection.

This one particular aspect makes the entire development process unpredictable and creates too many web security concerns to combat in order to establish a safe and secure app. Will the final product be protected against service attacks? Is the data safe? Are there any possibilities of fake data getting into the database? How secure is the authorized access? These questions are the foundation of web development security. When all the data is stored on the web, one mistake can compromise months of work, and so, our goal today is to cover ten basic security mistakes that might lead to these unfortunate results.

10 web security problems you can escape

In this article, we will cover the most common security vulnerabilities and how to avoid them. Even though some of these principles will seem basic, they are usually the ones that appear most frequently. So let’s go over them.

1. Establishing personally developed security methods

The first and quite common mistake is the assumption that you, as a developer, will do better with the app using a homegrown algorithm or method. This comes from the thinking that the more authentic it is, the safer it can be meaning that it will be unfamiliar to hackers. But, in reality, authentication is not only more of a costly process, but it will also only increase your chances of making security holes that can be easily discovered. The best way to go about this is to use well-tested libraries.

2. Allowing invalid data from users entering the database

This stands at the top of the list when it comes to website security vulnerabilities. Any input your users give you has to be taken with all defensiveness. If you can’t validate what you receive you might end up paying a high price for possible cross-site scripting, command injection, SQL injection or another similar security threat.

3. Focus on the components, not the system as a whole

This mistake is particularly relevant when it comes to large custom projects, when a team of developers separates the work to secure different areas of the app. Now, individual security of those parts might be at the top of the class but things are not so clear with the project as a whole. This is a well-known way to cause many handoffs which make your data very vulnerable to attackers. So, make sure your app is still secure when all its components are combined together.

4. Making security development your last step

Security is not something that can simply be added at the end of the process. It should be built in as the foundation of your entire project and never as another feature left to develop only when you feel like it. In that case, your application will be open for misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities, such as SQL injections.

5. Setting weak passwords

This one doesn’t require much explanation. Don’t hand the success of your app security to its users. Set clear rules for passwords or otherwise most users will simply look for the most instant solutions. No developer who truly cares about the safety of the app can let that happen.

6. Creating plain text password storage

Having a safe way to store passwords is a step forward to having a secure application. Now, practicing the safe storage of user authentication credentials is a broad and difficult topic. But, for now, we can concentrate on the most common and dangerous mistake: plain text password storage. That’s a big no-no. You may, with a doubt, consider all of the stored information that you’ve given away once your application is hacked. The important data, as well as passwords, should only be kept in the database.

7. Keeping unencrypted data in the database

Another common mistake related to data storage is the unencrypted storage of all important details. In this way, you put user data at a huge risk whenever your database is compromised. Encrypting everything can be assumed as an extra cautious measure, but only until you’ve been actually hacked. After your database is attacked, only encryption can prevent a massive loss of information. Remember, everything that is stored online is always under threat from hackers.

8. Allowing variables through the URL path name

Placing variables in the URL is a gateway for exploiting other applications and data. It’s one of the most dangerous mistakes that anyone can make, since it basically gives an allowance to freely download any files with any valuable data your app keeps.

9. Relying too much on the client side

Surely, working in the client browser is sometimes faster and more convenient. These days, many developers switch from the server side to client side. But the truth is, you might not even know what kind of a client is used. It also takes away a large portion of the control over security simply because, by relying too much on the client side code, a developer is losing its influence over the crucial functions of the app.

10. Being overly optimistic.

Build your security with one simple truth: it can always happen to you. Keeping “what if” in the back of your mind will do no harm to your project. Web security development is a never ending process, as there is always the possibility of having security holes. A good developer is one who is aware of that and constantly prepared to search and fix the mistake.

To conclude

Security is the number one concern for any developer, despite the size or scale of the project. So, whether you are working on your first startup or in the process of developing a large project for business, be sure you don’t repeat the mistakes we have collected and discussed above.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem is about so much more than just Bitcoin these days. Various altcoins are all trying to make a lasting impact on the industry. Some currencies, such as BitcoinDark, even claim to be superior versions of the original Bitcoin. While the opinions on BitcoinDark may be a bit divided, the project has some interesting fundamentals well worth checking out.

Why Does BitcoinDark Exist?

Besides the fact that Bitcoin isn’t a perfect cryptocurrency, there are other reasons as to why BitcoinDark was created. Many people consider it to be a useless clone of Bitcoin, but the currency does focus on paving the way for financial inclusion for everyone. Additionally, it offers some rather nifty features and blockchain-based aspects to take note of. It’s not necessarily superior to Bitcoin on paper, but it does provide some things which people will appreciate.

The Unique Aspects of BitcoinDark

Bitcoin itself is linked to centralized exchange-based trading first and foremost. BitcoinDark, on the other hand, is all about embracing the peer-to-peer model. As such, the team has developed the InstantDEX protocol, which allows for the instant and decentralized exchange of BitcoinDark with other cryptocurrencies supported by the project. This feature is built into the main BitcoinDark wallet client for desktop users, and also supports pegged assets, securities, and even share indices.

Additionally, BitcoinDark touts its Pegged Asset Exchange, or PAX. This platform allows users to buy and sell pegged assets – including fiat currencies, commodities, ETFs, and stocks – in a decentralized fashion. Unfortunately, it seems this tool was never finalized. Such a platform certainly has a lot of merit, but it’s evident the development of BitcoinDark has hit a bit of a roadblock in recent months.

Unlike Bitcoin, BitcoinDark also supports proof-of-stake. Users who stake their coins will be rewarded in the form of revenue generated by the decentralized exchange protocols mentioned above, as well as all SuperNET projects. All of this revenue is paid out in the native BTCD currency on a regular basis. These days, it seems BitcoinDark has been “absorbed” by the Komodo project, even though BitcoinDark is still listed as a separate currency on CoinMarketCap with a current value of US$105.

Where to Spend BitcoinDark?

The main challenge most altcoins face is gaining any sort of traction among merchants and retailers. To this day, there is no online or physical store dealing with BitcoinDark payments, nor will that situation change given that the future of this project is in question. It is evident BTCD is mainly a speculative vehicle as of right now, as there isn’t much else to this project. Whether or not the “integration” with Komodo will change things for the better remains to be seen.

Is there any official BitcoinDark Roadmap?

As of right now, there isn’t even a BitcoinDark website. Its former site has been offline for quite some time now, and it doesn’t appear as if the developers will be bringing it back. Given the lack of public communication regarding this project right now, it is evident things are not looking all that great for BitcoinDark. Only time will tell if this project is still viable in a few months, but for now, there is no real reason to invest in this currency.

Whether you order a pizza, taxi, or ask for a consultation at a bank via instant messenger, you will probably deal with a chatbot at some point in a day or week, though you may even not notice.

CRM itself is a powerful sales and marketing tool for many business processes automation, but a chatbot can push your business an additional step forward.

Uber, Lyft, PizzaHut, Sephora, the WallStreet Journal, and many more brands have already built chatbots into their software to increase sales, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.

How can chatbots enhance the productivity of your interaction with CRM? Let’s take a closer look at this question through the angle of CRM challenges that sales managers deal with most often.

1. Valuable Data Loss

Salespeople no longer sit in their offices in front of desktop computers. They have all necessary data on their smartphones and can convert leads and close deals on the go. However, such mobility has engendered the problem of data loss.

Image by Pixabay

Reasons:

• Small screens on mobile devices are uncomfortable for entering data.
• Sales reps can forget to add something if they fill in CRM once returning to the office at the end of the day.

How can chatbots help?

Because of the small screen sizes of mobile devices and a shortage of time, it may not always be easy to enter information into the CRM. You have to log in, switch among tabs to fill in all the necessary data, zoom in and out on the screen to enter into the fields, remember to save your work, etc. It may take a lot of time and effort and, besides, some CRM workflows are really not explicit and require additional thinking, especially if the system is large and bloated. Instead of these mundane tasks, you would rather pitch one more prospect.

Integration of a chatbot into your CRM can help to solve this issue. The greatest benefit of using a chatbot for CRM is that you have only a single message field to type in as you would do in your messenger. Chatbots can continuously go through the necessary workflows, asking you questions and recording your answers in the appropriate system areas seamlessly.

How it works, in practice:

The chatbot is integrated with your CRM and messenger to synchronize information between them. There can also be other enterprise systems connected to this chain (email services, social media, ERP, HRMS, CMS, WMS, etc.).

Let’s imagine that you have just had a call with your Lead and need to make some notes about this conversation. For this purpose, all you need to do is open your messenger (Telegram, Kik, WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook Messenger, or other) and initiate a dialogue with a bot agent.

Passing through the predefined inquiry workflow, you interactively add all valuable information about the meeting.  

Image by Justbots

In one single dialogue, you can create a new Lead, Contact, Case, Opportunity, Follow-Up Task, and other entities, without the necessity of logging into the CRM. All data is recorded to the CRM via API, automatically filling in the right fields.

For example,

and so on…

Here is Justbots example of how it may look in your CRM after a dialogue:

2. Missing Opportunities

Salespeople spend just one-third of their day actually talking to prospects. They spend 21% of their day writing emails, 17% entering data, another 17% prospecting and researching leads, 12% going to internal meetings, and 12% scheduling calls.

Image by Pixabay

Presentations, pitches, negotiations, meetings, calls, emails, chats, progress tracking, closing, data analysis and more. This is just part of the list that makes up a sales manager’s daily routine. Nevertheless, none of these tasks can be ignored.

“…more than 75 percent of the 2,000 deals I’ve landed over the years have come from sending follow-up emails.” – says Jason Zook, Founder, IWearYourShirt.com

Having a large number of deals and myriad of tasks on each of them, it is easy to get lost and miss an important event. That’s why setting reminders for follow-up emails, meetings, calls, and deadlines is very important for every salesperson.

Reasons:

• Difficult to manage data coming from many sources like emails, calls, social media, and messengers, so sales managers can forget meetings and miss deadlines.
• Difficult to track changes on the deal’s progress.

How can chatbots help?

A CRM chatbot will organize all tasks and follow-up on all scheduled activities, so that you can manage your time even more effectively.

How it works, in practice:

Follow-ups and compliance with deadlines are meaningful for successful deal closings. Chatbots can hint at what steps to do next: they’ll remind you that Mr.Doe is waiting for your call on Friday at 9am, or that you should send a contract to Mrs. Jones to close that deal before Monday, etc.

Besides the reminder function, you will also be notified of the latest updates on your Leads, Prospects, Campaigns, and more. Chatbots can analyze such meaningful aspects like potential revenue or deal closing deadlines to advise which deals one should focus on first.

3. Poor Understanding of a Customer

Image by Pixabay

Sales managers need a real-time, 360-degree view of their customers so that, when preparing for a meeting or call, they know all about the client. They will win the client’s trust more easily and close the deal faster if they are able to impress him/her with an understanding of their client’s pain points and interests.

Customer retention is one of the most important KPIs for any company and it directly comes from how well you know your clients. Timely reminders of contract prolongation, personalized offers, or just saying “Happy Birthday!” can make your clients happier.

Unfortunately, this may be quite a challenge to find out and organize scattered pieces of data to get the full picture of the client and his needs.

Reasons:

• Data may be scattered across different sources (like client’s profile, social media, chats, emails).
• Not enough time for thorough research before each meeting.

How can chatbots help?

The reasons to adopt chatbots for CRM are that they can be integrated with social media, email, messenger, inner enterprise databases and apps like ERP and CRM via API. As a result, this incorporation allows it to retrieve necessary data from multiple sources: user profiles, activities on websites, purchase history, transaction history, asked questions, preferences, complaints, etc. All this data, gathered by chatbots, allows the company to get a 360° view of a customer, identify trends and analyze the gaps that a human would not be able to see.

How it works, in practice:

Firstly, this can be used for improving the services, taking decisions for changing the marketing campaign, becoming more responsive to customer sentiments and, as a result, staying more competitive with others.

Secondly, armed with this knowledge, the sales rep can propose more precise matching of the product or service to the client’s needs, winning his/her trust and closing the deal faster.

4. Time-Consuming Routine Activities

Image by Pixabay

Call-centers are overloaded with incoming calls and requests, most of which repeat from client to client. Answering questions about services, giving recommendations, directing people to the appropriate content, receiving orders, and many other activities can be automated, instead of hiring more employees or sacrificing conversions.

Reasons:

• Managers spend a lot of time for answering repetitive questions.
• People hate waiting for answers to their calls or chat requests and go to those who will serve them first.

How can chatbots help?

Connecting your website chatbot to the CRM, you can automatically gather all necessary client information such as name, age, payment data that will be recorded without additional manual efforts. This allows for a significant savings in time when it comes to entering data into the CRM manually.

How it works, in practice:

Use chatbots for business to take away a part of the routine tasks of your employees by automating some processes with chatbots.

For example, RozeExpress, an online flower shop, did just that. By installing Telegram integrated with a chatbot to all company couriers’ smartphones, they reduced delivery management overhead. The courier types in the bot chat information about delivery, bot logs the info in the CRM, changes the status of the order in the system and sends SMS messages to the client. Such a scheme allows savings of up to 40 min of customer service operator work daily.

Chatbots brought a great relief to conversational commerce. Many banks and financial companies use chatbots to answer clients general questions. As an example, Mastercard uses a Facebook Messenger bot to help their clients get information on their account transactions (e.g., “How much did I spend on restaurants in November?”). A user does not need to login into banking apps and navigate through the screens to see necessary information before logging out. This allows for an improved user experience.

What Is the Price of Chatbot for CRM Development?

Depending on the complexity of your projects, time frames, and budget, you can create a chatbot either with the help of a bot builder or go for a custom-tailored solution from scratch. If we talk about a chatbot for CRM, you should focus on custom development, as here we deal with robust business logic, security, user permissions, and unique functionalities.

In general, it is considered that building a chatbot is easier and cheaper than creating a mobile application. The reasons are:

• No sophisticated UI design is needed, as chatbot uses a messenger UI. All functionalities are combined in a single interface and when, if anything, is changed or added, it doesn’t require app updating.
• Messengers are free, flexible for changes, well-optimized, and chatbot-friendly.
• No need to code for multiple mobile platforms.
• There are ready bot platforms that let developers build, host, test, and deploy chatbots.

Factors that may influence development price and time:

1. The scope of the project. The more robust interactions, the more time and higher price of development. Ask yourself the following question to understand the necessities:
2. 1. What is your bot supposed to do? Depending on business logic, it can go through the predefined conversational algorithm of questioning to collect data, take up the burden of answering FAQs, analyze data from multiple sources, or complete more sophisticated tasks.
   2. Are you going to collect payments through a chatbot?
   3. Does it need to integrate with third-parties and other enterprise systems?
   4. Should it recognize text only, or voice and gestures as well?
   5. What level of human speech understanding and AI does it need?

1. Security. Depending on the industry and tasks that you want to automate with a chatbot, different levels of system protection and user permission rules can be used. For example, if your CRM deals with Finance, Healthcare or other sensitive information spheres, the security of the data transfer should be the highest priority, and, therefore, chatbot development can be more expansive.
2. Bot infrastructure. Your bot may live either on a bot platform or your own custom infrastructure that allows taking overall control. On the one hand, creating a bot on the chatbot platform is easier, as all development tools and frameworks are provided, but, as a rule, such platforms are open source and this puts security in question. Another pair of shoes is a proprietary infrastructure where all rights for data and code belong to you and there are more guarantees of compliance with security measures.
3. Adding AI to your bot. This may lift your system to a higher level if a bot can learn human language from every interaction and provide more complex and intelligent analytics. But, this is more complicated and time-consuming from the development point of view.

How to Apply This to Your Business

As stated in the Business Insider report, 80% of businesses plan to incorporate chatbots into their systems by 2020.

Integrating a chatbot with your CRM and other enterprise systems allows for automation of many routine tasks like:

• answering customer questions
• setting reminders for deadlines and important events
• scheduling meetings among multiple participants
• filling data into the CRM without the necessity to log in
• analyzing omnichannel information
• creating a 360-degree customer view

And many more functions that will allow you to increase the efficiency of your business.

Every cryptocurrency in the world has its own set of wallet solutions. Whether one wants to use paper storage, a desktop client, or a web wallet, all of these tools can be found for all cryptocurrencies which take themselves somewhat seriously. In the case of Monero, there are a few different solutions to choose from, although there was still no hardware wallet support at the time of writing. That situation may soon come to change, though, with three potential hardware wallets in the pipeline.

3. The Monero Paper Wallet Option

Although it seems paper wallets are less popular than they were a few years ago, they are still a more than viable way to store funds for the long term. In the case of Monero, a paper wallet solution can be found on the MoneroAddress website. It is entirely possible to use this solution in one’s browser, with or without the use of prefixes. Moreover, the paper wallet solution supports English, Japanese, and Spanish, which is great to see. It also works on devices not connected to the network for added security.

2. The Monero Web Wallet Option

Even though web wallets are always a security risk when storing large amounts of currency, the MyMonero platform is well-respected within the Monero community. It is also operated by Riccardo Spagni, one of the lead Monero developers as of right now. Wallet keys and data are encrypted, and the service itself never has access to one’s funds directly. It is a good intermediary solution for keeping XMR on the side for spending purposes. However, when storing thousands of coins, a paper wallet or the desktop client may prove to be a better option.

1. The Monero Desktop Client

Unlike most other cryptocurrencies, the Monero GUI client is the best desktop option on the market right now. It also serves as a full node for the users willing to explore that option. Syncing with the Monero blockchain is a bit slow, but using remote nodes should speed up the process significantly. Desktop clients for all cryptocurrencies take a long while to sync up initially, and thus it is only normal that the Monero client would follow that same path. Future development updates may help speed up this process a bit.

But why no Hardware Wallets?

Monero certainly deserves a hardware wallet at this point in time. Even though no solution exists in a working fashion as of right now, a few such efforts are underway. First of all, there’s the community-funded Monero hardware wallet, which seems to be progressing rather nicely. It is unclear when this product will become available, but the demand for this solution is more present now than ever before.

Secondly, we have the impending Monero integration for the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet. Although this software update has been in development for some time now, the process is slow going. The developer working on this integration also has had to keep up with regular Ledger tasks for the currencies which are already supported. It is still expected that XMR functionality will come to the Ledger Nano S in Q1 of this year, but that may be pushed back by a few weeks or even months. For now, there’s no official timeline as of yet, but steady progress has been made so far.

Last but not least, we may still see Trezor integrate Monero at some point. It will not be a venture undertaken by the hardware developers themselves, although they are more than willing to integrate working code if anyone submits it to them. While it may not happen in the immediate future, this option was still on the table at the time of writing. One of these three solutions will come to market eventually, at which point Monero holders will finally be able to use a hardware wallet for added security.

Should you expect the tax authorities to sit back and watch, rather than trying to take a piece of cryptocurrency sales for themselves? #EXPERT_TAKE

The members of the Darknet Markets have become disappointed with Bitcoin. #ANALYSIS