Dropil offers a full investing suite including financial planning, retirement savings, and of course trading. Their primary target market is inexperienced investors who are looking for an easy way to enter into the cryptocurrency markets, but they also have something to offer the more experienced investor, cryptocurrency and otherwise. And they claim to be able to set-up investment planning for anyone, regardless of their risk tolerance or background. Of course the main selling point of Dropil is the automation of the cryptocurrency trading process. The platform requires little input from investors and claims it will deliver high profit margins and minimal risk of losses. A second part of the Dropil platform is the Arthur bot. This bot is the risk management bot, which manages investor portfolios and also provides arbitrage analysis. While it is less complex than Dex, it is still important as it will monitor up to 13 different exchanges and 10 different coins to find arbitrage opportunities for you. What is most important to note is that this can all be done without the use of an API as well as no user accounts needed. Future plans include expanding this functionality. The final aspect of the Dropil ecosystem is the DROP token, which is an ERC-20 token that was created to help ensure privacy, while also powering the internal economy of Dropil. The team chose to use the ERC20 protocol to help foster compatibility and quick exchange executions to benefit the entire community. The DROP token has a total supply of 30 billion coins, which was determined to be an optimal amount for asset management by the developers. It was also chosen with the optimal user base in mind, as well as the need for coins to be traded and achieve widespread adoption. The need to use the DROP token to access the feature of Dropil should ensure a good implementation and demand for the token. Dropil looks like an interesting project that is tackling the complexity of investing in cryptocurrencies. The idea of automated trading, investing and arbitrage is a compelling one, but it does sound familiar. Stocks, commodities and forex all have these types of automated systems, or robots, that promise guaranteed returns. I have yet to come across one that is reliable in the long term. Perhaps the artificial intelligence algorithm is advanced enough to change that. Perhaps cryptocurrency market movements are easier to analyze and predict.
What is Monero? Monero (XMR) is the top privacy-centric cryptocurrency based on the CryptoNote protocol, a secure, private and untraceable currency system. Monero uses a special kind of cryptography to ensure that all of its transactions are remain 100% unlinkable and untraceable. In an increasingly transparent world, you can see why something like Monero can become so desirable. Origins of Monero In July of 2012, Bytecoin, the first real life implementation of CryptoNote, was launched. While Bytecoin had promise, people noticed that 80% of the coins were already published. So, it was decided that the bytecoin blockchain will be forked and the new coins in the new chain will be called Bitmonero, which is was then renamed Monero, meaning “coin” in Esperanto language. In this new blockchain, a block will be mined and added every two minutes. Why Monero? #1: Unlinkability - Your identity is completely private You have complete control over your transactions. You are responsible for your money. Because your identity is private no one will be able to see what you are spending your money on. When you send funds to someone’s public address, what happens is that you actually send the funds to a randomly created brand new one-time destination address. This means that the public record does not contain any mention that funds were received to the recipient’s public address. In Monero, your public address will never appear in the public record of transactions. Instead, a 'stealth address' is recorded in a way that only you, the recipient, can recognize the incoming funds. #2: Fungibility Fungibility is interchangeability between one asset and another asset of the same type. Suppose you borrowed $50 from your friend, you can even return the money in the form of 1 $50 bill or 5 $10 bill, It is still fine. This shows that the dollar has fungible properties. However, if you were to borrow someone’s car for the weekend and come back and give them some other car in return, then that person will probably punch on the face. Cars, in this example, are a nonfungible asset. What is CryptoNote? CryptoNote is the application layer protocol that fuels various decentralized currencies. While it is similar to the application layer which runs bitcoin in many aspects, there a lot of areas where the two differ from each other. CryptoNote features an entirely new code base and is not a fork of Bitcoin. More info about CryptoNote can be found at their website. CryptoNote uses Ring Signatures to conceal sender identities via mixing and it also has unlinkable transactions that is achieved using 1-time keys for each individual payments. Ring signatures enable ‘transaction mixing’ to occur. Transaction mixing means that when funds are sent, the sender randomly chooses several other users’ funds to also appear in the transaction as a possible source of the funds being sent. The cryptographical nature of the ring signature means that no one can tell which of the funds were really the source of the transaction – not even the person that gave the funds to the sender in the first place. A system of ‘key images’ associated with each ring signature ensures that although no one can tell the true source of the funds, it can be easily detected if the sender attempts to anonymously send their funds twice.