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Zero Carbon is a project that aims to help with the problem of climate change facing our planet, with the help of a crypto token. The token helps incentivize people to be more conscious of their carbon footprint and consumption while promoting greener sources.

In a nutshell though, Zero Carbon is all about Carbon Credits on the blockchain. For those who don’t know, carbon credits are one of the most effective ways to tackle climate change. This is because carbon credits provide a direct financial incentive to pollute less, as opposed to many solutions that depend on changing people’s behavior. At the end of the day, people care about climate change, but would do very little personally to help the cause. Carbon Credits are a clever economic way to make people change their behavior, not because of the goodness of their hearts but because it is financially lucrative for them.

The Clean Energy Ecosystem

The Zero Carbon team sees the utility of carbon credits in choosing their energy source. The energy suppliers have an incentive to try and go for cleaner sources of energy. However, the suppliers are not limited to using clean energy only like solar or wind. This can be too restrictive and render them uncompetitive. Instead, these energy suppliers can use dirty fuels, but they will need to pay a premium when they do, as a ‘tax’ for their pollution. This makes them competitive and still work in a market system.

Each ecosystem is different of course. The success of a system like Zero Carbon depends on how much competition it can attract from energy providers. However, the world is already moving towards solar and clean energies. Mom and pop stores are becoming energy companies. In fact many home owners are becoming their own energy companies, and with some additional investment, can become effectively the grid and supply energy to their neighbors and others. The trend is clear.

Zero Carbon and the Energis Token

We’ve seen a good amount of effort directed towards the clean energy ecosystem, and several blockchain projects like Restart Energy Democracy are working on the energy side. Zero Carbon is taking the economic route with carbon credits instead.

The Energis token powers the Zero Carbon platform and ecosystem. The system has smart contracts built in that take a small transaction fee, and route that into a reward pool. This is then distributed to the holders. The actual collection of money offline happens via the company, since this cannot be automated. However, these smart contracts make sure that there is enough transparency in the system, and that there is no cheating going on behind the scenes. The rewards are accrued according to pre-set logic and cannot be changed arbitrarily by the team, which gives consumers and suppliers the confidence in the system.

If you’re interested to learn more about Zero Carbon, check out their website and whitepaper. The team is planning a token sale for the Energis token. If you’re interested, be absolutely sure you understand the risks – token sales are very risky and you can lose all your money. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Photo Credit: _gee_

Online games, and genres like esports are growing at a rapid rate. Esports in fact threatens the big-3 sports in terms of audience in the Unites States, just so you get an idea of how big this market is. You’re talking about a worldwide audience of over 200 million just to watch these games, let alone play them.

Online gaming itself as a genre is hugely popular especially among the younger demographics. At the same time, this popularity has attracted a huge swathe of competitors, which means it is increasingly harder to gain attention for your games from gamers. This is generally a hard problem to solve in such industries, given that the play time is limited. Can a crypto token help with this?

Crypto Token and its Utility

The utility of a crypto token in such an environment is that it can act as a layer of incentivization on top of existing games. That’s the proposition of Yumerium, in using its YUM tokens for this purpose. Games that integrate with YUM and the Yumerium token can add this layer on top of their existing games.

So how does it work? It helps the games attract more people and create more incentives for the players in that ecosystem. For example, games can use YUM to review games, and then use that token to buy in-game items in another game that also supports YUM. This is the ecosystem play here. Games can also award these crypto tokens for playing games to retain their loyal fans, and for sharing with their friends. Therefore, the token in this case is used for marketing purposes and user acquisition.

Yumerium Integrated Games

The play here is that all games that are part of the Yumerium network will benefit by other games joining the network, since it gives more value to the token being used in many different places. Take a given game, which allows you to earn some YUM. Now where do you spend it? You can of course spend it in that game itself, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go explore other games? That’s the network value here.

If there is a large enough user base based on the above, then other games would have an incentive to join the network. This attracts more users and the cycle continues. Of course, this is the classic marketplace dilemma of getting both sides on your platform. However, with crypto tokens, the problem of starting out is easier because you can incentive both sides to share in the upside if successful. We see this for many industries (e.g. we recently wrote about a marketplace for photo licensing).

The Yumerium team has already lined up their first partnership. A game called cryptomine will build integrating the YUM token. If it proves to be successful, it would attract other games to do the same. The team also has employees with experience in the VR realm, which is touted as the future of gaming. Keep an eye out on any VR enabled games to be built here as well.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the Yumerium website. Also check out the whitepaper for more details. Yumerium will soon have a token sale. Remember that all token sales are hugely risky and you can lose all your principal. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose and be responsible with your investments.

Photo Credit: hurov

With the gold rush of crypto, it is no wonder that the people selling the shovels make the most money. In the Bitcoin world, this is the miners and chip manufacturers that are making a killing.

In the broader crypto world, it is the exchanges that trade these cryptos. After all, an exchange gets a small fraction of every trade, no matter whether the market is going up or down. Literally billions of dollars are traded today on crypto exchanges, with volumes rivaling those of NYSE and NASDAQ. That’s serious money, and we are no where near peak adoption.

However, one big problem with the crypto exchanges has always been trust. Decentralized exchanges are far from production ready today, and therefore have very little trading volume. However, with centralized exchanges there is always the fear and risk of something going wrong. After all, many storied exchanges have failed outright and taken user’s money with them (Cryptsy, Bter, Mintpal … the list goes on). Also, as the space matures, it needs more regulated exchanges that are doing things the right way, and not the amateurish way. Regulators are also keeping an eye out on this space, and will step in if they see too much misconduct.

Enter GBX

With this backdrop, let’s look at GBX. GBX stands for Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange. It is building a truly institutional grade crypto exchange and ICO platform.

ICOs raised over $3.5 billion in 2017. Let that sink in for a moment. This is an industry literally born a few years prior, and the amounts raised used to be in the order of a few million dollars a year. ICOs have seen an incredible amount of growth. Even as the hype grows, new ICOs haven’t really stopped much. It has become a problem of discoverability of course – it is hard to separate the signal from the noise. How do investors find new ICOs? This has become a big challenge amidst the scams.

With an ICO platform like the one GBX is building, investors can be more confident that there has been some level of due-diligence already performed. Plus, some of the basic functionalities, like keeping the funds safe, would likely be more reliable with GBX than with each ICO by themselves. ICOs will also find a one single place to list. GBX can really build up a network effect here if it can attract enough popular ICOs and investors on the same platform. This way, investors can find new ICOs new ICOs can find investors easily.

This will benefit projects in other ways too. With regulation catching up, some ICOs need to do basic AML/KYC operations (Anti-Money Laundering/Know Your Customer) on the investors. This is hard to do for individual projects. There is also a lot of sensitive data collection and storage requirements that small teams are not very good at. If they can use an overarching service like GBX for this, they can raise money from investors without that point of friction.

Finally, GBX has its own token called the Rock Token (RKT). This is an access token, which is required for new project listings for projects and early access to ICOs for investors.

RKT is currently undergoing a token sale. If you’re interested to learn more, check out their website. If you want to invest, make sure to read their whitepaper.

Photo Credit: Agent Smith

Today, we’ll discuss a project that combines two of the technologies of the future – the blockchain and autonomous vehicles. The project is called DAV – Decentralized Autonomous Vehicles. The company is building a software platform that includes the element of payment in the autonomous vehicles world. This is important because previously, there wasn’t a way for machines to conduct commerce.

However, as we discussed the ideas of decentralized and autonomous corporations a few years ago on this blog, with the invention of Bitcoin, for the first time ever, machines can own digital assets that are valuable to humans, and therefore create an entirely new economic network. The reality is catching up to the ideas and we should soon see applications of crypto in the autonomous vehicles niche.

The ideas being worked on by the DAV team don’t involve the concept of self-ownership of a network, i.e. the autonomous part, as in autonomy of ownership. However, it is specifically targeted towards the autonomous vehicles space, as in autonomy of operation without human involvement in operations. This seems like the right time, as we are seeing autonomous cars in real cities now.

Creating an Entire Machine Economy of Driverless Cars

The idea behind DAV is to create an entire machine economy, but not in the ‘virtual’ world. This is autonomous vehicles that ply our roads. How does that economy look like? Today, it is the largest corporations – Alphabet (Google/Waymo) for example building its autonomous vehicles. It will work the city like a regular taxi service, and take payments. The profits go to Alphabet, the mothership.

However, how will this allow the everyday people to participate in the economy? As of now, this won’t, unless in the indirect way of making transportation cheaper and more convenient. With DAV, you can participate in this autonomous vehicles economy yourself, by providing services to the network. Not you per se, but your driverless car, for example.

The DAV Token, therefore, would be the currency of this economy. If you let your driverless car go out and give rides to people, you earn some DAV Token via your autonomous car.

DAV Tokens for All Economic Transactions on the Network

However, it is not just about you earning some DAV tokens if you let your autonomous car out. The whole ecosystem around driverless cars will be carried out in DAV Tokens. For example, the network will need service providers. The job of the service providers is to maintain the autonomous cars on the DAV network. This includes all the maintenance and upkeep required to keep the fleet of driverless cars fully operational and in the best health – from charging to cleaning to fixing any major operational issues or upkeep.

Therefore, if you want to earn some DAV Tokens to participate in the network, you can do so easily even if you’re not rich enough to buy an autonomous car – by simply becoming a service provider for the network.

As a platform, DAV is a fully open source software and hardware solution and architecture for the autonomous car segment of our economy. This will appeal to the hackers and tinkerers in the niche. The token gains value based on the software and platform that the team is building and providing, but should be an economy in and of itself.

DAV is one of the few blockchain/crypto projects that goes beyond the virtual world into the real world. There will be challenges in this transition – no doubt about that. However, if the team succeeds, the project can make a difference to our cities, our mobility, and how we operate in the real world.

If you’re interested to learn more, read their whitepaper.