Over the last few days, the centralization versus decentralization row has erupted in earnest. In case you missed it, the activities of Tron founder Justin Sun following his takeover of blogging site Steemit have been pivotal to the controversies.

Let’s briefly recap. Earlier in February, it emerged that Sun was further expanding his crypto-empire with the acquisition of Steemit, which runs on the Steem blockchain. Steem was developed by Daniel Larimer, who also introduced the delegated proof-of-stake governance model, or dPoS, to the blockchain sphere. Larimer later went on to build EOS, which also runs on dPoS.

The clash came about due to a conflict between Sun and the Steem “witnesses” — nodes elected by token holders to act as block producers. The entity Steemit Inc., which operates the blogging site, holds a large quantity of STEEM network tokens, which it had previously never used to participate in voting. Once Sun took over the company, the witnesses moved to implement a soft fork that would have effectively frozen the Steemit tokens and ensured they couldn’t be used to influence the network in the future.

Don’t play a player

Evidently, Justin Sun leveraged his significant weight in the crypto community to persuade exchanges, including Binance, Huobi and Poloniex, to vote against the soft fork that would have diminished his voting power. Not only that, but the vote also ousted the existing set of witnesses in favor of a new set, replacing 20 out of 21 witnesses. All the newcomers had accounts that were created in the days immediately preceding the vote.

At the time of writing, the issue appears to be ongoing, with the Steem community attempting to pool their voting weight as a means of replacing Sun’s stooges with the original witnesses. Nevertheless, Sun’s actions led to cries of foul play from those who believed that before this, Steem (and even Steemit) was a decentralized, democratic system.

But, to be fair to Justin Sun, he didn’t actually do anything wrong. He played the witnesses at their own game, using the rules of the system. What happened is simply an out-in-the-open play of the same scenario that many have long speculated is happening behind the scenes in EOS.

Challenges with collusion resistance

The issues with EOS are illustrative of the flaws inherent to the delegated proof-of-stake governance model, flaws that were highlighted in a recent report from Binance Research. The report assesses the practical effectiveness of the EOS governance model against three goals that decentralization is supposed to achieve: collusion resistance, fault tolerance and attack resistance.

Of these three, the most fundamental failures are around collusion resistance. The more revenue that block producers earn from producing blocks, the more influential they become over the network as a whole. By pooling that influence in votes, they can begin to exert dominance over the network.

Combine this with tokens stored on exchanges, where the exchanges also wield similar clout in the votes, and it’s evident that the control of the network rests in the hands of a small number of very powerful voters.

Aggregating power in crypto

Many would say that the exchanges shouldn’t use their influence in this way. In fact, it’s being used as an argument against Justin Sun’s recent actions regarding Steem, leading to both Binance and Huobi withdrawing their votes.

However, the case highlights the voting power that token holders are giving to exchanges. But the entire crypto community is also — inadvertently or otherwise — encouraging the aggregation of power through the use of staking pools.

Staking your tokens via a pool is essentially the same as putting them into an exchange, for voting purposes. As the saying goes, “not your keys, not your crypto.” Once users start putting their tokens into staking pools, they’re handing over their dPoS voting rights to the staking pool owner. This means that the exchanges and staking pools can easily control who is producing blocks in any dPoS blockchain.

Now, having seen that control being exerted over Steem, token holders may think twice about leaving their holdings on exchanges or putting them into staking pools. After all, if the tokens are in a private wallet, or staked under one’s own name, the voting rights remain intact.

DPoS is an unnecessary complication

There’s already a sound solution that works as good as dPoS. The merits of classical PoS have been proven in the case of long-running PoS blockchains such as Nxt. The added complexity of voting rounds introduced by dPoS does not increase security in any meaningful way and may increase risks of collusion and centralization.

The rights and wrongs of the Steem and Justin Sun saga are likely to be debated for some time to come. Either way, Sun is unlikely to relinquish his voting rights conveyed by the Steemit tokens, given that the community has already moved against him.

However, true advocates of decentralization should consider removing their dPoS tokens from centralized exchanges and staking pools, thus ensuring that they own their votes and their voices are heard.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

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Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has announced its recommitment to Indian markets following a Supreme Court ruling made last week.

According to a blog post published Mar. 9, Kraken is planning to expand its presence in Indian markets following the Supreme Court’s decision last week to overturn the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) controversial ban on cryptocurrency. In 2018, the RBI issued a ruling prohibiting banks from opening accounts for cryptocurrency businesses.

Kraken claims to have a history of servicing the Indian market with a full suite of exchange products but had their growth stifled following the RBI proposal. With the Supreme Court reversing the decision, Kraken has reaffirmed its commitment to India.

The post reads,

As believers in the potential of cryptocurrencies to promote financial freedom, we’ve long seen our services as essential in opening access to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Kraken’s Head of Global Business Development Sunny Ray, who founded the first regulated crypto exchange in India, explained the significance of the ruling,

This is an incredibly emotional moment for India. Satoshi created Bitcoin because he felt that central banks were inefficient. The fact that the crypto industry just battled, and won, against the central bank located in the second-most populous country in the world is a massive achievement. We fought for 1.5 billion people to have the right to access crypto.

Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com

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The cryptocurrency market has made great progress since the conception of Bitcoin in 2009. Crypto-traders in the market have seen the market at its best and its worst, opting to look at the positives and march on. The growth in crypto-use has been multifold over the decade and the same was reflected when aggregate transactions per year surpassed the 1 billion mark in 2019.

According to data provider Blocknative, 2019 turned out to be the most popular year in the history of crypto-transactions. In its recent research, the report claimed,

“Significantly, we crossed the 1 billion aggregate transactions per year threshold in 2019. In fact, more than 37% (>1.1 billion) of all blockchain transactions in history occurred in 2019.”


The attached chart reflected the growth in Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions over time. According to the report, in 2019, BTC and ETH represented nearly 44% of the total global blockchain transaction volume, with the crypto-industry growing at a 5-year
Compound annual growth rate [CAGR] of 44%. If the current trends continues, the industry could expect almost 20 billion new blockchain transactions over the course of the next 5 years.


Shifting its focus onto stablecoins, the report said that Tether [USDT] has emerged as the go-to stablecoin in the crypto-market. Over the last 180 days, Paxos [PAX] outgrew Omni-issued Tether [USDT], Ethereum-issued Tether [USDT_ETH], USD Coin [USDC], and TrueUSD [TUSD] in terms of daily transactions count, according to data provider Coin Metrics.

As USDT and USDT_ETH’s growth was restricted and fell to a certain extent, over the past 180 days, PAX grew by about 545%.


Despite falling lower on the prominence table, however, USDC managed to lead in terms of adjusted transfer value growth as it grew by 80%, as much as PAX.

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Users looking to redeem Brave BAT rewards can now look towards Amazon, Xbox, Apple, Walmart, and other mainstream brands. Brave recently announced a collaboration with Tap Network which means that users can claim their ‘Basic Attention Token’ at Tap Network’s 250,000 partners. Brave is making serious efforts to earn more users and beat age-old browsers from established tech giants.

The announcement is applicable only to U.S. users. Redeemed rewards are accessible via hundreds of popular Tap Network partners like Uber, Apple, Walmart, Playstation, Starbucks and others. The BAT tokens earned from the rewards program can be claimed as gift cards at the extensive list of partner brands. The option to redeem Brave BAT rewards at so many brands will certainly boost its popularity quotient.

Redeem Brave BAT rewards via Amazon, Apple and many more

The privacy-focused browser, Brave, provides enterprise-grade security for everyday browsing. It is already the most popular browser in Japan. Recently, the browser made headlines as it was ranked much higher than its competitors in terms of user privacy protection. Its privacy and online security quotient were ranked more than Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Brave browser’s rewards program gives BAT tokens to users watching selected ads.

Earlier this month, the Brave browser launched a ‘fingerprinting’ protection feature for its users. The concept of ‘Browser fingerprinting’ is used to track a user’s online browsing behavior by collecting unique information related to the user’s browser. This can become a huge privacy concern for many people.

In their fight against ‘browser fingerprinting’, conventional browsers often resort to making various browsers look identical. Brave takes a different approach. They have chosen to implement the ‘randomization’ technique that projects browsers as unique during browsing sessions. Users cannot be tracked and segregated as per browsing behavior. As options to redeem Brave BAT rewards have now increased manifold, users will surely be enticed to install Brave and earn some BATs.

Featured Image by Twenty20

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Last year, Live Bitcoin News reported that Fat Brands – a restaurant corporation that owns the popular burger chain Fatburger – was tokenizing a new bond offering with the help of the Ethereum blockchain.

Fat Brands and Ethereum Make Digital Magic Happen

Now, that offering is available in the form of $40 million worth of ETH-based securities. DBRS Morningstar, a company that rates investments, is passing its judgement on the new offering. The sentiment is positive as according to the company’s official report, which says that access to security data is considerably faster and transparency is at an all-time high.

According to Fat Brands CEO and President Andrew Wiederhorn, this could potentially open the doors to further digital securities offerings in the coming months. In an interview, he explains:

It’ll be a transformative event for Fat Brands, and I’m certain that there will be a number of smaller franchise companies or restaurant companies that want to access the whole business securitization market to access capital rather than term loans from lenders.

Payments are already being issued to stockholders via Ethereum through stable currencies and ERC-20 tokens such as $CDG. Payments are also being structured through a New York company called Cadence, which is responsible for recording all the transaction data.

Founder and CEO of Cadence Nelson Chu states:

You’ll see when the money came in, when it went out and how that whole waterfall works. It’s certainly the first rated securitization with a digital asset element, and we’re using it the way it was intended: to provide that level of transparency… What we’re doing is laying the foundation for a future where securitization will be on-chain from start to finish.

Typically, information is submitted first and foremost to Bloomberg, giving people an opportunity to see the trading data through a more traditional sense. Wiederhorn explains:

If you look up on the Bloomberg terminal, for example, who are the holders of the company’s securities, you can tell in two seconds, right? Anybody who’s got a material position in the company, they’re required to file it and list it in this way.

Chu states that while these securities are submitted digitally, they still have paper contracts behind them, which he describes as “crucial” for obtaining new users who are not entirely secure or comfortable with the way the blockchain operates. He explains:

People are getting comfortable with the platform… This takes no adoption from anybody. The ability to click into the contract, see who’s invested, see how much they put money for, how often they transact and for how much, is incredibly valuable.

We’ll Pay Your Fees!

He also states that Cadence covers all Ethereum-based gas fees as a means of ensuring customers can feel easier about getting involved:

We pay for it as a cost of providing that level of transparency that we’re hoping to be the foundation for the future.

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It isn’t only the markets that are being affected by the coronavirus. This image of the main stage at the CryptoCompare Digital Asset Summit in London tells a thousand words. As mass events and gatherings are canceled around the world, the CCDA Summit may well be the last major event of the industry this year. And beyond the explosion of crypto derivatives, DeFi, and the old chestnut of mass adoption, the main topic du jour is the coronavirus.

CryptoCompare – the numbers are down but business goes on (sort of) as usual

Of course, some of the keynotes were better attended than others. However, there was still an entire round table per person, noticeably self-distancing by about a meter. Anyone who’s ever attended a Q4 conference in a bear market will tell you it’s kind of a sad story. But attending a cryptocurrency conference amid a climate of media-induced psychosis and suggested self-isolation with nearby countries on mass lockdown is next-level bizarre.


The delegates meet, shake hands, then immediately laugh awkwardly realizing they shouldn’t have. Hand sanitizer is passed around at once. Someone coughs and a horrified expression appears on the faces of those nearby. Familiar faces bound towards each other then quickly check themselves before exchanging a hug. These are strange times indeed.

With so much uncertainty gripping the world, even opinions handed out or responses to a question are tapered off with “well, depending on how long this lasts,” or something similar.

On the plus side, business is still being done. The exhibitor hall is quite busy — but not exactly thriving and it’s probably because it’s also a very small space, presumably designed that way to make it look as if more people are in attendance.


No one wants to pick up the free merchandise that’s usually grabbed in the first few minutes as they remember the virus can live for days on hard surfaces and clothes.

Cryptocurrencies are more correlated to the stock markets than we thought

Of course, the other topic of conversation is the downward spiral of cryptocurrency prices and how Bitcoin is not, in fact, the safe-haven asset we may at one point have thought it to be.

The general vibe at the CryptoCompare conference? That the outlook for the crypto industry is bullish long-term, but there are some turbulent headwinds on the horizon.

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Huobi Group has officially announced the launch of its new mobile application, Huobi Lite. Per a March 10 announcement, the new app will allow anyone to trade major cryptocurrencies on Android and iOS without fees or commissions.

Users will be able to trade cryptocurrencies with fiat currencies such as the United States Dollar, Vietnamese Dong, Malaysian Ringgit, Hong Kong Dollar and Chinese Yuan through multiple payment methods, including credit cards.

Crypto assets supported in the app

Currently, Huobi Lite supports BTC, ETH, USDT, HT, EOS, BCH, XRP, LTC and HUSD, although they have clarified that they expect to incorporate new crypto assets in the future.

Users will be able to store, track and manage their portfolios and the company claims that a Bitcoin can be obtained in less than five minutes with the mobile app.

On the launch of Huobi Lite, Ciara Sun, VP of global business at Huobi Group, said:

“By reducing the barrier to entry and catering to both beginners and veteran traders, we’re vying for mainstream adoption across the globe, especially in underserved markets like Southeast Asia.”

Cointelegraph reached out to Huobi for additional details but received no response as of press time. This article will be updated accordingly should a response come in.

About Huobi Group

Huobi Group is a global blockchain company founded by Leon Li in 2013. Currently, the crypto exchange has an accumulative turnover that exceeds USD $3 trillion and offers its services to users from more than 170 countries.

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Since launching in 2018, Brave's privacy-focused browser promised real world use for its BAT token. Now it wants to make it easier.


If you use the Brave internet browser, you’ll now be able to buy a Starbucks coffee, ride in an Uber, or pay for HBO and Hulu subscriptions with the reward you reap from viewing ads.

Brave Software, the company behind the privacy-focused, Google Chrome fork Brave, announced on Tuesday a partnership with the TAP Network, which will allow users to redeem Basic Attention Token (BAT) rewards from over 250,000 major brands in the US.

The browser, which uses a “blockchain-based advertising model,” gives users 70 percent of revenue share through its BAT, according to Brave. Now users who earn BAT can redeem those tokens through the TAP Network for gift cards at various retailers—but only if those users have verified their wallets with crypto exchange Uphold.

“This partnership with TAP Network supports our mission of connecting consumers and brands in a respectful, mutually beneficial way, and contributes to the growth of our overall ecosystem by expanding the utility of BAT,” Brendan Eich, co-founder and CEO of Brave Software, said in a press release.

According to Eich, this all lines up with Brave’s privacy-centric mission. All users need to do to start buying gift cards with BAT is connect their Uphold accounts to the TAP Network. Some Brave users may not find that so easy though, given the complaints BAT holders have levied against Uphold’s “insane [KYC] verification process.”

While Brave said it had rolled out the real-world rewards functionality for desktop users, with a general release expected within 8 weeks, it isn’t clear whether it will enable this function through other exchanges. (Brave did not immediately respond to our questions, but we’ll update if it does.)

The company, whose browser now boasts 12 million monthly active users (according to its own figures), initially announced its intention to “go the full distance towards ecommerce” last year. As of December, the company said it had partnered with 350,000 publishers to integrate BAT rewards, which users can use to tip publishers.

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