My 3 favorite Crypto Projects
By: Shubham Girdhar
Tags: Binance, Blockstack, Coinbase, Metamask, Cryptocurrency

Being a newbie in this domain, my knowledge base has more width vis-a-vis depth, but as time passes, the relation will hopefully become inverse.

How I got interested in Crypto-verse?

In 2016,I heard the term Bitcoin first time,Read the Bitcoin whitepaper once though couldn't understand much.

In 2019, I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile which has a quote “Small is beautiful but also less fragile”, This quote indirectly introduced me with the concept of decentralisation.

And,In 2020 during Covid Lockdown,The world was getting engulfed into chaos, lives were being lost, businesses were failing and the world was looking at its leaders to act sane but to their surprise they just did the opposite. The early warnings were not taken seriously and when they were, The implementation was dodgy. In retrospect, The way we had connected the world using globalization and made it one giant breathing creature and transferred wealth to specific points leaving other parts poorer.Suddenly decentralization made more and more sense and led to more questions like,

Is Centralisation always better?

Is Scalability always better?

Crpto as a concept is a belief, A belief that a group of people can communicate their financial transactions and validate them without the need of a central authority/King/Head of State.

So here is a list of my 3 favorite projects in Crypto-verse.

Blockstack

The first crypto information piece that made sense to me was a Ted talk by Muneeb Ali where he talked about how he wants to build a decentralized Internet and then it just clicked that the idea was to make a parallel world where decentralization was guiding everything as a core concept.

Blockstack is an open-source effort to design a network with the security of Bitcoin and the expressivity required for developing decentralized applications. In these decentralized apps, mass data breaches, loss of user privacy and lack of data portability can be a thing of the past.

Blockstack builds on, and extends, the Bitcoin blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto designed its limited scripting language for a single use case — tracking the ownership of Bitcoin. While this is one of the things that keeps Bitcoin secure, it also means you can’t program Bitcoin with enough expressivity to build decentralized apps. Blockstack adds this expressivity to Bitcoin without spinning up a new Proof of Work chain. Instead, Blockstack re-uses Bitcoin’s computing power and its blockchain for settlement and security.

Connecting Bitcoin and Blockstack: Proof of Transfer (PoX)

Bitcoin miners have already spent electricity on computation to mine blocks and earn Bitcoin. Instead of introducing another Proof of Work chain, Proof of Transfer (PoX) re-uses Bitcoin to secure the Stacks blockchain. Miners compete to mine blocks by sending Bitcoin to participants in the network. This Bitcoin becomes proof of computation, and by proxy enables the Stacks blockchain to share Bitcoin’s CPU resources.

Proof of Transfer is in line with Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of new networks sharing Bitcoin’s computing power, but keeping additional data out of the Bitcoin chain.

2. Metamask

While exploring, I noticed one thing that the community can improve upon is the messaging part. The underlying technologies need to be communicated in a way that a normal user can understand it and find them appealing.

There is one initiative that has got this part right is Metamask. Its explainer video is one of the pieces of content that appeals to muggles as well and the explanation is simple and lucid.

MetaMask allows users to manage accounts and their keys in a variety of ways, including hardware wallets, while isolating them from the site context. This is a great security improvement over storing the user keys on a single central server, or even in local storage, which can allow for mass account thefts.

3. Coinbase

Now as an early bitcoin enthusiast, The next thing you want is to buy some bitcoin and store it in a safe place and you're looking for an application that is trusted and is easy to use.

Next, you find Coinbase which is simple to use and is easy to navigate. Their core mission is going to benefit the crypto ecosystem as a whole.

Coinbase is a secure online platform for buying, selling, transferring, and storing digital currency. Our mission is to create an open financial system for the world and to be the leading global brand for helping people convert digital currency into and out of their local currency.

Some highlights of the platform include :

Solid variety of altcoin choices : Coinbase offers over 25 cryptocurrencies for investment, trading, and also staking.

: Coinbase offers over 25 cryptocurrencies for investment, trading, and also staking. Extremely simple user interface : Coinbase is perhaps one of the easiest on-ramps to crypto investing. It is easy to sign up and buy cryptocurrencies within a matter of minutes. It also has a learning program that pays users cryptocurrency to learn more about how cryptocurrency works.

: Coinbase is perhaps one of the easiest on-ramps to crypto investing. It is easy to sign up and buy cryptocurrencies within a matter of minutes. It also has a learning program that pays users cryptocurrency to learn more about how cryptocurrency works. High liquidity: Coinbase consistently ranks among highly liquid exchanges. This protects the investor from serious price slippage in an already volatile market.

So , These are my favourite projects in Crypto-verse.

Published for a Freehold Challenge

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