BitBay is a free, decentralized marketplace for buying and selling goods and services on the blockchain. You can connect directly with peers and transact without the need for a middleman like Amazon, eBay, or Craigslist. Transactions are secure and anonymous. They’re also guaranteed by escrow. The project aims to be the new standard for eCommerce, allowing individuals to trade one-to-one at scale. As a result, BitBay claims it will revolutionize global trade. It’s seemingly a great solution for other niche applications as well, where groups of people aren’t served by existing marketplaces. In the beginning, BitBay got off to a rocky start. In 2014, the original founders raised capital in bad faith and quickly abandoned the project after fundraising, leaving the lead developer holding the bag. It seemed like BitBay was finished, but the developer continued working on the project out of a sense of duty to the original investors, without access to the capital raised in the fundraising round. The BAY token is the transactional token in the marketplace. You use it to buy and sell, and it can also participate in freezes, escrow, bets, swaps, etc. The token itself operates like Bitcoin and is secured by the network. Although you can use BAY for transactions, you don’t have to. You do, however, have to use BAY if you’d like to take part in token staking. BAY’s price cratered after the original founders left and stayed low until March 2017 when it took off. It has been through several cycles of bull and bear runs, with a max price over 30 cents in January 2018 before retreating to its current value. BitBay supports all kinds of privacy and security measures. It’s easy to create a multisignature wallet for added security. There are integrations for Tor and other proxies that help anonymize your connection to the marketplace. An on-screen keyboard allows for password or key entry without using your keyboard and being susceptible to keylogging. Additionally, you can create images with your private key embedded, so that finding a stored key is more difficult for a hacker. The marketplace also has functionality for time locking contracts and swapping currencies. This enables all kinds of cross-chain transactions and financial implements. The time lock and other smart contract elements make it possible to create bets, escrow, futures and options trades, or any number of other financial transactions. The idea and implementation by BitBay, of a decentralized marketplace and trading platform is brilliant and shows further promise of expansion.The rocky beginning of the cryptocurrency and its subsequent comeback as a promising platform indicate that the developers are in it for the long haul and don’t plan on abandoning the platform after all these years.
Mithril is a decentralized ecosystem on the ethereum blockchain. It is a system that rewards users who engage in “social mining”. Mithril rewards users for the impact their content may have in viewers and the popularity it attracts, such as number of likes and views. In the blockchain network and cryptocurrency, Mithril is a very innovative idea that aims to change the way we think about social media entirely. This particular innovation will decentralize and reward social media content creators in a fair and open way.The process of building a social media platform from the scratch is a long, rigorous and exhausting one. Even though blockchain based social media platforms are not new innovations, they usually cannot interact with existing platforms. The Mithril integration protocol permits MITH mining on all social media networks. Therefore, Mithril can also leverage existing sites for their own purposes. In addition, it permits content influencers to make use of their pre-existing followers network to mine Mithril. This acts as a big plus to the Mithril ecosystem. It requires less stress and work than establishing followers on an entirely new platform. It also helps Mithril to have an edge and a bigger pool of users. This means that, content providers only need to start making use of the Mithril integration protocol in order to make more money. Instead of an ICO, Mithril held a private crowdsale where 400,000,000 MITH was distributed and 50,000,000 was retained by the Mithril team for development and marketing. Mithril MITH tokens are mined by participating on partner applications and this social mining is a gamechanger. Creating and sharing content earns Mithril MITH, which can then be spent with partner applications. Because mythril is a crafting ingredient in the Final Fantasy video game series, online searches for how to spend MITH have these pages mixed in, which will likely continue for several years until the platform gains enough big-name retail spending partners to rise up SEO rankings. MITH is currently available on Bithumb and OKEx, but more exchanges will likely list the token soon. Although exchanges are never the best place to store your cryptocurrencies due to security concerns, this is one possibility. Better would be to store them using an ERC-20 wallet that allows you to add custom tokens, such as MyEtherWallet, MyCrypto, or Coinfy. Although the Mithril platform and its flagship social network Lit are still in fairly early development, as an early mover, they are poised to be a leader in the decentralized social networking space. If Mithril gets its way, centralized social networking companies may soon have worthy competitors that offer users more control of their data while rewarding people for creating the content that is ultimately the life-blood of all social networks.