BitShares Review: Here’s What You Need To Know About BTS

One of the primary challenges of the traditional and centralized crypto exchanges is insecurity due to online hackers. This risk has led to the loss of investor’s funds, as was experienced during the famous Coincheck hack and Mt.Gox hack.

Many other smaller hacks have affected investors’ funds because they trusted the centralized third-party provider. BitShares has adopted the decentralized mechanism of crypto exchange to eliminate this probability of losing funds due to hacking.

BitShares is a decentralized platform designed to offer a more efficient exchange and payment network globally. It’s majorly used to secure trading cryptos without third-party intermediaries making it easy for hackers to compromise the exchange.

This BitShares review unveils the potentials of this original decentralized exchange, how the exchange works and what makes it unique. In addition, it explained the BTS token, the BitAssets, and what makes the exchange secure.

What is BitShares (BTS)?

BitShares is a decentralized exchange that seeks to eliminate the need to convert coins to fiat money, thereby losing your anonymity. It’s a decentralized platform that is designed to provide a fast and more efficient global payment network.

The primary purpose of  BitShares is to secure trading cryptos without the need for a third party or an intermediary. The project team of Bitchares established BTS crypto with the value pegged to a real-life asset.

Pegging BitShares currency (BitAssets-BTS) to fiat money fixes the anonymity problems. It also helps to eliminate the price volatility issues. The price volatility issue is very common for almost all cryptos in the digital market.

Eliminating price volatility means that your investment will be held in stable assets during the periods of volatility. By transferring your money into fiat paying fees, you may not necessarily need to lose anonymity.

The BTS token is the utility token that powers the BitShares platform. You can use it for many purposes, including creating smart coins-BitAssets with various parameters that represent reward points.

You can also use it to create IOUs and collateralized fiat-pegged tokens.  A decentralized autonomous company DAC manages BitShares. It allows the holders of BTS tokens to govern the platform.

The BTS token holders have the right to decide on the new feature and future of the platform. The project team first launched the BitShares exchange in July 2014 as ProtoShares (PTS) and later rebranded it to Bitshares(BTS). BitShares was relaunched as of January 2021.

It’s undergoing major changes and runs an open-source blockchain implementation, the Graphene. It has a processing speed of 100,000Transactions/Second, which makes it faster than VISA and MasterCard combined.

This feature may give BitShares the advantage of taking part in the market share from traditional institutes.

The Origin of BitShares

Daniel Larimer and Charles Hoskinson co-founded BitShares in 2013. They are among the biggest names in the cryptocurrency industry. Daniel Larimer is an accomplished software engineer and one of the leading innovators in the crypto space. Larimer co-founded many other prominent blockchain projects, which include Block. one, Steemit, and EOS.IO.

Currently, he is the CTO of EOS.IO and built Bitshares based on proof of work mining flaws due to network centralization. Larimer came up with the concept of Bitshares to overcome these flaws. He also developed a new consensus DPoS algorithm. The Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm is more efficient and gives Bitshares greater speed and flexibility.

The co-founder Charles is an entrepreneur, a mathematician, and among the original co-founders of the second top blockchain platform Ethereum. He is currently the CEO of IOHK (Input Output HK), a research and development company behind Cardano (ADA).

The Bitshares core team members are made up of 17 permanent and dedicated workers as of January 2021. They include Ryan Fox, Alex Megalokonos, Fabian Schuh, the CTO, and four other key executives.

Over 60 long-term contributors with vast experience from a wide range of disciplines also support the team. They include legal, economics, system administrators, and highly skilled developers with grounded experience in the crypto industry.

How does BitShares Work?

It’s fast and easy to create an account with BitShares, unlike with centralized exchanges that require extensive user’s personal information. Privacy-conscious users find BitShares very attractive due to the elimination of the need to provide your personal information.

Furthermore, your data is not stored on the network, not even on any centralized server; this secures the platform. In addition to securing the platform, BitShares also eliminates volatility from the crypto exchange.

BitShares exchange makes use of a SmartCoin known as a Stable coin which distinguishes it from other cryptos. It was designed as an exchange with tokens pegged to real-world assets, other than becoming a peer-to-peer currency.

This is related to the Bytom or Polymath projects, even though it’s been functioning for years now. Hence, you can stabilize your BitShares holdings by converting them to stable crypto assets pegged to fiat currency.

Note that you don’t need to convert your crypto holdings to fiat currency, thereby maintaining your user anonymity. BitShares offers the following features BitShares token, and Bitshares exchange, and blockchain.

You can convert the BitShares token to BitUSD pegged to the US dollar at the ratio of 1:1. This pegging helps to stabilize the BitShares token value, retain assets on the blockchain and protect users against volatility.

The BitShares has a scalability feature and can process transactions faster via Graphene, an open-sourced implementation, and blockchain consensus mechanism.  Steemit also uses Graphene, and it can handle 100,000 TpS, which is above the combined speed of Visa and Mastercard.

BitShares also offers a multi-currency wallet available on android, desktop, and web. However, based on Google play reviews, the Android version is a bit buggy, while the web and desktop versions are okay.

What Makes BitShares Unique?

This section outlines the BitShares features and attributes that make it unique and distinguished from its counterpart. Check the explanations below.

• BitShares is an integrated decentralized exchange (DEX) and a crypto platform that allows users to trade on regular cryptos. It also enables users to trade more traditional financial instruments through BitAssets without a third-part or middleman.
• It’s mostly referred to as the world’s first Decentralized Finance and capable blockchain. This can be traced down to its support for synthetic assets (BitAssets) and native DEX.
• BitShares allows BTS holders to decide on the rules governing its ecosystem via a voting procedure and secure proposal. This is achieved by using BitShares distributed autonomous companies (DACs) to produce a self-financing and self-governing system.
• The platform is among the blockchain platforms that eliminate the need for addresses. It differentiates users with simple memos. Hence, it’s among the popular crypto platforms that are easily accessed.
• A popular referral program is used to design BitShares to incentivize its growth. BitShares distributes the upgrade fees among the network users and the referrers.
• The network was recorded as the first blockchain platform to use a self-governed DPos (Delegated Proof of Stake) technology. Its transaction processing time is three seconds which currently makes it one of the fastest operating blockchains.
• The Bitshres platform passed through a hard fork in September 2020, which led to the development of New BitShares (NBS). The NBS is simply a derivative project though not affiliated with the main BitShares. But as a result of this, BTS holders airdropped the NBS token at the ratio of 1:1.

Benefits of BitShares

You are entitled to a lot of benefits when you sign in with the BitShares exchange. These benefits  are below;

• Decentralization: The decentralized BitShares exchange ensures that your security is guaranteed. Hacking the platform is almost impossible, and the cryptos are highly reliable.
• Transaction Speed: The transaction speed of BitShares’ blockchain is high. It takes less than five seconds to process a transaction.
• Real Value: BitShares offers other services like a trading platform and also makes asset value prediction easier than others like Bitcoin. BitShares is not like other cryptos that have no backing.
• Minimum Commission: BitShares offers very fast and cheap transaction sol One of the main objectives of developing the exchange is to offer reduced transaction commissions.
• Increased Throughput: The technical capability of the BitShares trading platform allows for up to 100,000TPS, unlike Bitcoin and others.
• Referral Rewards: BitShares adopts a referral reward mechanism that drives mass adoption. Opening a BitShares account is currently free, but you will be charged $100 for a lifetime members account. You will earn a discount fee of 80% and a reward of  $80 for registering another lifetime member.

Governance and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) in BitShares

The major challenge with the Proof-of-Work consensus is that it’s highly resource-intensive; a lot of people believe it won’t last. Another major shortfall is the centralization that happens with the Proof-of-Work protocols.

These shortfalls gave rise to the development of the Traditional Proof-of-Stake, where users earn more coins for their holdings. The Delegated Proof of Stake includes adding a governance layer to the Traditional Proof-of-Stake mechanism.

Users in the  Delegated Proof of Stake are allowed to pass on or transfer their stake to others. This requires electing various witnesses that will create blocks, verify transactions and broadcast the blocks to the system.

The witnesses earn additional BTS from the reserve pool as rewards for their services. This mechanism accepts 1vote per BTS, and users with many BTS may consider this voting process burdensome.

However, most users are reluctant to utilize their votes leading to the introduction of proxy voting. This implies that votes too can be delegated to other members of the system. Also, this development speeds up Bitshare governance.

The network centralizes these witnesses temporarily and can vote out anytime to maintain the network’s decentralization. The BitAsset exchange currently handles over $7million daily trading volume, with the bulk of the trades coming mostly from China.

BitShares (BTS) Token

The BTS token is the native and utility token that powers the BitShares platform. It’s the chief architect for the idea of crypto trading pair and has long existed before most of the exchanges. This is why they refer to it as the legacy coin.

It’s also the governing tool of the Bitshare platform. You cannot mine the BTS token, but you can create tokens and convert them to BTS and then to BitAssests.

The BitAsset has a direct link to real-world markets. bitEUR, bitCNY, and bitUSD are all based on real-world fiat currencies like Euro, Yuan, and U.S. Dollar, respectively.

However, the values of bitSILVER and bit-GOLD base on silver and gold prices, respectively. Thus, South Africans and other volatile markets with hyperinflation will enjoy the BTS crypto stability, especially now that fiat currency strives.

As of January 2021, the BitShares team had only less than a 3billion BTS token in circulation. This represents 83% of the max BTS supply and makes it extremely diluted.

The platform was initially funded in 2014 by community investments amounting to 5,904 BTC and 415,000 ProtonShares (PTN). This figure was worth about $3.6 million at that time. However, the BTS token economics was not made publicly available.

As of August 21st, BTS has a circulating supply of 2,994,430,000BTS coins and a maximum supply of 3,600,570,502BTS coins. It trades at $0.05945 with a trading volume of $20,366,706 in the past 24 hours.

Image Credit: CoinMarketCap

The BTS has a live market cap of $161,208,495 and the CoinMarketCap ranking of #199. It recorded an all-time high of $0.89199 on January 3^rd, 2018, and has not had another one since then.

What is BitAsset?

BitAsset is a coin pegged to a real-world asset, and its value represents the real-world’s value of that asset. So, for example, the BitUSD of BitAsset mirrors the actual value of USD in the ratio of 1:1. This implies that you can convert BTS directly to BitUSD and BitUSD to BTS without the need to exit the blockchain.

This feature gives BitShares an advantage over its counterparts. Crypto users and traders are always in need of converting their cryptos to stable assets like the USD to facilitate exchanges. The exchanges allow them to buy and sell their holdings by converting from and to fiat currencies like YUAN, EUR, USD, etc.

Buying and Storing BitShares (BTS)

The BTS token currently trades mainly on the BitShares platform and also on ZB.com and Huobi exchange. This is due to its popularity among Chinese traders; they prefer it mostly because of its privacy features.

The coin doesn’t trade on many exchanges as most of its active work is recorded on less popular sites. BTS trades of the following exchanges Poloniex, Binance.com  HitBTC, OpenLedger, and CoinEgg.

However, ZB.com processes transactions in BTS/ZB pairs and can reach a total exceeding $ 600,000. The BTS/USDT pair on this exchange trades for a total sum of $300,000, with over $5million BTS coins traded daily.

Both the BTS/ZB and the BTS/USDT trading pairs accept trades with BTC, USDT, and ETH. Moreover, the most BTS trading pairs as of January 2021 are BTS/ETH BTS/USDT and BTS/BTC in all the exchanges.

Note that there are presently no trading pairs of BTS to any fiat currency. You can store BitShares (BTS) with any official BitShares wallet.

How is BitShares Secured?

One of the main aims of the BitShares project team is to develop a network that is cheaper, faster, and more secure. They seek to eliminate the issue of hack in the centralized, traditional exchange, as mentioned earlier. This section reveals the secret behind the security of this original exchange.

• BitShares network secures its platform using a custom consensus mechanism known as the Delegated Proof-of-stake (DPoS).
• The DPoS adopts both the decentralized voting and witness process in producing a more consensus and democratic system. A system that eliminates and avoids all possible gloomy effects of centralization.
• The BitShares system turns down the demand for numerous transaction confirmations and ensures that BitShares transactions are processed quickly.
• The network has delegates or witnesses who produce and broadcast blocks with various safeguards and checks for transparency and accountability. Blocks are files for recording the network’s data.

Conclusion of BitShares Review

This BitShares (BTS) review is an article that gives general information and explanation about the decentralized exchange platform. It reveals that Bitshare is one of the first developed exchanges that seeks to solve the problems of centralized exchanges.

BitShares has lots of benefits that distinguish it from other decentralized exchanges and may make it the user’s future choice. Daniel Larimer and Charles Hoskinson co-founded the exchange in 2013, and the launch was in July 2014.

BitShares was ProtoShares (PTS) at first before the team rebranded it to BitShares (BTS) in less than a year. It runs an open-source blockchain implementation-the Graphene with a processing speed of 100,000TPS faster than VISA and MasterCard combined.

This feature may give it the advantage of taking part of the market share from traditional institutes. BTS focuses on Wall Street while other cryptos seek to redefine banking.

The network is backed and powered by a native, utility, and governance token known as the BTS. The exchanges currently have a trading volume of over $20million, and over 2billion BTS tokens are in circulation. We recommend that you do thorough research before becoming financially committed.

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