IntroductionWith a 6% APY or annual percentage yield on BTC and 8.6% on stablecoins, the BlockFi Interest Account seems like a ray of sunshine for digital asset holders that have grown used to having their holdings slosh around with market volatility. Let me share with you an independent review of BlockFi and whether it is a legitimate means for you to generate passive returns. Who is BlockFiBlockFi is a privately-held NYC-based lending platform founded in 2017. The BlockFi Interest account is one of the only cryptocurrency storage option that pays offers rates that are competitive with most non-cryptocurrency account interest rates. BlockFi allows users to earn competitive compound interest rates on their cryptocurrencies, such as BTC, ETH, LTC, USDC, USDT, GUSD, and PAXG. Security of DepositsBlockFi’s cryptocurrency deposits are held by the Gemini Trust Company, regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services. It is available worldwide, outside of sanctioned or watch-listed countries. Gemini has never been hacked, stolen from, or otherwise compromised in any way during it's more than 5 years of operation. It is available worldwide, outside of sanctioned or watch-listed countries. Allows for anytime withdrawals. Users get one free withdrawal per month. Earn Up to 6% APYComparatively, BlockFi offers 43x more than “high-interest” savings accounts. However, it’s worth noting that BlockFi deposits aren’t FDIC insured, so BlockFi accounts shouldn’t be considered a savings account. It is an investment account, and users are exposed to a unique set of risks that traditional fiat savings accounts are not. Bitcoin Interest Rate: 6% up to 2.5 BTC, and then 3% on any amount over 2.5 BTC. If you are interested in Ethereum, then you can get up to 5.25% on any amount of Ethereum deposited. There are no monthly fees or charges. The interest rates are paid in their nominal cryptocurrency. For example, you will earn 0.06 BTC on 1 BTC in a full year, provided the interest rate stays the same. If you’ve been in the cryptocurrency space for a while you’re no stranger to the pros and cons of owning a volatile asset– your 0.06 BTC could either be more or less than its USD equivalent at the time of deposit, so plan accordingly. BlockFi Interest Account (BIA)BlockFi Interest Account clients can deposit their crypto and earn interest. Paid out at the beginning of every month, the interest earned by account holders compounds, increasing the annual yield. The BlockFi interest rates are fairly competitive, especially when compared to simply keeping your cryptocurrency on an interest-free exchange or wallet. Bitcoin: Users can earn up to 6% in annual interest on deposits under 2.5 BTC, and 3% on any BTC amount above that 2,5 BTC threshold. Ethereum: Users can earn up to 5.25% in annual interest on any ETH deposits. Account WithdrawalsYou can withdraw your funds at any time. BlockFi currently offer one free crypto withdrawal and one free stablecoin withdrawal per calendar month. Any further withdrawals may be assessed a fee as listed here. BlockFi TeamFounder & CEO, Zac Prince has experience in leadership roles at multiple successful tech companies. Prior to starting BlockFi, he led business development teams at Orchard Platform, a broker-dealer and RIA in the online lending sector, and Zibby, an online consumer lender. Co-Founder & VP of Operations Flori Marquez has experience managing alternative lending products. In the marketplace lending industry, she helped build, scale, and optimize a $125MM portfolio for Bond Street (acquired by Goldman Sachs). As Head of Portfolio Management, Flori managed all operations from point of origination through to default and litigation. BlockFi Funding AmountBlockFi recently raised $50 million in Series C funding lead by Morgan Creek Digital, with participating investors such as Valar Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Kenetic Capital, CMT Digital, Castle Island Ventures, SCB 10X, HashKey, Avon Ventures, Purple Arch Ventures, Michael Antonov, NBA player Matthew Dellavedova, and two university endowments. As a company, BlockFi’s revenue has grown 10x over the past year, putting it on track to reach $100M in revenue over the next year. With over $1.5B in assets on the platform, and a 0% loss rate across its lending portfolio, BlockFi has made a strong case for establishing itself as a dominant entity in the overarching emerging FinTech space. How does BlockFi Make $$?BlockFi is a spread business that makes money by borrowing capital at a certain rate (the interest rates it pays to users) and lends it a higher rate (the interest rates it offers for BTC/ETH/GUSD loans). A BlockFi blog post notes that the company primarily works with institutional counter-parties to offer them liquidity. These borrowers consist of Traders and investment funds that seek arbitrage trading opportunities in a fragmented marketplace. They borrow cryptocurrency to close mispricing gaps between exchanges or dispersed markets. Margin traders will borrow to fuel their trading strategies. BlockFi Bitcoin Credit CardLaunching in early 2021 (but waitlist open to current BlockFi clients), BlockFi is launching a Bitcoin Rewards Visa Credit Card. Similar to cash-back credit cards, the BlockFi Visa will earn you rewards in Bitcoin! The card is set to earn 1.5% rewards rate in Bitcoin on all card purchases. Bitcoin Rewards Rate Boost. After three months of card ownership, the rewards rate of 1.5% back increases to 3.5% back in bitcoin on every purchase for the following three months, with an accrual payout of up to a maximum of $100 in bitcoin, paid out in the seventh month. Trading Bonus — Card owners who trade cryptocurrencies with BlockFi will earn 0.25% of their trading volume back in bitcoin, up to a maximum of $500 in bitcoin each month. How to Apply?Signing up for a BlockFi account is fairly straightforward and can be done in under two minutes. You can start right from this BlockFi review. Go to the BlockFi website using the link here. You can receive up to $500 on your deposit as a signup bonus, starting at $25 sign-up bonus when you deposit a minimum of $500.
My BlockFi
ConclusionWhether or not BlockFi is worth it comes down to your risk profile and what you’re doing with your cryptocurrency. The BlockFi interest rates are quite competitive for the industry, and for some digital assets, industry leading. If it’s just sitting on an exchange, you may as well reap the benefits of compounded interest. 10 BTC would turn into 10.62 BTC in a year, a not insignificant gain of around $5,000 for the year. You would also receive the benefits or tragedy of Bitcoin’s price going up or down. However, it’s worth remembering that any time your cryptocurrency leaves your hard wallets, it’s exposed to a higher degree of risk. If BlockFi or Gemini were to experience some (highly unlikely) catastrophic hack, your cryptocurrency would be at risk. . If you are looking for assistance on any topics related to zilliqa, feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] and I will do my best to create an education video around that topic.
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IntroductionHello and good to have you back at Zilliqa Zebra. Are you confused about what gZil is and what you can do with it? Do you want to find out more about the purpose of gZIL? Let Zilliqa Zebra help answer your burning questions about gZIL. You will learn what is what is gZIL and how it came to being. You will also learn about a Decentralized Autonomous Organization or DAO and what purpose does it serve. Find out how to earn and accumulate gZIL, and what else you can do with this token. I will also share with you how you can use a real time calculator to help plan and strategise your staking to get most gZIL. Last but not least I will share with you where else you can buy, sell or trade gZIL. What is gZIL?gZIL is essentially a governance token, which empowers long-term token holders and frequent engagers to become a decision-maker in the Zilliqa ecosystem. This can be compared to a DAO- like structure where gZIL holders can vote and make decisions on community and partner projects powered by $ZIL. $gZIL are ZRC-2 compliant fungible tokens that can be earned alongside $ZIL staking rewards. $gZIL will only be issued when a user withdraws his/her $ZIL stakings rewards from his/her designated SSN operator. For every 1,000 $ZIL earned as staking reward, 1 gZIL will be issued (i.e. 0.001 $gZIL will be issued for every 1 $ZIL staking reward). The rationale behind issuing $gZIL is to capture long-term token holders and give them access to governance tokens that they can later use to make ecosystem-wide decisions (e.g. in a DAO like structure where $gZIL holders can vote and make decisions on community projects). What is DAO?What Is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)? One of the major features of digital currencies is that they are decentralized. This means they are not controlled by a single institution like a government or central bank, but instead are divided among a variety of computers, networks, and nodes. The DAO had an objective to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing both commercial and non-profit enterprises. In the DAO, each action or vote is represented by some form of transaction in the Blockchain. Here the members are represented by the address (in Ethereum, It’s Ethereum address). These addresses can be owned by a human, a robot, an IOT device, or even another DAO. This makes it ideal for a fully automated system to run the full-fledged organization. Each member is given a token which represents the shares of the DAO; these tokens can also be used to vote in the DAO to take a certain decision. The token is nothing but another kind of contract sunning on top of Blockchain. The more token an address has, the more control he will have on the DAO. How does DAO work?Each member will have the rights to submit the proposal to take certain decisions. These decisions can be:
How do you earn gZIL?gZIL will be used for broader ecosystem governance. This will create a DAO-like structure through which gZIL holders can invest in community projects, with the longer-term goal of moving all ecosystem funding to the DAO and empowering the community to be decision-makers of the funded projects. The community holding gZILs will be able to vote on proposals alongside Zilliqa Research on making decisions. $gZIL will only be issued for 1 year starting from the launch of non-custodial $ZIL staking (14 October 2020), with the objective of creating scarcity and to incentivise users to get involved in the staking programme early. The maximum number of gZIL ever to be issued is limited at 722,700. gZIL will only be issued when a user withdraws their $ZIL stakings rewards from the designated SSN operator. For every 1,000 $ZIL earned as staking reward, 1 gZIL will be issued (i.e. 0.001 gZIL will be issued for every 1 $ZIL staking reward). What else can you do with gZIL?Aside from holding gZIL for governance purposes, users can also swap gZIL for other ZRC-2 tokens on our DEX decentralised exchange , ZilSwap, or contribute to its liquidity pool(s) in return for rewards. As of 18 Feb 2021, 1 gZIL is worth about 116 US dollars, so you can tell that it’s pretty valuable. Planning with a Real-time CalculatorIn fact, if you are planning to do some serious Zilliqa staking, you might want to check out the real time staking calculator at My-Zilliqa-Wallet. The calculator is a useful took which takes into consideration your potential gZil earnings. It then calculates the estimated annual returns factoring the returns from gZIL. In fact, using this example here, if you invest 100,000 ZIL at 14.2 APY, you should get an estimated annual return including gZIL of 3372 USD with an estimated actual APY of 26% which is really fantastic. With lots of great projects coming up, you are not only capturing the yield from staking but also the price appreciation of Zilliqa itself! You can also buy and trade gZILYou can also buy and trade gZIL at various crypto exchanges. Yes, users can swap gZIL for other ZRC-2 tokens via the decentralised exchange ZilSwap, or contribute to its liquidity pool(s) in return for rewards.
What is Zilliqa? Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform is home to many decentralized applications , and as of October 2020, it also allows for staking and yield farming Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet. The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts. Who are the founders of Zilliqa? Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Saxena and several students in the School of Computing published a paper in 2016 that outlined how a sharding-focused blockchain could improve network efficiency and speed. Around the same time, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital alongside Max Kantelia, a lifelong finance and tech entrepreneur, and Juzar Motiwalla, former president of the Singapore Computer Society. The company incorporated Zilliqa Research in June 2017 to develop the Zilliqa network, bringing on Dong Xinshu as its CEO, Yaoqi Jia as its chief technology officer and Amrit Kumar as its chief scientific officer. All three previously worked as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing. At present, Amrit Kumar is president, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Zilliqa. How many Zilliqa coins (ZIL) are there in circulation?Zilliqa has a fixed maximum supply of 21 billion tokens. ZIL was first made available for sale as an ERC-20 token as a part of a token generation event that concluded in January 2018. The tokens were subsequently transferred to the Zilliqa mainnet in a token-swap event that concluded in February 2020. Before launching, Zilliqa generated 60% of all tokens (12.6 billion ZIL) to be distributed at the token generation event, and the remaining 40% (8.4 billion ZIL) will be created through the mining process. Ten percent of all tokens (2.1 billion ZIL) were reserved for Anquan Capital, 12% (2.52 billion ZIL) for Zilliqa Research, and 5% for contemporary and future Zilliqa team members all of which were announced to be distributed quarterly over a three-year period. Zilliqa is designed such that all tokens will be minted within 10 years, with the block mining reward slowly decreasing. According to its whitepaper , the project aims to have 80% of the tokens (16.8 billion ZIL) mined within the first four years and 20% (4.2 billion ZIL) in the remaining six years. What is network sharding? Zilliqa network uses a concept called Sharding where the transactions are grouped into smaller groups and divided among the miners for the parallel transactional verification. Developing smaller groups for transactional verification means the Consensus can be reached faster and hence a higher number of transactions can be processed in a given time frame. The capacity of the network linearly increases in other cryptocurrencies as the number of people joins the network, but in this case, the capacity is increased at a higher variable rate than the number of members joining the network. By incorporating the Sharding Technology, it can completely revolutionize the smart contract functionality too. Well, network sharding or just sharding is a mechanism that allows the Zilliqa network to be divided into smaller groups of nodes each referred to as a shard. Simply put, imagine a network of 1,000 nodes, then, one may divide the network into 10 shards each composed of 100 nodes. Network sharding is the secret sauce that makes Zilliqa truly scalable. Imagine our example network of 1,000 nodes. Zilliqa would automatically divide the network into 10 shards each with 100 nodes. Now, these shards can process transactions in parallel. If each shard is capable of processing 10 transactions per second, then all shards together can process 100 transactions per second. The ability to process transactions in parallel due to the sharded architecture ensures that the throughput in Zilliqa linearly increases with the size of the network. Ziliqa has few pros as it has a great new technology. Zilliqa is the first platform to use sharding technology. This puts it ahead of the rest of the market. It's a completely new kind of blockchain designed to solve the problem of scalability. Third-generation platforms like Zilliqa could be the big winners in the future of cryptocurrency. Where should you store ZIL? A crypto wallet is essentially software that stores public or private keys and engages with a particular blockchain platform to enable users to send, receive and trade cryptocurrency, and keep a close watch on their asset balances. Storing your $ZIL in wallets that are secure, user-friendly and accessible is of the utmost importance. Wallets come in several types such as hardware, software, desktop. What is Zilliqa staking? The ZIL token is the native token of the Zilliqa ecosystem. The token completed its ICO on January 4, 2018. Staking ZIL tokens is supported by several platforms. Some of them include Zillacracy, Atomic Wallet, Frontier , and the Moonlet Wallet. Zilliqa's fast-growing ecosystem further makes its governance staking token profitable. Though not as popular as other top cryptocurrencies, ZIL stakers, however, are earning remarkable rewards on their stakes. gZIL tokens are ZRC-2 compliant fungible tokens. Interestingly, the token is earned alongside ZIL staking rewards. Users receive them as rewards when ZIL staking rewards are withdrawn from specified SSN operators. According to reports, for every 1,000 ZIL staking reward, 1 gZIL will be issued. The idea behind gZIL issuance is to help the platform identify long-term holders of ZIL tokens. Subsequently, providing them with access to participate in important decision making on the Zilliqa ecosystem. This is quite similar to the DAO structure, where governance token holders cast votes to reach a decision on community projects. What is Scilla smart contract language?Scilla (short for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language) is a safe-by-design smart contract language developed for the Zilliqa blockchain. Scilla provides a clean separation between the communication aspect of smart contracts on a blockchain, allowing for the rich interaction patterns, and a programming component, which enjoys principled semantics and is amenable to formal verification. Scilla imposes a structure on smart contracts that will make applications less vulnerable to attacks by eliminating certain known vulnerabilities directly at the language-level. Furthermore, the principled structure of Scilla will make applications inherently more secure and amenable to formal verification. First, due to the immutable nature of blockchains, smart contracts cannot be updated. Compare a smart contract with a traditional software, where, if a bug in the software is found, it is possible to fix it and release a new version. Smart contract bugs are hard to fix (possible only through a hard fork). The impossibility to update contracts is a serious limitation considering the fact that smart contract platforms drive an extremely large blockchain-based economy. Ethereum alone has a market capitalization of around USD 201 billion (as on Feb 2021). Second, smart contracts differ from traditional programs in the sense that they have a gas mechanism to pay for computational costs. Hence, while writing a contract, a developer must make sure that every function therein will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed to due gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems. We will come back to this point in the coming sequel of this series. As a result, it is extremely important to ensure that a smart contract deployed on a blockchain is bug free and safe. Safety of smart contracts is particularly critical because they are run in a Byzantine environment, where, every party involved with a contract can potentially be malicious. For instance, a malicious user interacting with a contract may want to steal money, a miner may want to order transactions in a block to produce some unexpected outcome or the worst being the case where a user calls a contract that in turn calls another contract (such as a library contract) which is under the control of an attacker and hence behaves maliciously. IntroductionWelcome to another edition of Zilliqa Zebra! Are you unsure how to stake on the Zilliqa blockchain? Or are you confused with what gZIL is and how to earn it? Let Zilliqa zebra help. In this article, I am going to share with you some great tips on how often you should claim your staking rewards, and how to maximise your profits from Zilliqa staking. What is Staking?
What is a Proof of Stake?
Advantages of Proof of Stake
How to stake Zilliqa?
Understanding the APR
What causes APR to vary?
What is gZIL?
How do you earn gZIL?
How often should you claim staking rewards?
Planning with a Real-time Calculator
How to maximise your staking rewards?
IntroductionWelcome to another edition of Zilliqa Zebra. Are you confused with Zilswap and unsure about how to contribute to the Zilswap pool? Are you hope to earn some ZWAP but not sure how to do it? In the trending twitter forums on Zilliqa, there were many users complaining about the lack of how-tos to guides on how to contribute to the liquidity pool on ZilSwap and to earn ZWAP. With this in mind, I am going to share more about Zilswap, how to access this platform. I will also share with you how to provide liquidity pool to ZilSwap and in the process earn ZWAP as well. What is ZilSwap?Zilswap is a fully on-chain, decentralized exchange running on Zilliqa. Zilswap will be at the core of Zilliqa’s push into the decentralized finance (DeFi) space by allowing users to trade digital assets on the Zilliqa blockchain Download ZilPay WalletFirst of all, you will need to get a ZilPay Wallet. You can download it easily at https://zilpay.xyz/. For me I am using a Chrome extension for ZilPay.
How to provide liquidity?
What is $ZWAP?
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AuthorZilliqa Zebra provides news, updates, how-to, guides and all things related to the Zilliqa, the first public blockchain to implement sharding on its mainnet. Zilliqa Zebra is an ardent supporter of the Zilliqa blockchain. ArchivesCategories |