DEV Community: CoinMonks

What can I do with Remix IDE?

CoinMonks — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 05:30:05 +0000

Exploring the plugins on Remix IDE — a Smart Contract developer’s POV

Bitsgap Alternatives

CoinMonks — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 18:33:15 +0000

What are Bitsgap Alternatives?

Top 5 Bitsgap Alternatives [2021]

Bitsgap is one of the best crypto trading bots providers. However, while choosing a service, you must know about the alternate options you have. Hence, this article will cover the five best Bitsgap alternatives.

Summary (TL;DR)

The Bitsgap platform allows you to automate your trading strategies and automatically find signals for potential opportunities.
Napbots uses techniques were developed by professional traders with over 15 years of quantitative trading expertise at major financial institutions.
The Cryptohopper bot will trade on exchanges for you automatically. Additionally, the site may provide trading indications to assist you in deciding whether to go long or short on a transaction.
Zignaly is a next-generation cloud-based crypto trading bot platform with a slew of useful features, including the ability to trade several currencies.
3Commas, a cryptocurrency bot trading platform, was founded in 2017 in Vancouver, Canada.
TradeSanta is a bitcoin trading bot that handles trading tactics through automation.

What is Bitsgap?

Bitsgap is a cryptocurrency trading platform that began running in Estonia in the year 2018. You can link to prominent crypto exchanges and trade them all from one place using the program.

The Bitsgap platform allows you to trade and analyze signals in over 10,000 crypto pairings, arbitrage from price discrepancies across exchanges, automate your trading tactics, and automatically discover signals of currencies with the highest potential.

Apart from all of these capabilities, Bitsgap also allows you to keep track of your portfolio’s performance in real-time. To learn more, read the Bitsgap review. The platform also offers a Bitsgap Futures bot.

However, we’ll look at Bitsgap competitors that are just as simple to use and provide a full experience in the bot-trading space.

First Bitsgap Alternative: NapBots

What is Napbots?

Napbots is a cloud-based, artificial intelligence-powered program that enables anybody to trade cryptocurrencies, which were previously exclusively available to hedge funds. Professional traders with over 15 years of quantitative trading experience at major financial institutions created these approaches.

Napoleon Group is governed by the AMF, and its sister business, Napbots. The platform provides a trading bot service that automates the cryptocurrency trading process. Furthermore, it assists customers in increasing profit margins and avoiding losses.

Around three years ago, Napbots began developing crypto-trading strategies, and in April 2018, it released its first approach to the broader market. Twenty more strategies have been launched since then, each with basic KPIs and test templates. Their oldest technique, “BTC LO,” provides human trading signals, and its automated version is presently available and on its way to breaking the new ATH.

To learn more, read the Napbots review.

Napbots Features

Additionally, over the course of a year, the flagship strategy BTC/ ETH/ USD AR outperforms the underlying by 233 percent. Because it permits shorting, this technique is more aggressive. Prior achievement, however, does not guarantee future success.

In fact, pricing is the key database for Napbots‘ strategies, and the team offers both trend-following and mean-reversion methods (weekly, daily, and hourly).

Apart from that, NapBots is a trading bot for a wide range of investors. Not just for novices or casual traders who can simply let the bot handle everything, but also for skilled traders who can disable “Bot Only mode” and place trades without utilizing the bot’s automated systems. It’s the only bitcoin bot available that allows you to combine strategies.

Napbots will handle tasks in the user’s place depending on information such as market price changes.

How to use NapBots?

By trading crypto-currencies in autopilot mode, you experience financial freedom with Napbots and automatically make money. First, however, you must perform the following to make it operate on your behalf:

Firstly, link to one of the trust exchangers offered.
Secondly, select the NapBots Bots from the unique list.
Finally, choose your investment plan in the right way.

NapBots will be ready to trade cryptocurrencies and make money for you when you have finished these three actions. Happy trade!

Napbots Supported exchanges

NapBots’ starting point takes the form of giving people eight bitcoin exchanges to choose from. The abovementioned exchanges include Binance, Bitmex, Bitfinex, Okex, Phemex, Kraken, and Bitstamp. Moreover, shortly, you may expect the following: CoinBase, Revolut, Kucoin, HitBTC, and many more. A diversity of exchanges provides significant liquidity to implement its algorithmic methods.

It is a piece of cake to integrate your exchange with Napbots. As you have a valid exchange account, all you need to do is click the Generate API Key button from your account and then use it to input the data on your Napbots account.

Napbots Pricing

There are three distinct price options for Napbots services, customized to suit all budgets and reliant on varying volume levels. All the plans include an unlimited trading limit of $25,000.

The following price figure illustrates the service charge:

Why Choose NapBots?

Napbots aims to enable public access to complex trading techniques previously employed by hedge funds.
Setup and installation are easy. Non-experts are also able to use it. The new strategy employed by NapBots promises extraordinary value for its customers.
Financial industry professionals are on Napbots‘ panel of experts. On their résumé, they have extensive expertise with money, which eliminates the need for technological talents. So using this service even while you’re asleep, you’ll still passively earn money.
There are no initial fees, making their pricing very clear.

Second Bitsgap Alternative: CryptoHopper

What is CryptoHopper?

Customers may easily handle the management of various crypto assets across eight major (accepted) exchanges using the cloud-based interface that Cryptohopper provides. The platform also provides a Telegram crypto signals bot.

Due to the range of semi-automated trading tools that Cryptohopper’s clients will have access to on these exchanges, these clients will be able to engage in various trading strategies.

Once a user has provided an account, the Cryptohopper bot will trade automatically on exchanges with it. In addition, you may find trading signals on the site to help you decide whether to go long or short on a trade. Automated trading is only one of the ways that Cryptohopper allows traders to work together and earn money.

To learn more, read the CryptoHopper review. Furthermore, read our review of the five best free apps on CryptoHopper to get some free stuff.

CryptoHopper supported exchanges

The platform supports the following cryptocurrency exchanges:

The leading cryptocurrency exchanges include KuCoin, Binance, Coinbase Pro, Bittrex, Poloniex, Kraken, and Huobi.

CryptoHopper Pricing

There are three tiers to the Cryptohopper price plan, and the lowest is free for seven days.

Pioneer plan: 7-day free trial
Explorer: It has a single-month plan available that costs $19 per month.
The Adventure Hopper is $49 USD per month, and Hero Hopper is $99 USD each month.

What are the benefits of using Cryptohopper?

Charges a flat price plus a commission without charging a monthly fee.
It is possible for investors to have access to top-level analytical tools.
Included in this smartphone app are advanced security safeguards.

Third Bitsgap Alternative: Zignaly

What is Zignaly?

Zignaly is a next-generation cloud-based crypto trading bot platform with numerous helpful features, such as allowing traders to deal with several coins. The following exchanges will soon be linked to the trading platform: Binance and KuCoin. However, additional crypto exchanges will be added in the future.

The platform’s primary purpose is to provide copy trading, crypto trading bots, and trading interfaces. It has a particular set of distinguishing properties, including using third-party signal sources in automatic trading. Crypto signal sources that meet this definition are currently supported, and the quality of the signals is quite high.

Zignaly Pricing

In fact, Zignaly is now available for free, with no limits on an exchange or currency pairings, which is impressive because many services charge a monthly fee to give restricted assistance.

What are the benefits of using Zignaly?

A third-party signal provider interface that provides many advantages.
An easy-to-use platform.
Register as a free user.
Hosted on the cloud platform.

Fourth Bitsgap Alternative: 3Commas

What is 3Commas?

Crypto bot trading platform 3Commas was launched in 2017 in Vancouver, Canada. To manage all of your cryptocurrency accounts in one location, the program links to up to 23 major cryptocurrency exchanges. This trading terminal includes tools that allow you to create your own trading strategies and copy the trading strategies of great traders.

3Commas offers four kinds of bots: short bots, simple bots, composite bots, and composite short bots. An example of an automated options trading strategy would be the Options Bot. To learn more, head over to our 3Commas review.

What are the benefits of using 3Commas?

Firstly, a service that enables you to have access to the most popular bitcoin exchanges.
Moreover, advanced trading bots which are able to interact with clients are a good alternative.
Above all, there is a basic and direct user interface.

3Commas Pricing

The starter plan at 3Commas is $14.50 per month; however, there is no free account with 3Commas. Furthermore, there is a $49.50 monthly fee and a $24.50 charge monthly with the advanced and pro plans. Only pro and advanced account users have access to the trading bot.

Fifth Bitsgap Alternative: TradeSanta

What is TradeSanta?

TradeSanta is a bitcoin trading bot that employs automation to handle trading strategies. It was originally launched in 2018, but it began to rise in popularity in the latter part of 2019. Today, this company currently has 25,000 members in the community who have done more than a million transactions.

TradeSanta has simplified the world of crypto trading bots and offers fantastic trading tools to its members. Additionally, the total number of active trading bots on the platform is currently 6,400, more than any of its competitors. There are three bots; a long bot template, a short bot template, and a bespoke bot template.

TradeSanta also offers extra orders, martingale, purchases of coins for commissions, and other TradeSanta features. Moreover, to learn more, read the TradeSanta review.

TradeSanta supported exchanges

Bitfinex, Bittrex, HitBTC, Binance, Huobi, Upbit, and OKEx are now all part of Cryptopia, and the plan is to include BitMEX shortly.

TradeSanta Pricing

TradeSanta is moderately priced when compared to other crypto bot trading services. Furthermore, the following four packages are available: MINIMUM (free plan), BASIC ($14/month), ADVANCED ($28/month), and MAXIMUM ($42/month). Two trading bots and a $3000 monthly trading cap are part of the MINIMUM plan.

What are the benefits of using TradeSanta?

A simplistic and basic platform.
It also offers many trading bots and other trading tools.
Market-driven pricing.
Hosted on the cloud.

Bitsgap Alternatives: Conclusion

The number of alternatives to choose from is considerable, and each of the platforms offers a set of unique characteristics.

All of the trading bots described here are very trustworthy and trusted platforms for buying and selling cryptocurrencies. While Napbots still has much to go in terms of functionality and capabilities, it is somewhat ahead of the competition in terms of overall capabilities.

The bitcoin trading bots of the future will be able to give you an edge on any market opportunity that you would miss out on. Following this, be strategic about the platform, and you will be highly known.

Also, Read

Originally published at https://blog.coincodecap.com on June 30, 2021.

How to test a BEP20 token with Hardhat and not get SCAMmed

CoinMonks — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 03:31:28 +0000

In this post, you will learn how to test a custom BEP20 token with Hardhat and ethers.js NPM package.

The BEP20 token we will be testing today is the $SCAM token.

SCAM is a BEP20 token created on Binance Smart Chain. $SCAM has a 100k marketcap currently (350k at its/BNB’s ATH) and a limited supply of 100 million tokens, a lot of which was distributed through multiple free airdrops on reddit that helped grow the community into 200+ members on telegram and 700+ on reddit.

$SCAM follows a bare-bone ERC20 token implementation deployed on the BSC Mainnet with basically no admin functions or centralized control — no blacklist, burn or freeze functions and also no additional tokens can be minted.

Find out more with this post.

You can also visit their website.

I hope you already have solidity development environment ready at your machine.

Otherwise, please refer to my previous post How to make a fullstack dapp with React, Hardhat and ethers.js with examples.

Why was SCAM token chosen for this post?
Inspect the SCAM contract source code
Prepare tests for it
Conclusion

You can find the entire code used for this post here.

1. Why was SCAM token chosen for this post?

I came across Safe Crypto and Money ($SCAM) randomly on the dev.to website through the developer’s story about how learning about ERC20 tokens and programming practice on Solidity became a passion project leading to this coin.

I was just restarting blockchain development again and I found the story of the author very interesting.

What started out as a meme token, as can be understood from the name itself, organically evolved into an awesome friendly community where beginners and developers alike could learn more about cryptocurrency and DeFi.

They’ve already launched a website and implemented a fully decentralized liquidity rewards contract, and are currently working on decentralized governance and treasury, as well as a faucet.

The community itself has become a place of healthy conversation, discussion and ideation, and a launching platform for various voluntary projects taken up by members such as a coin-listing site, NFTs, merchandise, and marketing campaigns.

First, I thought it was just a joke but I was intrigued by the post. I found the project funny and wanted to be more involved with the project and found its Telegram group also.

Different from my first expectation, the members of the group were very helpful. I could find a clue to set up and deploy a smart contract code that one of my client wanted to test.

I also inspired myself to write How to make a fullstack dapp with React, Hardhat and ethers.js with example by participating in the group.

I think it helped me a lot in getting further involved with blockchain stuffs and find useful information.

It is important to have someone help you get familiar with cryptocurrency and its relevant technologies. Otherwise, it is very easy to get scammed and lose money.

If you want to know more about SCAM after this post, you can participate in its Telegram group.

Currently, the faucet contract to get SCAM free is also working so you can hold it free. I think it can be a good opportunity to have your first cryptocurrency.

For more details, you can read this post for the faucet also.

The website for it is also ready at https://faucet.scam-coin.org/ page.

You can use any wallet in the list below.

Then, connect it to the website.

Finally, follow its instruction to get your first $SCAM token.

If you have any doubt, please join the group and ask the members in there for help. They will help you to learn about SCAM, cryptocurrency, smart contracts and DeFi in general and other blockchain relevant stuffs.

2. Inspect the SCAM contract source code

Before you start, BEP20 token specification is equal to ERC20 equivalent, so if you are not familiar with that, please read the documentation for it first.

You can see that SCAM was verified by bscscan with the code snippet similar to this. I use js extension instead of sol to easily read the code snippet with a gist.

We will inspect each part of it. This will help you find what this contract does and write tests in the next part to confirm that.

1. This is where the owner of the contract can define BEP20 token name, symbol and the decimal for it. It is just following the ERC20 standard.

2. Here, the total supply of the token is defined. There are no mint or burn function for SCAM. You can see that there is a fixed amount of SCAM tokens(100000000).

Then, the owner of the contract will take 20000000 of it and 1000000 will be used with airdropTokens function.

3. These functions until 4. is just some parts of IERC20 standard functions. It was the intention of its author.

4. This is where airdrop of the SCAM token happens, you can see it is sent from the contract to receiver. (100000000–20000000 = 80000000 in the constructor part)

5. This part is not relevant to the SCAM token logic. It is just a fallback function that extracts the BNB balance from the contract.

I spoke with the author and he told me that he included it to receive donation for the contract.

It is not relevant to SCAM token logic. But, we will include the test to see if it affects the balance of a SCAM holders in the next part.

6. These are some functions from SafeMath OpenZeppelin library code.

You can read their documentation for more information.

3. Prepare tests for it

In the previous part, we inspected the contract code for SCAM and see what each part of it does.

We will write simple tests for it to find that they all work ok.

I will assume you are using the source code link I shared at the beginning of this post.

Before you update your project, please edit your hardhat.config.js and use the solidity compiler version between >=0.4.22 <0.6.0 that you prefer.

module.exports = {
  defaultNetwork: "hardhat",
  paths: {
    artifacts: './src/artifacts',
  },
  networks: {
    // $npx hardhat run scripts/deploy.js --network localhost
    // https://hardhat.org/config/
    hardhat: {
      chainId: 1337,
    },
  },
  solidity: "0.5.6", // This is where you should edit.
};

Use $yarn compile (npx hardhat compile) to see if the contract code really compiles and it should show a result similar to this.

Creating Typechain artifacts in directory typechain for target ethers-v5
Successfully generated Typechain artifacts!

Use $yarn serve (npx hardhat node) in a console to set up local solidity dev env with hardhat.

Then, verify that everything is ok with your scripts/deploy.js file.

If you could make it to this part, we can finally write tests for the SCAM contract.

You can see the test/scam-test.js file in the repository similar to this.

The smart contract code for SCAM is very simple and we don’t need a lot of lines of code to test it also.

1. There are very big numbers are involved for BEP20 token contract. We need their hex values to test them with hardhat and ethers.js package.

Therefore, I manually included them. For that, you can use your Python console with hex function.

$python
>>> hex(1000000000000000000000000)
'0xd3c21bcecceda1000000'
>>> hex(1000000000000000000000000000000)
'0xc9f2c9cd04674edea40000000'
>>> hex(1000000000000000000000000000000000)
'0x314dc6448d9338c15b0a00000000'
>>> hex(1000000000000000000000000)
'0xd3c21bcecceda1000000'
>>> 10 ** 26
100000000000000000000000000
>>> hex(_)
'0x52b7d2dcc80cd2e4000000'

You can also refer to How to use Python in JavaScript with examples post to include that to your JavaScript code.

Otherwise, you can find a JavaScript function to find hex value of the big number also. But, that will be unnecessary if you know how to use Python also.

2. We test here to see contract name, symbol and the decimal is set correctly when the contract is deployed. You can also verify if the total supply of the token is set and preMine amount is correctly saved to the address of the owner of the contract.

3. In this part, we first check if other users (not owners) can call airdropTokens or not.

You can see if the caller were firstComer or secondComer (not owners), the contract shouldn’t allow to use airdropTokens function. In the contract, there is no error message set, so we use unspecified api from @openzeppelin/test-helpers package to test them.

You can also see the receiver have airDropSize amount of token “1000000000000000000000000” after that. This can be confusing comparing to the smart contract part but you can see the decimal value is “18”. If we consider that, the large number will be 1000000 of SCAM token and sent to the receiver.

4. Tests below this will be help you find how some of ERC20 standard functions included for this contract work.

You can see transfer, approve, allowance, transferFrom will work all ok with them.

5. There were fallback function and releaseBNB in the contract code for donation.

function releaseBNB() external {
  require(msg.sender == owner_);
  owner_.transfer(address(this).balance);
}

// Fallback function
function() external payable {}

We can test that calling this function will not have any effect for not owners.

You can see the balance for the firstComer is equal after calling releaseBNB function in the test.

You could write more tests here if you want.

Test all of them really work at your machine with $yarn test (npx hardhat test) and you will see every test passes with the result similar to this.

$yarn test
Creating Typechain artifacts in directory typechain for target ethers-v5
Successfully generated Typechain artifacts!

SCAMToken state and transactions
    ✓ Should test 'totalSupply' and other default values.
    ✓ Should test 'airdropTokens' and the contract and receiver balance change.
    ✓ Should test 'transfer' from the owner to firstComer.
    ✓ Should test 'approve' and 'allowance' from the owner to firstComer.
    ✓ Should test 'approve', 'allowance' and 'transferFrom'.
    ✓ Should test 'releaseBNB' and it shouldn't affect the balance of other users (not owners)

Hope you could make all tests pass.

4. Conclusion

In this post, we learnt how to test a custom BEP20 token with SCAM. I introduced it because I found its community very helpful. Hope the code snippet used here can be a starting point to test other BEP20 or ERC20 tokens also before you buy them.

ERC20 and BEP20 token are almost identical and you will be able to use the code snippet used here for the former as well.

If you liked the post, please share it with others. I am plan to share more blockchain relevant stuffs. I am interested in ETH and POLKADOT.

If you need to hire a developer, you can contact me.

I can write a full stack dapp.

I can also clone, set up, update and deploy another blockchain project if you want.

Thanks.

Also, Read

What is Margin Trading | Dollar-Cost Averaging
BigONE Exchange Review | Grid Trading Bot
3Commas Review | Pionex Review | Coinrule review
Ledger vs Ngrave | Ledger nano s vs x | Binance Review
Bybit Exchange Review | Bityard Review | CoinSpot Review
3Commas vs Cryptohopper | Earn crypto interest
The Best Bitcoin Hardware wallet | BitBox02 Review
BlockFi vs Celsius | Hodlnaut Review | KuCoin Review

Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 2: How Does Staking Actually Work?

CoinMonks — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 16:45:02 +0000

Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 2: How Does Staking Actually Work?

_This is second part of a 2-part series. You can read Part 1 [_here](https://tobyornottoby.medium.com/ethereum-2-0-for-dummies-part-1-why-upgrade-112d8f5b6d88).

Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity) is an upgrade to Ethereum’s economic infrastructure in order to allow new avenues for gains in scalability, security, and efficiency. In Part 1 we discussed the overarching ideas and rationale behind the network upgrade and its transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. We touched upon sharding and its anticipated effects on increasing scalability, as well as the use of validators in lieu of miners — allowing for more efficient network security. I also introduce a quick glossary of terms, which will be helpful to read/review before continuing with this section¹ (actually I really recommend it). Some of this stuff can get a little dry, so I’ve sprinkled in some memes to keep you going :)

ETH 2.0 In Phases

We begin with an overview of the planned phases of the Eth 2.0 Upgrade, which is really a set of interconnected upgrades²:

Phase 0 — Beacon Chain & Proof of Stake

Phase 0 of the Serenity update package is live as of December 1, 2020 and includes the introduction of the Beacon Chain and the Proof of Stake Protocol (discussed in detail below). It will run separate and parallel to the PoW Eth 1.0 chain, and serves as the central point of truth (the main chain) for Eth 2.0 and broadcasts and receives from the rest of the system, including shard-chains. Each node will maintain it’s own local copy of the Beacon Chain, much like chain now. The Beacon Chain will maintain the set of validators and their balances, and essentially administer the new Proof of Stake Protocol.

Phase 1 — Sharding / Shard Chains

Phase 1 will implement shard-chains, which is a scaling solution (explained in Part 1 and below) that breaks up the Ethereum network into 64 smaller shards to increase capacity and speed of transactions. It will also provide the framework for roll-ups which is another scaling solution that includes processing and aggregating transactions off-chain to be executed and confirmed on-chain. This is estimated to be introduced late this year or early 2022.

Phase 1.5 — Merging the original Proof of Work Chain with the new Proof of Stake Chain

Phase 1.5 will bridge the gap between the current PoW chain and the new PoS chain. The current proof of work chain will be folded into the new Beacon chain by becoming one of the shard-chains. This ETH 1.0 mainnet shard will provide the history and current state of Ethereum to the new Beacon Chain, and serve as the transition from the old network to the new. This transition will mean that Ethereum 2.0 is officially live.

Phase 2.0 — Enable Transaction Processing on Shards (Smart Contract Execution)

Phase 2.0 will bring about the final touches on the Serenity upgrade. This includes introducing different execution engines to the shards, meaning they will then be able to support smart contracts and become fully operational. In this phase the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is responsible for processing contract code, will be replaced with Ethereum Web Assembly (eWASM) which will provide efficiency gains in transaction processing and contract execution.

Now that you have any idea of the general game plan, let’s dive into specifics. But before we do that, let’s take a meme break.

Beacon Chain

To gain a good understanding of the Beacon Chain, we first need to dip our toes into what sharding is. As discussed in Part 1, part of Ethereum’s scalability issue is each node having to verify and execute every transaction. We mentioned that by splitting the blockchain into pieces for a subset of validators/nodes to process in parallel , the chain is processed much, much faster. This is great and all, but at this point the shard-chains all still need to be aggregated and verified in a single canonical source of truth. This is where the Beacon Chain comes in.

For simplicity’s sake we can consider the Beacon Chain to be the Eth 2.0’s main chain, the heart of the system. Shard-chains will be reconciled with the main chain through cross-links which we will explore in a bit. In the initial stages of Ethereum 2.0, there will be 64 shard-chains (there is capacity for a total of 1024 which can be added later).

Slots and Epochs

The Beacon chain is processed in regular time windows called slots and epochs. An epoch is made up of 32 slots , and each slot is 12 seconds — so each epoch is 6.4 minutes (12sec x 32 slots). Each slot is a chance for a block to be added to the chain. Every 12 seconds (slot), one beacon chain block and 64 shard blocks are added. You can picture each epoch as a cycle in the blockchain validating process.

from ethos.dev

Validators and Attestations

So how are the blocks processed within slots and epochs on the Beacon Chain?

This is done through a combination of proposing blocks and voting (or attesting) to them. The proposals and votes are made by validators, who are the virtual equivalent of what PoW miners are today. A block proposer is a validator that has been pseudorandomly selected to build a block , which is then attested (voted) by other validators. Most of the time, validators will take on an attester role as they vote on beacon and shard blocks. Validators are split/grouped into committees and these votes are aggregated (more below). These aggregated votes will determine the most recent valid beacon chain block, as well as the most recent valid shard-chain blocks, aka “ head of chain”.

There is a semantic difference between a staker and a validator. In Eth 2.0, users (stakers) stake ETH to activate and run validators. For every 32 ETH staked, 1 validator is activated. Stakers can stake as much ETH as they like, but a validator has a maximum balance of 32 ETH. A staker can run multiple validators. Validators use validator clients make use of a beacon (chain) node to follow and read the blockchain. One validator client can execute one or more validators. You can run a beacon node without running a validator. Confused yet? Here is a more concrete example to help:

Staker stakes 64 ETH > this activates (2) validators > validators use the same client (computer program/node) to participate > the client uses a Beacon Node (usually their own but can be a 3rd party) > the Beacon Node reads the blockchain and provides data back to the (validator) client > the validator client uses that data so that the (2) validators can run > the (2) validators run and generate staking rewards for the _ **_Staker**

Crosslinks

Crosslinks are how the shard-chain blocks are reconciled into the Beacon Chain. During each 12-second slot, a Beacon Chain block is proposed. A Beacon Chain block can contain up to 64 crosslinks, one for each shard. As long as validators have voted and proposed a block for the shard during that 12-second slot, it can be cross-linked to the corresponding Beacon Chain block.

Let’s take another meme break

Committees & Proposers

A committee is essentially a group of at least 128 validators (but can and will usually be more).

A proposer is a validator that is pseudorandomly selected for each slot. They temporarily take on the role of proposing or building a block for that slot, so that the other validators (grouped into committees) can vote on it.

During each 6.4 minute epoch, the validators on the network are evenly divided across 12-second slots and then subdivided into committees, from which the validators can cast their vote. Each committee within a specific slot attempts to crosslink a particular shard. This means that a single validator is only be allowed to attest/vote once per epoch. Each attestation is a two-part vote, one for the validator’s assigned shard, and one for the head of the Beacon Chain.

For example, say we have 32,032 validators (not a real number — currently there are ~185,000). 1001 validators are assigned to Slot #1, 1001 to Slot #2, ….. 1001 to Slot #32 (*32,032 validators / 32 slots). The 1001 validators in Slot #1 are subdivided into 7 committees and pseudorandomly assigned shards. For the sake of simplicity we say that Shards 1 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 (in reality, these would be a very random selection) were selected as shard assignments. All 1001 validators in Slot #1 cast a vote for the Beacon Chain head (called an LMD GHOST vote⁴, more on that in a sec). The 143 validators in the one of the 7 committees (*1001 / 7 = 143) attempts to crosslink Shard 1. 143 validators from another one of the 7 committees attempts to crosslink Shard 2, and so on and so forth.

For Slot #2, the process repeats. The 1001 validators in Slot #2 are subdivided into 7 committees which are assigned to shards 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40. All 1001 validators cast a vote for the Beacon Chain head, and then each committee of 143 validators attempts to crosslink shards 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40.

This process repeats for the rest of the 32 slots (epoch). Committees are shuffled around each epoch. Again, a validator can only vote once per epoch, which means it can only be in one committee per epoch. The minimum committee size of 128 is intentional — there is a statistical rationale behind it that requires a bit of high school math, which you can read about here⁵ . The gist is that 128 (or more accurately 111) is the number at which as long as 2/3 of all validators are honest it is extremely improbable for any one committee to be 2/3 dominated by dishonest validators (which means they’d have the majority and be able to act maliciously).

Checkpoints, LMD Ghost, and Casper FFG, and Finality

Each epoch block contains a checkpoint block and serves as the last point where the blockchain is finalized or agreed upon by all parties, as the name implies. You can think of them roughly as save points within a video game. If you’re character dies, you can go back to where you had last saved the game. They are also referred to elsewhere as Epoch Boundary Blocks (EBB), but we’ll stick with “checkpoint” here.

During each epoch, a validator will cast an LMD Ghost vote and a Casper FFG vote, as part of the 2-part vote I mentioned earlier. I’ll explain what these are here:

An LMD GHOST Vote is a vote for the Beacon head of chain (usually the block at their current assigned slot). LMD GHOST stands for “Last Message Delivered Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree”. If this seems like a daunting concept to fully grasp, that’s because it totally is. Simply speaking, the LMD-GHOST protocol selects the head of the chain by choosing which fork has the most votes (let’s say one of the validators missed a block and votes on the previous block as the block head, while everyone else votes for the current block. The Ghost protocol would choose the current block as it has more votes).

A Casper FFG vote is a vote for the checkpoint within the current epoch (called the target ), and a vote for the prior checkpoint (called the source ).

A block or a checkpoint must have votes made by 2/3 of the total balance of all active validators. This is called a supermajority.

In essence, each checkpoint is voted on twice, once as the target and once as the source. When a target checkpoint receives a supermajority, it is considered justified. Once the checkpoint has received a supermajority in both instances, it has achieved finality and is considered finalized. Most of the time, finality is achieved in a little over two epochs. This is much like the required block confirmations that we see today in PoW.

Whew, you’ve made it this far! Time for another meme break

RANDAO — ETH 2.0’s Random Number Generator

You may be wondering how committees, proposers, validators are randomly assigned, and why this article makes use of the word “pseudorandom” as opposed to just “random”. This is because computers cannot generate true random numbers. A computer can be considered a deterministic system, which means that given the same input it always generates the same output (this is debated, but we won’t blow that dynamite here). In the same way a calculator will always give you 2 for the sum of 1 + 1, a computer cannot give you an unrepeatable output for the same input. This means that at best, a computer can simulate randomness, or a reasonably “random” number. In order to do this the computer needs a seed , a semi-random input or starting point to do calculations — like the position of the bubbles in your lava lamp at any particular point in time (this is a real thing , check it out). In the case of Eth 2.0, the “random validator selection” simulation is two-fold. First, validators select a random number of their choosing when depositing their 32 ETH, which gets hashed. In each block each validator’s random number is revealed one at a time. Once all the numbers are revealed the numbers will be put together to form a new random number which will determine the next block’s random selections. This paradigm is coupled with a mechanism called Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) which is essentially a check mechanism on the random process. I’ll try and keep it simple here but if you want to get more in depth with he logic behind Eth 2.0’s random generator, you can find out more here.

Rewards and Penalties

The obvious motivation for staking your ETH are the rewards you can generate by running a validator. There is however also a risk of losing some or all of your stake if you fail perform the expected tasks or are acting maliciously. Both the rewards and the punishments are proportional to the validator’s actions and form the basis of Ethereum 2.0’s incentive structure.

Let’s start with the good stuff. How are these rewards issued?

Validators are rewarded for making attestations, for proposing a block that gets finalized, or for raising an alarm that another validator that has committing a slashable offense (in ETH 2.0 snitches don’t get stitches, they get rewards). In each epoch, a validator can earn rewards to making LMD Ghost/Casper FFG votes that that the majority of other validators agree with. For each slot, a validator has the chance of being selected to be a proposer of a block. Should that happen, and the validator proposes a block that gets finalized, they will obtain a sizeable reward. Validators that are consistently doing their job attesting accrue a ~ 1/8 boost to their total rewards for proposing a valid block. A validator that provides proof that another validator is acting maliciously is rewarded.

Validators can also be penalized, but this can happen in several ways and in varying degrees. You can be penalized for not attesting or for attesting to blocks that do not get finalized (i.e. your validator goes offline). These are relatively minor and if you were to be offline or simply didn’t attest for an entire year, you would stand to lose about ¾ of the amount you’d stand to gain that year (e.g. if the reward rate averages out to 10% annualized, you would lose about 7.5% if you didn’t attest the entire time). This means that being offline for a few days or even weeks is still a relatively small penalty — especially compared to the next penalty method, slashing.

Validators can be slashed by maliciously or intentionally acting against the system. This is known as a slashable offense and is defined in 3 ways: a double proposal, an FFG surround vote, and an FFG double vote.

In a double proposal , a selected proposer tries to propose more than one block for their assigned slot.

In an FFG surround vote you are casting a vote for a target and source (current and prior checkpoint blocks) that is surrounded by a previous FFG vote that you made. This basically discounts the validity of your previous vote, and is disallowed. For example you voted for slots 32 as a source and 64 as a target in your previous vote, but in the current epoch vote for Slot 0 and Slot 96. Your current vote would surround the previous one.

In a double vote , you are casting two FFG votes in the same epoch, instead of the allowed one.

If you are slashed, you stand to lose up to your entire stake (32 ETH). You will lose at least 1/32 of your balance and deactivated (forced to exit as a validator). *As a side note, in the normal course of operation if a validator’s balance were to drop below 16 ETH, it is automatically forced to exit through deactivation.

There is also a rare but severe penalty known as the inactivity leak penalty. This is designed as a backstop against the entire system not finalizing checkpoints. Essentially if more than 4 epochs have passed since a validator has finalized a checkpoint, then an inactivity penalty is assessed that increases quadratically until a checkpoint is finalized. This leak ensures that problematic validators are forced to exit so that validators that are operating optimally maintain a 2/3 majority and the blockchain’s finality mechanisms function as normal.

Rewards in ETH 2.0 are normally calculated as annualized interest rates and follow an inverse square root function. In layman’s terms this means that as more total ETH is staked, the lower the rewards will be per validator. At current ETH deposit levels, a validator will make ~7% — 7.5% return annualized. There is a long formula that calculates the different rewards for different actions (e.g. attestations vs proposing) and factors in whether the validator is performing duties on time, etc. It looks something like this:

It’s a bit too technical for this conversation and it’s a lot easier to simply use a rewards calculator⁸.

Last meme. You’re nearly there!

Exiting/Withdrawing your ETH as a Validator

In order for an honest (unslashed) validator to voluntarily exit, it needs to have served for 2,048 epochs — around 9 days. Validators, on the other hand need to wait fo 2⁸ epochs (~27 hours) in order to become withdrawable. This ensures that if a validator has misbehaved there is still a period of time that they can be caught and slashed. The ETH 2.0 protocol ultimately limits the number of validators that can be activated or exit within an epoch. This makes it more difficult for an attacker to quickly ramp up and attack the system.

How Can I Get Involved?

Solo Staking — You can stake on your own by setting up a validator client (and probably a Beacon Node too) and depositing 32 ETH into the deposit contract. Once a valid transaction has been submitted to this contract, your validator client will now be in the “deposited” state. Your deposit will then be processed over the span of a few hours, before it gets assigned an index number and put into a queue to be activated. Once the validator reaches the front of the queue, it is assigned an activation epoch from where the validator is activated and assigned the responsibilities mentioned above.

Staking Pools / Derivatives — This will be a subject of much literature as the upgrade unfolds. The Ethereum PoS protocol does not provide some of the functionality that PoW or other PoS implementations have — namely liquidity. As such the market has and will continue to step in to make staking more convenient and efficient. This has taken the form of staking pools which allow participants to pool their ETH together and delegate the operational aspects of running validators to the pool. The pools may offer additional services like maintaining a reserve of liquid ETH to satisfy withdrawal demand, or insurance against slashing. One expected feature will be the tokenization of your claim on the staking pool in the form of ERC-20 tokens which can be used in other applications, such as Defi. The pools can be centralized (e.g. Coinbase or Binance ) or decentralized (e.g. RocketPool or Lido) and each will have it’s own Pros and Cons that you should look carefully into before interacting or depositing any tokens. Some argue that this pooling or introduction of staking derivatives lowers the security of PoS and incentivizes centralization in it’s own right, as they separate the staking/slashing aspect from block production aspect (principal-agent problem). However, others argue that derivatives lower both the explicit and the opportunity cost of staking, leading to more participation and more ETH being staked. This is a debate that we can only speculate on at the moment, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Summary

The Ethereum 2.0 Serenity Upgrade is schedule to be implemented in phases. Phase 0 has introduced the Beacon Chain and Proof of Stake. Phase 1 will introduce sharding and shard-chains. Phase 1.5 will merge the existing Proof of Work chain with the new Proof of Stake chain, as one of the latter’s shard-chains. Phase 2.0 will bring about the execution engine on the shard-chains allowing for smart contracts to be executed on the shard chains. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) will be replaced with Ethereum Web Assembly (eWASM), which will allow for faster transaction processing and throughput. The Beacon Chain will serve as the main ETH 2.0 blockchain and administer the validators and the Proof of Stake protocol. Shard-chains will run concurrently and be reconciled with the Beacon Chain in lockstep. A Beacon Chain block and up to 64 shard-chain blocks (1 block for each) are processed every 12-second slot. Every 32 slots constitutes an epoch , which analogize to a cycle within the block validation process. Each validator is allowed to cast a vote, called an attestation, on what the chain heads are for the Beacon and the shard-chains (LMD Ghost Vote), and on a on the current and prior checkpoint blocks (the target and the source , respectively). This vote on checkpoints is the Casper FFG Vote portion of the attestation. When the current or target checkpoint block achieves 2/3s of the votes, ( supermajority ), it is considered justified. If after another epoch passes and it achieves the supermajority vote as a source, it is considered finalized ( finality ). Validators are pseudorandomly selected and shuffled between committees of at least 128 validators, using a pseudo-random number generation process called RANDAO. These randomized committees are partitioned in order to vote on head of blocks, attempt to cross-link shard chains with the beacon chain, and are designed to help thwart malicious activity on chain. Validators earn rewards by attesting to blocks that become finalized, and by proposing blocks (when they are selected as proposers) that become finalized. They can also earn rewards by providing proof that someone has committed a slashable offense. Validators can be penalized as well, by going offline or not attesting (relatively minimal penalty) or more seriously penalized by committing a slashable offense, which include double voting, proposing two blocks in the same epoch, or casting a Casper FFG vote that conflicts with their previous one. You can lose your entire stake for committing a slashable offense. People can be involved by solo staking — putting up 32 ETH and your own validator node, or by committing some amount of ETH to a staking pool. Staking Pools allow you to pool your ETH with other participants to bypass the 32 ETH minimum requirement. The pool handles the operational aspects of staking and may tokenize your stake in the pool to provide you liquidity to use in other applications. All in all, we should be super excited to see the activation of the Serenity upgrade. ETH 2.0 aims to provide an even more scalable decentralized platform for applications and computing and I personally can’t wait to see it happen :)

REFERENCES

[1] Tobias Fan (Jun 25, 2021) Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 1: Why Upgrade? https://tobyornottoby.medium.com/ethereum-2-0-for-dummies-part-1-why-upgrade-112d8f5b6d88

[2] Cryptopedia (Jun 21, 2021) The 3 Phases of Ethereum 2.0’s Serenity Upgrade https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/ethereum-2-0-blockchain-roadmap-proof-of-stake-pos

[3] ethos.dev (May 23, 2020) The Beacon Chain Ethereum 2.0 explainer you need to read first https://ethos.dev/beacon-chain/

[4] Carl Beekhuizen (Feb 12, 2020) Validated, Staking on eth2 : #2 — Two Ghosts in a Trenchcoat https://blog.ethereum.org/2020/02/12/validated-staking-on-eth2-2-two-ghosts-in-a-trench-coat/

[5] Chi-Cheng Liang (Jul 12, 2019) Minimum Committee Size Explained https://medium.com/@chihchengliang/minimum-committee-size-explained-67047111fa20

[6] Amanda Shendruk, Quartz (Aug 19, 2020) CloudFlare Uses Lavalamps to Generate a Fundamental Resource: Randomness https://qz.com/1642628/cloudflare-uses-lava-lamps-to-generate-a-crucial-resource/#:~:text=Cloudflare%20uses%20lava%20lamps%20to%20generate%20a%20fundamental%20resource:%20Randomness&text=In%20Cloudflare's%20San%20Francisco%20office,lamps,%20but%20the%20office%20environment.

[7] Nimbus (May 7, 2019) Two Point Oh: Randomness https://our.status.im/two-point-oh-randomness/

[8] Staking Rewards Rewards Calculator https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/ethereum-2-0

Also, Read

What is Margin Trading | Dollar-Cost Averaging
BigONE Exchange Review | Grid Trading Bot
3Commas Review | Pionex Review | Coinrule review
Ledger vs Ngrave | Ledger nano s vs x | Binance Review
Bybit Exchange Review | Bityard Review | CoinSpot Review
3Commas vs Cryptohopper | Earn crypto interest
The Best Bitcoin Hardware wallet | BitBox02 Review
BlockFi vs Celsius | Hodlnaut Review | KuCoin Review
Bitsgap review | Quadency Review | Bitbns Review
Crypto Copy Trading Platforms | Coinmama Review
Crypto exchanges in India | Bitcoin Savings Account
CoinDCX Review | Crypto Margin Trading Exchanges
CoinLoan Review | YouHodler Review | BlockFi Review
The Best Crypto Tax Software | CoinTracking Review
Stackedinvest Review | Kraken Review | Futures Trading Bots
Best Crypto Lending Platforms | Leveraged Token
Best Crypto Charting Tool | Best Crypto Exchange
How to buy Bitcoin in India? | WazirX Review
CryptoHopper Alternatives | HitBTC Review
WazirX vs CoinDCX vs Bitbns | BlockFi vs CoinLoan vs Nexo
LocalBitcoins Review | Cryptocurrency Savings Accounts
Coinbase Review| Deribit Review |FTX Review | StealthEX Review
NGRAVE ZERO review | Phemex Review | PrimeXBT Review
Best Blockchain Analysis Tools | Earn Bitcoin | Swapzone Review
Crypto arbitrage Guide | How to Short Bitcoin | Prokey Review
Binance Trading Bots | OKEx Review | Atani Review
Best Crypto Trading Signals Telegram | MoonXBT Review
Godex.io Review | Invity Review | BitForex Review

Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 1: Why Upgrade?

CoinMonks — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 16:43:46 +0000

Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 1: Why Upgrade?

Introduction

If you are involved or have been keeping tabs on the ETH space at all, you’ve probably been hearing plenty of buzz about Ethereum 2.0 , dubbed Serenity (that’s ok if you haven’t — that’s what this post is for). You’ve likely heard snippets about “staking” and “sharding” and a whole litany of buzzwords where like myself, you might understand the gist but have a hard time reconciling it all. Even in a space as (relatively) new as crypto– there is so much information to compress and so much noise to filter. And if you’re like me you want something comprehensive and easily digestible to get you to that mental click! without reading bits and pieces scattered all over the internet while you pull out your hair or drink all your roommate’s beers lest you go mad. Fortunately for you, I’ve since pulled out a ton of hair and finished the 18-pack in the fridge (to my roommate’s dismay) in order to piece together the many aspects of the Ethereum Serenity upgrade into a cohesive summary so that you won’t have to.

Me writing this article at 2am

In this post, we explore the Ethereum 2.0 transition from a high-level view, diving into the weeds when necessary to help fully understand or internalize important concepts. Some of the material can get pretty dry, even for crypto-lovers like myself so I will do my best not to bog you down with terminology and lazy delivery. (I have split this article into a 2-part series). I will provide links for certain sections that require its own inspection altogether, or simply for you to no-look-leap into your own rabbit holes should you choose (Be careful!).

In Part 1 we start with a glossary of relevant terms and then dive into the rationale behind the Serenity upgrade. We will talk about why we need scalability and what that really means, as well as how the upgrade affects network security and the underlying the economics behind it. For each of these we will discuss the solutions that the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade plans to introduce.

In Part 2 we delve deeper into the mechanics of staking and validating. We’ll unravel the threads of the Beacon Chain, sharding, validators, and the Proof of Stake incentive structure and then weave them all back into a comprehensible picture.

Hopefully, you will feel that this is written from a similar level of proficiency and capacity as you. To clarify, that means you are NOT a human AI like Vitalik Buterin or Satoshi Nakamoto himself (or herself), but just a normal person with a love and interest for the space (Read: If I can do it, you can too).

Glossary

PoW/PoS — Proof of Work / Proof of Stake

Staker — Someone who stakes/deposits/risks their ETH in order to run one or more validators

Validator — A node that validates transactions and blocks in return for staking rewards. A validator is to PoS what a miner is to PoW. A staker can run multiple validators, assuming they have enough ETH at stake.

Node — Part of the distributed network of computers running the Ethereum software. A node is one of those computers. There are different types of nodes (full, light, archive — for example).

Client — An implementation of the Ethereum software. A node runs a piece of client software. Clients are written in different languages, but ultimately do the same thing — interact with the blockchain.

Serenity — the name given to Ethereum 2.0

Casper — Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (or Casper FFG for short) is basically a consensus mechanism. We’ll get into this later.

RANDAO — A (pseudo) random number generator, in a verrrrry simplified sense. We will explore how this comes into play when we talk about the validator process.

Attestation — A 2-part vote from a validator on which blocks are valid.

Proposer — A validator that has been pseudo-randomly ( RANDAO ) selected to build a block that other validators vote on ( attestation ).

Sharding — Basically breaking up the blockchain into pieces and processing/validating them at the same time i.e. “parallel execution”.

Beacon Chain — Think of this as the main chain that everybody and all the validators come back to. We’ll have a whole thing on it below.

Slashing — Punishing malicious validators i.e. attackers by taking away some or all of their ETH stake. You have to be a real dick to slashed.

EVM — Ethereum Virtual Machine. When people say “Ethereum is a world computer” — this is basically the computer. There is a copy of it on every full node. It allows smart contracts to be run by serving as a middleman between the smart contract (code) and your computer’s operating system — if you’re running a node. Each client (see above) is an implementation of the EVM.

eWASM — Ethereum Web Assembly. A goal for Ethereum 2.0 and an improvement on the EVM. I won’t get too technical here, but think “faster Ethereum computer” by speaking a (machine) language that your computer’s operating system can understand faster and easier i.e. WebAssembly, thereby speeding up the process.

TPS — transactions per second

Problems/Rationale — What are we solving for?

Why Ethereum 2.0 and why does it matter? In order to understand some of the rationale behind this long-planned upgrade to the network, we have to have to understand the current scope of problems and obstacles that we face today. To me there are two main areas of focus for the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade — simplistically speaking “using the network vs. securing & running the network”. As humans, we tend to think in dualistic terms — so I think this is a good framework to kick off our journey with. (This is how I framed it for myself anyway).

Number one is derived from the user experience. Technically miners and stakers are users but when I say “user experience” — I’m talking end users (not mutually exclusive) — people and even smart contracts that interact with Dapps, DAOs, other smart contracts, and the accounts you use to hold your ETH. Basically anyone or any entity interacting with the Ethereum global computer in the way that you, me, businesses, systems, etc. use the internet to do whatever it is that we do. Think finance, or running your city’s power grid, window shopping on Amazon, playing Fortnite with your friends. This is where we get into scalability.

I’m sure you’ve heard this term. But what does scaling really mean in this context?

When we talk about scaling, we are talking about increasing the amount of computation or execution that the Ethereum network can handle within a given period of time. This is measured in transactions per second, as transactions are the way the world interacts with the Ethereum network. The speed at which transactions are processed is called transaction throughput.

If we wish to modify or update the state (i.e. who has what assets at any point in time) of the network, we send a “transaction”. There are different types of transactions but the takeaway here is that a transaction is a signal or request to the network to change the overall state, much like you press some buttons on your mobile banking app to change the state of your bank balance, or you click your mouse to move your League of Legends champion from here to there (changing the state of the game).

One of the most commonly used benchmarks is Visa. “Visa processes 1700 TPS on average while Ethereum only processes 15 TPS!” — you’ll read that over and over again. What this means is that IF Ethereum is to become a network that secures more than crypto-flavored Pringle NFTs (look it up, I swear it’s a real thing) with any hopes of servicing a global financial system, let alone a global computing system — the transaction throughput is going to have to drastically increase while maintaining security and decentralization — both core tenets of Ethereum’s mission.

So what is the real bottleneck here?

One part of the bottleneck comes from supporting complex transactions. Basically smart contracts. This is being addressed by Eth 2.0’s move from EVM to eWASM¹. This is still in development and a bit beyond the scope of this article, but ultimately it should allow for smart contract transactions to be processed faster and at a lower cost. The article linked here provides a good introduction.

A larger part of the bottleneck comes fromthe way the Ethereum state is accessed, and how it grows over time². As more things happen on the Ethereum network, its state (again — a record of all the accounts, who has what, who did what) grows in size. As that state grows it needs to be to be stored (on nodes across the network) — and accessing/processing that stored data is limited by how fast the node computer can physically process and store data.

This means that without some sort of limit on the amount of processing that can be done within a certain period, some nodes might not be able to verify blocks and stay in sync with the blockchain (which is not great for the network). For this reason, Ethereum places a limit on the amount of processing power that can be involved in each block, which indirectly limits the number of transactions that can be included within each block. This “ processing power ” is measured in “ gas” (more complex transactions use more gas), and this gas is paid to miners in ETH. Whenever you send a transaction, you are basically bidding for this gas/processing power against other people sending transactions , which is why you can specify a higher fee limit to have yours go through faster [this is slightly different now with EIP 1559]. The per-block limit on processing power I mention above is referred to as the gas limit. Currently the limit is 15m gas which averages out to about 15 transactions per day.

All said and done, there is both a technical AND artificially placed limit on throughput —both a node’s processing capability and the gas limit (which are related to each other). These limits are there to level the playing field for Ethereum users and make it relatively affordable for nodes to exist (helping to maintain decentralization), but they also limit the amount of transactions the network can safely validate. Sharding is a way around these limitations.

Sharding is not a new paradigm. It’s a method of splitting the blockchain into smaller pieces with the goal of processing the pieces concurrently — this is called parallel processing. The concept of breaking up of the blockchain itself is derived from horizontal database partitioning where, you guessed it — a database is partitioned or separated for more efficient handling and organization. As part of the Eth 2.0 upgrade, the chain will initially be partitioned into 64 shard-chains, which spreads the network’s load across the new chains. They are meant to eventually be paired with rollups³, which is a Layer 2 technology that is beyond the scope of this article. We will get into the specifics of the sharding implementation in Part 2, but the key takeaway is that sharding breaks up the blockchain into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Not to be confused with “sharting” — image by Consensys Media

The second part of the Ethereum 2.0 focus is the network and infrastructure — this is where we get into security and the economics behind security. The economics covers everything from Ethereum’s incentive structure, centralization of miners/validators, user participation, attack mitigation, and systemic risk etc. These risks in security and economics are being addressed by Ethereum 2.0’s transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake , and it is arguably the largest part of the upgrade. Much like our previous discussion about scalability, we will explore what security means in this context.

Discussions about security often pertain to securing against malicious attackers who seek to modify, revert, or coerce the Ethereum network state in a way that does not follow the agreed upon protocol, — either to profit from it or simply bring the network down (think The Joker from Batman).

The most widely known and discussed attack vector is a “51% attack” or some variant of it. There are also more conventional attack vectors like scams, and contract code vulnerabilities but we won’t get into those here — as those pertain more to user error than a flaw in the overall system design. In layman’s terms a “51% attack” implies an attacker somehow gaining control of a majority of the network processing power, be that mining or validating, thus gaining the ability to process transactions in his or her favor, usually at the cost of other network participants. A well-designed system makes the cost of an attack higher than the payoff from a successful attack — something that Ethereum’s blockchain actually does fairly well already.

Related to said attacks is the risk of centralization. This is when a large group (or majority) of miners or validators are controlled by a single or small number of entities. It is essentially a monopoly or an oligopoly on network infrastructure and security, and this has a few ramifications. One, this creates a single point of failure while simultaneously creating a single point of leverage should these dominant parties decide to act against the interest of the other network participants (i.e. users like you and me). Having a fully decentralized network is valuable because it gives users the confidence that the network will function as expected regardless of a single party’s agenda, giving them the peace of mind to use and to build on it. I think an appropriate analogy is some of the public tech and media platform censorship we see today — I don’t think it’s a stretch on the imagination to see how that dynamic can quickly devolve into something we don’t like.

Another aspect to the Ethereum security model is not the security itself, but the cost of security. Currently, with the PoW paradigm there are essentially two main costs that are incurred to secure the network: capital and electricity (we will ignore elbow grease and technical expertise here for the sake of discussion, though they are clearly costs as well). Securing the network with the PoW i.e. mining, entails purchasing an ASIC — a “mining rig” in simplified terms — which is an upfront capital cost (some machines go up to $20k) and then keeping this thing running continuously, which implies an ongoing cost of electricity.

Annualized, Ethereum mining consumes about as much electricity as Singapore does. Each transaction consumes the equivalent of an average U.S. household over 3–4 days⁴. At this level, pollution and carbon dioxide emissions become equivalent factors as well — but you get the picture. Mining uses (many would say “wastes”) a lot of physical resources, namely electricity and atmosphere health — something I think we can all agree we’d like to avoid.

Ethereum 2.0’s transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake is meant to address all the issues that have been raised so far — maintaining security and decentralization while lowering or keeping the costs for that maintenance in check. I’m assuming that as a reader who’s gotten this far, you have at least a basic understanding of PoW and blockchains, but I’ll try to distill it down to the applicable portions here.

The Ethereum blockchain is simply a chain of snapshots of the network’s state (its history basically). Each snapshot (block) depends on the one before it and the one before that, and so on. Each block/snapshot must be computed and agreed upon by a majority of the network.

In Proof of Work (what Ethereum currently uses), you mine a block by essentially being the first one to solve a tediously hard puzzle. This is done through ASIC machines (mentioned above) which themselves run a hashing algorithm over and over, each time with a different nonce (a random number). This results in a different number result each time. Once a number is found with a value below a certain Target number (known as the difficulty level) the “puzzle” is solved. Whoever solves it first gets to mine the block and is rewarded with a fee. Everyone else vying for this fee concedes to the winner, but before that they check the winner’s answer to make sure it is valid, and if it is, they add that block to their own blockchain and begin trying to solve the next block’s puzzle.

Proof of Stake is a little more simple on the surface. In order to mine a block, you lock up 32 ETH for the right to “mine” or validate blocks. Every few minutes, you work alongside other validators to cast votes on valid blocks, and if everyone continues to vote on valid blocks in this manner, everyone is continuously rewarded with a fee. If you make a mistake or are found to be acting malicious, you are punished by losing some or all of your ETH, depending on the severity of your infraction. The computation involved with validating the blocks is not nearly as high as PoW.

Moving to PoS allows us to maintain our network security at a lower cost (less financial waste). Mining Ethereum with PoW is on average ~1/3 ongoing electricity costs and ~2/3 upfront capital costs⁵. The ASIC machine (your upfront capital cost) has a useful life of about ~2yrs before it wears out or become obsolete from newer and better hardware. Essentially your ASIC is a depreciating asset, which means mining over the years will incur a fixed cost every 2 years (adding to the total cost of mining over time).

With Eth 2.0’s transition to Proof of Stake, the dynamic becomes different. In PoS, your cost is almost entirely a capital cost (the ETH you deposit) but really, it is the just the opportunity cost of not being able to use your coins while they are locked up/staked. Electricity consumption in the PoS scheme is minimal, since staking can be done without expensive hardware (i.e. your home computer) and the computation is minimal. Unlike ASICs, your deposited coins do not depreciate (in a pure sense: 1 ETH today will still be 1 ETH tomorrow, regardless of the dollar value).

ETH gives you a year-over-year return whereas an ASIC gives you a year-over-year deprecation. This is a fundamental component of the improved tradeoff between security and cost of security. Some contend as well that as more and more coins are staked and taken out of circulating supply, the value of the circulating coins rise — meaning that the total value in circulation (the buying power and opportunity to do something productive with the coins) remains the same, even as coins are being locked up.

Essentially all of this means that we maintain the our current level of network at a drastically lower cost. This also lowers the barrier to entry for staking, as there is no longer a requirement for expensive ASICs (this is an arguable point⁶). As a wider spread of participants come into the picture, we make a step in the direction of decentralization as well.

Summary

Zooming back out — this article contends that there are two main high-level goals for the Ethereum 2.0 transition: increasing scalability and lowering the cost of security. Ethereum is currently unable to handle the transaction throughput required for conventional high-transaction applications, due to both real and artificial limitations on the way Ethereum’s transactions are processed, stored, and mined by network nodes. This is being addressed by sharding implementations in Eth 2.0, which is essentially done through parallel processing of different parts of the blockchain. Ethereum 2.0 will also replace the existing Proof of Work consensus mechanism with Proof of Stake. PoW miners are replaced with PoS validators that deposit a sum of ETH into a lock-up mechanism for the right to validate transactions and gain rewards proportional to the size of their stake. Depreciating ASIC mining machines are replaced by non-depreciating ETH coins , essentially eliminating both a wasteful consumption of electricity as well as a recurring capital cost of expensive machinery. This lowers cost of network security, barriers to entry for transaction validation, and reduces centralization in the network security providers (validators or miners).

In the next section , we will cover the nuts and bolts of the new Eth2.0 blockchain design — everything from how validating is actually done, what the beacon chain and shards looks like, rewards and penalties associated with processing transactions, and how it all comes together.

REFERENCES

[1] Ivan on Tech (June 27, 2020) Breaking Down ETH 2.0 — EVM and eWASM Explained https://academy.ivanontech.com/blog/breaking-down-eth-2-0-ewasm-and-evm-explained

[2] Crypto AM (Feb 26, 2021) The state of the State of Ethereum https://www.cityam.com/the-state-of-the-state-of-ethereum/

[3] Vitalik Buterin (Jan 05, 2021) An Incomplete Guide to Rollups https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

[4] Digiconomist Ethereum Electricity Consumption Index https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/

[5] Ethereum Wiki Proof of Stake FAQs: What about capital lockup costs? https://eth.wiki/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-about-capital-lockup-costs

[6] Reddit r/Ethereum (Jan 21, 2021) “How is Proof of Stake supposed to combat centralization?” https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/l2gptb/how_is_proof_of_stake_supposed_to_combat/

Also, Read

What is Margin Trading | Dollar-Cost Averaging
BigONE Exchange Review | Grid Trading Bot
3Commas Review | Pionex Review | Coinrule review
Ledger vs Ngrave | Ledger nano s vs x | Binance Review
Bybit Exchange Review | Bityard Review | CoinSpot Review
3Commas vs Cryptohopper | Earn crypto interest
The Best Bitcoin Hardware wallet | BitBox02 Review
BlockFi vs Celsius | Hodlnaut Review | KuCoin Review
Bitsgap review | Quadency Review | Bitbns Review
Crypto Copy Trading Platforms | Coinmama Review
Crypto exchanges in India | Bitcoin Savings Account
CoinDCX Review | Crypto Margin Trading Exchanges
CoinLoan Review | YouHodler Review | BlockFi Review
The Best Crypto Tax Software | CoinTracking Review
Stackedinvest Review | Kraken Review | Futures Trading Bots
Best Crypto Lending Platforms | Leveraged Token
Best Crypto Charting Tool | Best Crypto Exchange
How to buy Bitcoin in India? | WazirX Review
CryptoHopper Alternatives | HitBTC Review
WazirX vs CoinDCX vs Bitbns | BlockFi vs CoinLoan vs Nexo
LocalBitcoins Review | Cryptocurrency Savings Accounts
Coinbase Review| Deribit Review |FTX Review | StealthEX Review
NGRAVE ZERO review | Phemex Review | PrimeXBT Review
Best Blockchain Analysis Tools | Earn Bitcoin | Swapzone Review
Crypto arbitrage Guide | How to Short Bitcoin | Prokey Review
Binance Trading Bots | OKEx Review | Atani Review
Best Crypto Trading Signals Telegram | MoonXBT Review
Godex.io Review | Invity Review | BitForex Review

Working with Ethereum and IPFS

CoinMonks — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 16:41:27 +0000

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

We’ll see a quick demo of how we can use IPFSand Ethereumtogether. We’re going to upload some data on the IPFS network and save the returned Content Identifier (CID) on the Ethereum blockchain, which we can access via the smart contract.

To start off swiftly you can use a boilerplate that already has the structure for a Dapp project. There are tonnes out there, but get thisone in order to follow along.

(Note: All the commands are run from within this project directory)

Ethereum Setup and Code

Ethereum is a blockchain-based platform for developing decentralised apps and smart contracts. Ethereum blockchain is like a general-purpose blockchain where anybody who wants to do something doesn’t need to make their own blockchain for their applications. They can build apps on top of this blockchain. While IPFS, short for Interplaneary File System is a blockchain network to store files of all sorts. Ethereum was never made to store huge amount of data as it would be very costly for the network. Therefore, we have a solution like IPFS.

Assuming NodeJS and React.js is installed on your device install the following:

Install all packages: npm install
Install truffle: npm install -g truffle
Download Ganache app here

Truffle

Truffle is a development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for Ethereum, aiming to make life as an Ethereum developer easier. You can run truffle compile, truffle migrate and truffle test to compile your contracts, deploy those contracts to the network, and run their associated unit tests. In this demo we’ll only be working in the local environment.

Ganache

We also need a local Ethereum blockchain and some Ether to pay the gas fees which is required in transactions that change the state of the blockchain. For that we’ve downloaded Ganache. You can just QuickStart Ganache and it’ll be enough.

Ganache main screen after QuickStart

You can see many addresses there and these can be used for paying gas fees in the development process.

Writing smart contract

Now, in the ./contracts folder create myContract.sol and write the following code.

pragma solidity >=0.4.21 <0.6.0;

contract myContract{
    string data;
    function set(string memory data){
        data=data;
    }

function get() public view returns(string memory){
        return data;
    }
}

Here, we have two functions set() and get(). The function set() is just setter function that write some value in the variable data and get() just returns that variables.

Deploying smart contract

In the ./migrations directory create a file by the name 2_deploy_migrations.js and write the following code:

const myContract= artifacts.require('myContract');
module.exports = function(deployer) {
    deployer.deploy(myContract);
};

Here, we’ll import the contract then run the deploy command to put it on the blockchain. This file will be used when we’re deploying our smart contract. Before migrations make sure to test your smart contract, because once it’s on the blockchain it cannot be changed. Also compile before doing anything using the commandtruffle compile . To deploy the smart contract on the network, make sure Ganache app is running. Then, we’ll simply go to the console and run:

truffle migrate

We will receive a transaction confirmation receipt, that will tell everything related to the transaction.

Please note this deployment happens on the local blockchain network with the app Ganache. Now, you might be wondering how did our application connect with Ganache and deployed the contract there. This all happened because we’re communicating with the application in the background. You can check truffle-config.js where all the configurations are written.

Setting up IPFS

One way to connect to IPFS is to download IPFS on the system and run it on the machine to make it an IPFS node and connect your app to this, read herefor the steps necessary. Another method (suitable for this quick demo) is a public client like Infura. We can use Infura to test and learn about IPFS functionalities and we can upload files to the IPFS network very swiftly without any hassle. To work with IPFS you need to install ipfs-http-client library:

npm install --save ipfs-http-client

Then we can just connect to the node like this:

const create = require('ipfs-http-client')

const ipfs = create('https://ipfs.infura.io:5001')

If you had the node running on the local machine the client address would be something like http://localhost:5001. Once that’s done, we can simply run functions like this:

const run = async ()=>{
    const data= await ipfs.add(“Hello World”)
    const resultCID= file[‘path’]
    console.log(resultCID);
} // You could put a file buffer as well or anything
run();

The function, add() returns some data back and the most one important to note is the CID, which is a string starting with “Qm”. We can access using the second line here (Keep the CID saved somewhere we’ll need it again). You could also make a form in the react app and upload any sort of file to the IPFS network. Learn more about different functions here.

Go to the terminal and run truffle console this will open the console for truffle. You can run the functions set() and get() to set the CID and fetch it back from Ethereum blockchain and then retrieve the data back from IPFS. Before that run the command truffle compile again

(If needed run deployment commands again). Now, run the console and run these commands.

1. const contract= myContract.deployed()
2. setData= contract.set(<paste the CID that was earlier received>)
    // This set() command will consume gas as it's changing state
3. getData= contract.get()
4. getData

Getting data back from IPFS

To get the data we can hit the URLhttps://infura.io/ipfs/ or http://localhost:5001/ipfs/ (If node running on the local machine) with the CID of the content and it will show the data.

Additionally, you can also build a client-side interface and using web3.js library users can interact with the smart contract. Let’s save that for another demo.

Thank you for reading!

Also, Read

Kucoin Trading Bot — Automate Your Trades

CoinMonks — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 13:17:43 +0000

Kucoin bot

Kucoin Trading Bot — Automate Your Trades

Trading Bots by Kucoin Team and Other Bitcoin bot solutions that work with Kucoin

Automating your crypto trading is an easy task; however, finding the best trading bot provider is a tedious job. Especially when you are looking for a specific exchange such as Kucoin. Hence in this Kucoin bots article, we will be introducing you to the Kucoin trading bot and five other trading bot providers, which might be the best choices available.

Summary (TL;DR)

Kucoin is one of the best crypto exchanges; moreover, it provides Kucoin trading bot for free.
You can also connect various other bots such as Bitsgap, CryptoHopper, 3Commas, Mudrex, and HaasOnline using API keys.
Firstly, Bitsgap supports over 25 crypto exchanges and provides one of a kind futures trading bot.
Secondly, CryptoHopper comes with various trading bots such as Market making bot, arbitrage tool, Telegram crypto signals bot, etc.
Furthermore, the platform 3Commas provides an option to copy trading bots of experienced traders.
Mudrex comes up with its unique Performance score, which helps you calculate better risk vs. reward.
Finally, HaasOnline trading bot software lets you code the entire bot using HaasScript.

What are crypto trading bots?

Crypto trading bots are just algorithms that are intended to assist you in automating your trading approach. Moreover, you may build your trading strategy to construct your trading bot. Various platforms, however, charge a fee for this function. So, if you have no expertise in coding but would like to automate your investing technique, continue reading.

How does trading bot work?

Professional programmers and market specialists collaborate to develop trading bots by programming an investment strategy. Therefore, if the bot comes upon a potential market opportunity, it will open and liquidate positions on your part. Furthermore, emotions and feelings are not present in crypto trading bots. As a result, they only employ a pre-planned approach.

What is Kucoin?

Michael Gan and Eric Don established KuCoin, an excellent cryptocurrency exchange with headquarters in Seychelles. The founding members have prior business expertise and have previously led Ant Financial and iBox PAY initiatives. In addition, the fundamental goal behind the creation of KuCoin was to offer a secure and straightforward platform for the worldwide community to exchange digital currency.

Kucoin is commonly referred to as “The People’s Exchange.” As it provides a fantastic range of trading pairs as well as crypto-related services. To learn more, head over to the Kucoin review.

Kucoin Trading Bot (Their Own)

The trading platform Kucoin offers its trading bots to investors. Moreover, the Kucoin trading bot provides free trading strategies that let you take returns without monitoring the market. Furthermore, you do not need to connect a third-party bots provider using API keys to Kucoin. You can begin using the Kucoin trading bot by simply depositing funds, selecting your strategy, and enabling the bot.

Kucoin Bot: Features

The Kucoin trading bot provides six different trading strategies: Classic Grid, DCA, Futures Grid, Margin Grid, Infinite Grid, and Dynamic Rebalancing. Furthermore, you can run up to 10 bots at the same time. In addition, the Kucoin trading bot supports over 100 coins/ tokens and provides numerous bonuses and free essential services.

What is the Kucoin Swing trading bot?

Swing trading includes taking short or mid-term returns. You can use the Kucoin Margin Grid or Futures Grid trading bots for swing trading.

Kucoin Trading Bot Pricing

Here comes the best part of the Kucoin bot , it is entirely FREE of charge. Therefore, you do not have to pay anything apart from the regular trading fees on the platform.

Best trading Bot for Kucoin

Even if you are the most competent trader, no one can keep an eye on things while asleep. Furthermore, because crypto assets are so volatile, it’d be irresponsible to sleep on your leveraged investments. That’s where cryptocurrency trading bots come in; the bots automatically take returns if the market follows your plan. Furthermore, if it swings beyond your strategy, they minimize your losses.

So here are the best five trading bots for Kucoin.

1. Bitsgap Kucoin Bot

What is Bitsgap?

Bitsgap is one of the most well-known trading bots on the market. With 25+ trading platforms supported, such as Coinbase, Poloniex, Binance, Kraken, Bitfinex, and others, it caters to nearly any platform you may be using. You may try the bots in the Bitsgap demo trade mode before investing real money in the market.

Furthermore, the Bitsgap bot comes with a Futures trading bot with a minimum risk level. However, as of June 2021, this bot is only available for Binance, and the platform is soon planning losses and other exchanges. To learn more, read the Bitsgap review.

Bitsgap Features

The trading platform comes with a series of features such as Demo mode, trading terminal, Grid trading bot, etc. Moreover, the platform recently came out with its Bitsgap Futures trading bot, a safer way to take small returns from the futures market. However, as of June 2021, the Bitsgap futures trading bot is only available for Binance. Therefore the platform is planning to expand it as soon as possible to other crypto exchanges.

Bitsgap also provides crypto trading signals to its users. Moreover, the platform allows you to search for a particular cryptocurrency or categorize them according to your trade exchange or assets.

Bitsgap Bot Pricing

Bitsgap principally provides three premium-featured plans to its consumers. You can begin with a 14-day trial period and then choose one of the options listed below:

Bitsgap Pricing

Is Bitsgap Legit?

Most of your funds are stored securely on your cryptocurrency exchange platform’s account. Since this bot uses API credentials to link your crypto exchange to the Bitsgap bot but does not have the permission to enact a withdrawal on your account. Furthermore, Bitsgap recommends utilizing 2FA, and if you attempt too many wrong logins, your account would be suspended.

Bitsgap Bot: Pros and Cons

Bitsgap Review: Pros and Cons

2. CryptoHopper Kucoin Bot

What is CryptoHopper?

CryptoHopper is a stop shop platform that offers trading bots, exchange arbitrage, copy trading, backtesting, strategy creator, and other services. Besides, the platform provides trading bots for crypto signals Telegram channels. Furthermore, the MarketPlace is the most crucial element of CryptoHopper.

To learn more, read the CryptoHopper review. Furthermore, you can use our CryptoHopper discount code to get outstanding deals.

CryptoHopper Features

The platform comes with various trading features such as the Market-Making bot, Arbitrage tool, strategy designer, etc. Moreover, CryptoHopper provides its all-in-one, third-party Marketplace that offers services such as CryptoHopper signals, apps, trading strategies, and templates.

The platform goes a step ahead and provides a Telegram CryptoHopper signals bot. Moreover, the bot enables you to automate your trades coming from crypto signals. CryptoHopper also provides a paper trading mode to test your trading strategies and bots without putting your funds at risk.

CryptoHopper Pricing

The platform is primarily available in four subscription plans; see below. In addition, you may begin with the Explorer plan and take advantage of a free trial. You may also pick an annual membership and save money on monthly fees.

CryptoHopper Pricing

Is CryptoHopper safe?

The platform has been up and running for more than three years with no significant issues which have resulted in customer losses. Furthermore, since CryptoHopper uses API keys and does not have the authority to process withdrawals from your trading exchange.

Please be warned that trading using automated bots such as CryptoHopper is risky in volatile market circumstances. Therefore don’t put more money in danger than you can afford to lose.

CryptoHopper: Pros and Cons

CryptoHopper Review: Pros and Cons

3. Mudrex Kucoin Bot

What is Mudrex?

The trading bot provider Mudrex, with 10,000+ investors and 200+ indicators the platform is one of the best out there. Moreover, Mudrex supports the most popular exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase pro, Okex, Bybit, etc. You can even build, test, and deploy your trading strategy at Mudrex. Furthermore, you can get paid by publishing bundles at the platform; to learn more, visit Mudrex Bundle publishing.

To learn more about the platform, read Mudrex invest.

Mudrex bots for Kucoin

Mudrex Features

The trading bot provider Mudrex uses a Performance score ranging between 0–10, and for a strategy, the higher the score better will be the risk vs. reward. Through Mudrex protect, the platform offers to refund your subscription fees if the bot makes no profits for you. Furthermore, you don’t need to code your trading strategy; instead, you can simply use drag and drop.

To learn more, read the Mudrex strategy builder review.

Mudrex Pricing

The free plan provides you plenty of room to develop and test anything you want. However, you can also go with the $19 monthly premium plan. The first three months of the paid version are free, and you can cancel at any time!

Mudrex pricing review

Is Mudrex Safe?

Yes, the platform is safe to use as it does not ask you to deposit any funds apart from the subscription fees. According to Mudrex, all critical personal information is kept via bank-level AES-256 protection. Furthermore, all API traffic is protected and passes over SSL and TLS 1.2 to prevent hackers from knowing your details.

Mudrex: Pros and Cons

Mudrex Review: Pros and Cons

4. 3Commas Kucoin Bot

What is 3commas?

3Commas is an online platform that automates the trading methods of its subscribers through its advanced trading bots. It is a Miami-based firm that allows users to utilize pre-programmed trading methods or create one from scratch. In addition, using API keys, you can simply link your crypto exchange to 3Commas without granting the bots withdrawal powers.

To learn more, read the 3Commas review.

3commas Features

The platform 3Commas comes with various trading bots such as the Grid trading bot, DCA bots, Options bots, etc. The one-of-a-kind Options trading bot offers a possibility of a very high return. However, Options trading is equally risky. Furthermore, 3Commas Copy trading bots, you can simply copy the previously programmed bots of professional traders. To learn more, visit 3Commas.

3commas Pricing

3Commas provides its users with four subscription plans: Free, Starter, Advanced, and Pro. Furthermore, by selecting lengthier plans, you’ll be saving extra. The following are the specifics of each of these plans:

Is 3commas Safe?

3Commas‘ security measures are unclear; nevertheless, the trading bots at 3Commas cannot withdraw funds from any trading account since they use API keys. Furthermore, 3Commas gathers user trade data and utilizes it to improve its trading bots.

3Commas: Pros and Cons

3Commas Review: Pros and Cons

5. HaasOnline Kucoin Bot

What is HaasOnline?

HaasOnline is one of the first companies to provide cryptocurrency trading bots. Moreover, the software makes it simple to construct a trading bot depending on your investment strategy. You may even backtest your trading bots and invest actual money only when you are confident in the bot’s performance.

To learn more, read the HaasOnline review. Furthermore, you can also use the HaasOnline coupon “ COINCODECAP ” to get a 10% discount on HaasOnline.

HaasOnline trading Bot: Features

HaasOnline allows you to backtest your trading strategy and prevent and unnecessary losses. The platform provides its services using the desktop application and the HaasScript to create your trading bots. Furthermore, HaasOnline will soon introduce a Cloud Management service, which would let you skip the worry of software updates.

HaasOnline trading Bot: Pricing

HaasOnline offers three subscription plans: Beginner, Simple, and Advanced. Furthermore, you have the option of selecting a 3-month, bi-annual, or yearly plan term. However, you will have to pay the membership fees in BTC, and you will also receive a discount on the annual subscription. Refer to HaasOnline or the picture below for further information on features:

HaasOnline Pricing

Is HaasOnline safe?

HaasOnline, situated in Rotterdam, is one of the earliest trading bot providers. Moreover, the platform is the product of the combined experience of Josh Becker, Quintus de Haas, and Rustim Rhoda. Moreover, they know what they’re doing most significantly, providing the safest trading bot software. Additionally, with the addition of HaasOnline Cloud Management, the platform will become even more safe and efficient.

HaasOnline: Pros and Cons

HaasOnline Review: Pros and Cons

Kucoin Trading Bot: Conclusion

Kucoin is one of the best crypto exchanges out there. Moreover, the platform has the edge over others as it provides Kucoin trading bots to its users. However, if you wish to go for an alternate trading bot, you can connect the bots to Kucoin using API keys.

Firstly, Bitsgap comes with many features such as Bitsgap demo trade, Grid trading bot, Futures trading bot, etc. Secondly, CryptoHopper provides one of a kind Marketplace where you can find various third-party services such as crypto signals. Furthermore, the Options trading bot 3Commas is particularly very famous. Mudrex provides you with a refund of subscription fees if the bot doesn’t make you any profits. And lastly, HaasOnline is the go-to software for coders who wish to create their trading bots from scratch.

For ease of use, we suggest going with the Kucoin trading bot or Bitsgap trading bot. However, you can also go with CryptoHopper or 3Commas if you’re looking for a ton of features.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I find the Bitsgap app?

Bitsgap does not offer an app on iOS or Android as of July 2021. However, the platform has an interactive website and is planning to release an app soon.

Best CryptoHopper indicator settings?

The best indicator settings are relative to every trader. However, if you wish to trade on the safe side, then you can go for the following settings:

RSI: buy when it goes below 25 and sell when it goes above 75.

Williams %R: buy when it’s near 100 and sell when it’s near 0.

MACD histogram: Buy on the lowest bottom and sell on the highest top.

However, you must remember that these indicators can give false signals at times, and nothing in this article is financial advice. So trade at your own risk.

Is CryptoHopper bot cloud-based?

Yes, the CryptoHopper trading bots are cloud-based. Hence, the bot will be up and running even if you shut down your device and sleep.

Which is the best free crypto trading bot?

Pionex is one of the best free crypto trading bots out there. You don’t have to pay any kind of subscription fee to the platform. All you have to do is deposit funds in your Pionex account and start using the bot.

How to hook up TradingView to ** 3Commas **?

You can easily connect more than one indicator from TradingView to your trading bot, and the bot will execute trades based on those signals. Follow the below steps to combine the two:

First of all, create a new bot from the DCA bots tab.
Then head over to the bot viewing page, and find “Message to close order at Market Price” and “Message for deal start signal.”
Thirdly, go to your TradingView account, and check the ‘Webhook URL’ checkbox from the “Alerts” tab. Now, paste the URL, https://3commas.io/trade_signal/trading_view
Now paste the second message from step two into the ‘Message field’ to create a TradingView notification and initiate a trade.
Finally, repeat steps 3 and 4, use the first message from step 2.

Disclosure: Affiliate Links Included

Also, Read

What is Margin Trading | Dollar-Cost Averaging
BigONE Exchange Review | Grid Trading Bot
3Commas Review | Pionex Review | Coinrule review
Ledger vs Ngrave | Ledger nano s vs x | Binance Review
Bybit Exchange Review | Bityard Review | CoinSpot Review
3Commas vs Cryptohopper | Earn crypto interest
The Best Bitcoin Hardware wallet | BitBox02 Review
BlockFi vs Celsius | Hodlnaut Review | KuCoin Review
Bitsgap review | Quadency Review | Bitbns Review
Crypto Copy Trading Platforms | Coinmama Review
Crypto exchanges in India | Bitcoin Savings Account
CoinDCX Review | Crypto Margin Trading Exchanges
CoinLoan Review | YouHodler Review | BlockFi Review
The Best Crypto Tax Software | CoinTracking Review
Stackedinvest Review | Kraken Review | Futures Trading Bots
Best Crypto Lending Platforms | Leveraged Token
Best Crypto Charting Tool | Best Crypto Exchange
How to buy Bitcoin in India? | WazirX Review
CryptoHopper Alternatives | HitBTC Review
WazirX vs CoinDCX vs Bitbns | BlockFi vs CoinLoan vs Nexo
LocalBitcoins Review | Cryptocurrency Savings Accounts
Coinbase Review| Deribit Review |FTX Review | StealthEX Review
NGRAVE ZERO review | Phemex Review | PrimeXBT Review
Best Blockchain Analysis Tools | Earn Bitcoin | Swapzone Review
Crypto arbitrage Guide | How to Short Bitcoin | Prokey Review
Binance Trading Bots | OKEx Review | Atani Review
Best Crypto Trading Signals Telegram | MoonXBT Review
Godex.io Review | Invity Review | BitForex Review

Originally published at https://blog.coincodecap.com on June 29, 2021.

Solana From Source

CoinMonks — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 04:06:08 +0000

Solana is an interesting blockchain project that promises to be an L1 with low gas fees and fast block times. To check it out I decided to…

Continue reading on Coinmonks »

Crypto Trading Bot | Best 16 Bitcoin Trading Bots [Free & Paid]

CoinMonks — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 02:46:47 +0000

Crypto Trading Bot | Best 16 Bitcoin Trading Bots [Free & Paid]

What is the best crypto trading bot?

Nowadays, lots of teams provide paid and free crypto trading bots for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. It’s a hassle for a crypto trader like you and me to choose between these services*

When should you use a Crypto trading bot?

Many functions that a well-executed bot can conduct for you are rebalancing, portfolio management, data collection, smart order routing, etc.

What exactly can you improve with trading bots? Let’s take a look.

#1 Repetitive Tasks

Repetitive tasks consume a lot of time and effort. A crypto trading bot will allow you to virtually “copy and paste” specific tasks to conduct trades with ease. One of the best ways where bots can help with repetition is in periodic rebalances. If you want to conduct hourly rebalances, then you’ll need to, as the name suggests, rebalance your portfolio every hour. So, you have two options:

Set the alarm every hour to rebalance the portfolio and lose your sanity in the process.
Create a trading bot and program it to rebalance your portfolio every hour till the end of time.

#2 Timing

Timing and achieving a high degree of accuracy in your trading is essential for trading. Every single trade that you make can have an enormous impact on your potential earnings. Let’s take an example. Suppose the price of Bitcoin is going down, and you want to sell your position the moment BTC hits the $59,000 support line. If you were to do this manually, you’d have to patiently and carefully observe the price chart, and even then, you may not pull the trigger at the right time. **The trading bot can be easily programmed to monitor the market and execute a trade at the correct times.**

#3 Complications can be simplified

Consider the example of “smart order routing.”

The idea is to route trades through numerous trading pairs.
Every single trading pair needs to be carefully determined as per its timing, asset quantity, and trading price.
This entire route needs to be finished within a specific time-limit before the market conditions change.

It seems pretty easy-to-understand, right? However, the execution of this trade could be nearly impossible. This is just one of the many examples of the several complexities that should be factored in while training. Some strategies could be almost impossible to implement.

Trading bots could be used to automate these complicated and seemingly impossible strategies with ease.

Crypto Trading Bot Discounts and Coupon Codes 🔥

The best crypto trading bot in 2021

#1 Pionex — FREE Crypto Trading Bot for Bitcoin

Don’t need to hassle with the API Keys while using Pionex. So far, there’re 12 crypto trading bots on Pionex: Grid Trading Bot, Leveraged Grid Bot, Margin Grid Bot, Infinity Grid Bot, Reverse Grid Bot, Leveraged Reverse Grid Bot, Dollar-Cost Averaging Bot, TWAP Bot, Trailing Take Profit Bot, and Spot-Futures Arbitrage Bot.

Pionex is the exchange with the in-built crypto trading bot. It’s one of the best free trading bot platforms for cryptocurrency I’ve ever seen since 2017. (the year I start buying crypto :P) It aggregates the liquidity from Binance and Huobi and provides a free trading bot upon it.

The trading bot on Pionex is easy to use. And mostly I prefer trading bitcoin with these trading bots. Bitcoin has a higher market cap, and it’s the center of the whole cryptocurrency IMO.

Pionex is safe and has been granted the MAS and MBS licenses from Singapore, and U.S. Pionex is the first crypto trading bot on my list.

To learn more read our Pionex Review.

#2 Bitsgap — Grid Trading Bot for Binance

Bitsgap is best known for its unique automated trading bot. Thousands of traders with different experience and skill sets are using Bitsgap on a daily basis to maximize returns by automating their trading.

The algorithm implemented by Bitsgap is based on a simple and effective technique, called GRID. It distributes investment proportionally within a trading range predefined by a trader.

Each time the buy limit order is filled, a new sell order is placed by the bot right above that price. And vice versa, a new buy order is placed below any filled sell order. As long as the price stays within the borders of the trading range, the bot will be trading non-stop.

Bitsgap algorithm is designed to maximize profit from buying low and selling high each time the price swings. Automated bots have all the risk-control features like Stop-loss, Trailing UP, Take profit, and several exit strategies.

A cloud-based solution, so you don’t need to download anything
Trading bots are based on a transparent and efficient logic
Risk-free trading simulator in DEMO mode
Backtested Strategies for a quick bot start
14-Day Free Trial

To learn more read our Bitsgap Review.

#3 Cryptohopper — World-class automated crypto trading bot

Cryptohopper is a paid crypto trading bot for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But before jumping into the paid membership, you have a free trial for 7 days in Cryptohopper.

One of the well-known trading bots on Cryptohopper is the market-making bot. It’s similar to the Grid Bot in Pionex, but it’s more focused on profit from the spread on the order book.

The tagline of Cryptohopper is quite eye-catching to me: World-class automated crypto trading bot ;)

To learn more read our Cryptohopper review.

#4 Quadency — A smarter way to trade and manage your crypto

The best part of Quadency is the backtesting feature, with which you can do it based on data and numbers instead of shooting it in the dark. It’s also the most important feature for a crypto trading bot; it’s always nice to know the performance of historical data before using your money with the crypto trading bot.

To learn more read our Quadency Review.

#5 Mudrex: Smart crypto investments on AutoPilot

Mudrex makes investing in crypto bots as simple as investing in a mutual fund. They are very transparent about their info, have a wide variety of bots based on our risk appetite, and a pricing model that is by far the best we have seen. Y-combinator backed Mudrex outshines everyone else on the list!

Mudrex has over 7000 users and over 400 Mn USD traded on it. They are backed by well-known VCs and angel investors and have a very active and engaged community. They are connected with 8 of the top exchanges and are some of the very few on this list who are able to support US customers as well.

Mudrex does not build its own bot but instead has a curated marketplace of bots created by pro traders. The best part about the platform is that all info regarding the performance of a bot is public and easy for users to understand.

If you were looking for a platform using which you can invest your crypto, then Mudrex might just be it!

To learn more, you can also read an in-depth Mudrex review.

#6 Coinrule — Trade while you sleep

Coinrule is the best crypto trading bot for beginners. The “if-this-then-that” rule logic allows even less advanced traders to build their trading strategy in a minute. The user-friendly interface guides users in building the trading bot step-by-step.

The template library includes over 150 pre-set rules that help beginners running the trading system that suits their needs. The platform allows different trading strategies, including stop loss, take profit, and integrates the main technical indicators. The list of trading strategies that Coinrule allows is limitless and the company posts regularly new ideas in the Knowledge Base of the platform.

Another interesting feature is the built-in Demo exchange. Traders can test their trading systems in a safe environment with a virtual allocation of coins. The Demo rules run on prices that come directly from Binance, risk-free.

To learn more read our Coinrule Review.

#7 3Commas — Smart Trading terminal and auto trading bot

3Commas is one of the most famous crypto trading bots. I put it on #7 of the list because the UI is more for a professional trader. As their users become more and more professional, they turn their product development to pro users.

So if you’re a professional bot trader already, then you should try 3Commas.

It has two subscription levels — Basic and Pro. The basic level costs $25/month, while the latter costs $84/month and has a lot more features.
The cryptocurrency trading bot on 3Commas can implement multiple strategies based on technical indicators.
The community is good, and you can buy some online courses for using the 3Commas Bitcoin trading bot.

To learn more read our 3Commas Review.

#8 TradeSanta — Automated Crypto Trading Made Simple

You can use TradeSanta on eight main exchanges, Binance, Bittrex, HitBTC, Bitfinex to help you trade simultaneously on them.

You’ll need to pay from $14 to $70 per month according to your package.

One of the features I’ve tried with the TradeSanta Trading Bot is the Grid Bot. Pionex and BitUniverse have already provided the same feature for free, so if you’re here for grid bot, I don’t see it necessary to purchase the package. But if you’re here for other features, then you can evaluate the feature by yourself.

To learn more read our TradeSanta Review.

#9 HaasOnline — The most advanced automated crypto trade bots

HaasOnline is a paid crypto trading bot platform that is unlike any other. Similar to the other trade bots mentioned, they offer your standard pre-built trading bots for strategies like arbitrage and market-making, and other tools.

However, with the release of HaasScript, their scripting language, you can develop highly complex trading bots using a drag-and-drop designer or intelli-sense editor. You also have the ability to backtest or paper trade your strategies before executing live trades on over 25 exchanges.

Their current product is a locally hosted non-custodial trade server, which offers complete discretion and privacy, keeping prying eyes away from your trade data and strategies. They also plan to launch a cloud version for retail traders. There’s no free trial, but they do offer a discounted 14-day trial license.

To learn more read our HaasOnline Review.

#10 Shrimpy — The social trading platform for cryptocurrency

Shrimpy is a paid Crypto Trading Bot service for rebalancing. This is also the feature that makes it different from other bitcoin trading bot services. It helps you to automate your portfolio and rebalance it to a specific ratio.

For sure, Shrimpy is one of the excellent cryptocurrency trading bots in 2020, and that’s why I am listing it here. But it is a bot especially designed for portfolio management, indexing, rebalancing, and strategic backtesting.

The best part of it is to rebalance your portfolio when you are hodling the coins. It supports 10+ crypto exchanges.

For Shrimpy, it only executes a few trades every day. So it’s better for a HODLER.

To learn more read our Shrimpy review.

#11 CryptoHero — Automated Crypto Trading Bots Powered By AI

CryptoHero allows you to automate trades right from your phone easily for free. No coding skills needed. You can trade popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum with bots based on technical indicators 24/7.

CryptoHero supports multiple exchanges, allows you to track all your crypto trading performance individually or aggregation across exchanges through one app.

Bots can be configured with technical indicators. Enter a trade with one, exit with another, all without writing a single line of code. Besides, CryptoHero offers preset for popular technical indicators and allows multiple rules and triggers to work together.

You can also backtest your bots with historical data before deploying. And, get an indicative performance of your trading bot based on actual data with different trading frequency, against different time periods of up to a year.

#12 Botsfolio — Use Powerful automated trading systems

Botsfolio takes a risk assessment quiz and then recommends the best crypto investment strategy that you can automate. The trading bots are pre-built and strategies are recommended based on your financial goals, risk appetite & financial condition. This makes it easy for the user to trade crypto without any coding or trading skills.

They have bots for 5 different investment styles: Value investing b) Hedged Trading c) Futures Trading d) Index SIP e) Fixed Income. They have automated different investment styles that are used by professional hedge funds and investment banks.

The Hedged trading bot is the most famous as it provides active trading while reducing loss using a hedge.

The setup is very easy because you just have to link your Binance account and the rest is automatically done by Botsfolio.

You get a 1-month free trial and the cost for bots ranges from $1 to $85 per month.

To learn more read our Botsfolio review. Also, get 25% off on Botsfolio using this link.

#13 Napbots — Crypto trading on autopilot

NapBots seeks to democratize quantitative trading giving direct access to professional algorithmic crypto trading strategies in a plug n’ play style, so their users don’t have to worry about having any type of skills to be able to use this platform.

Based on the trading frequency(weekly, daily & hourly) users can choose from a variety of in-house made crypto trading strategies to automate their trading and allocate their funds. Many NapBots customers choose to diversify between multiple strategies to reduce risk, others prefer to stick to one crypto strategy. Easy to take in hand, NapBots is addictive. You are investing and having fun!

NapBots makes you trade like a pro and give you instant access to professional crypto trading strategies in 3 simple steps:

Connect your crypto exchange.
Select the crypto strategies of your preference.
Relax, and let the bot do the hard work.

NapBots is part of the Napoleon Group which is a French group of companies founded by former multi-billion asset managers at Tier 1 banks, who have designed, created, and run high-performance trading bots for the past ten years.

To learn more Napbots review.

#14 Botcrypto — Crypto trading on autopilot

Botcrypto is a very interesting platform if you want to personalize trading bots. They developed a drag and drop interface where you can combine more than 20 technical indicators (RSI, MACD, Moving Averages, Ichimoku Clouds, ...) to build your strategy. So you don't need to code! Stop losses, take profits and notifications are also available.

Backtests and real-time simulations are free. When you're ready to go, subscriptions start at 12$/month.

To learn more read our Botcrypto review.

#15 Trality — Create Trading Bots Like a Pro

I discovered Trality last year in 2020 and despite still being a young company, it is in our rankings for its great focus on the bot-creation process and the professional nature of the platform. It distinguishes itself from the majority of other solutions in that it does not provide ready-to-go, black box bots right away but gives you absolutely everything you might need to develop a professional-level algorithm on your own.

Trality’s killer feature is its one-of-a-kind, in-browser Code Editor, which allows even the most intricate and creative strategies to be written in Python with loads of unique order types. If you are neither a professional trader nor a Python developer, that is not a problem at all. Trality has another product, what it calls its ‘Rule Builder’ to help you build your bot with zero programming skills required. Just put your trading logic all together using simple drag and drop UI and it’s ready to go

The platform is also equipped with a quick and competent backtesting tool to help fine-tune the parameters and validate your ideas. Once the bot is ready, it can be set up to live-trade on popular exchanges like Binance, Coinbase Pro, Kraken, and Bitpanda.

The last thing to note is that the platform has a fair pricing model that is designed for users of all experience levels. Moreover, the starting plan is absolutely free and timeless, so you can use and test the basic capacity as long as you want.

To learn more read our Trality Review.

#16 Superalgos — Free and Open-Source Crypto Trading Bots

If you are a trader or developer looking to build sophisticated crypto trading bots with your own strategies, look no further than Superalgos. It is hands down the most powerful, flexible, and extensible platform, and it’s open-source, so it’s a safe bet in the long run.

Superalgos solves all of your infrastructure issues so that you may focus on building intelligence instead of wasting time-solving problems. It is the way in which the platform integrates all the concepts you need to master to succeed at trading that makes the system so powerful!

Take for example raw market data downloads from exchanges, local processing of data into standard and custom indicators, the visualization of data over the built-in charting system, the visual design of strategies following a professional framework, the different kinds of trading sessions including backtesting, paper trading, forward testing, and live trading, each of them producing visual simulations over the charts that you may debug right then and there, on a visual environment.

You know that Superalgos is built for power when you realize that the software can handle coordinated deployments of data and trading tasks across multiple machines in a network! People are setting up trading farms and scaling up operations as they build more bots, trading in more markets, with great diversification.

It is an impressive package. However, Superalgos is not a simple plug-and-play bot that you can master over the weekend. It’s a vast system that takes time to learn. That said, in-app interactive tutorials are amazing and the system is fully documented. You will appreciate the power Superalgos may unleash if you are looking to develop trading bots that will give you an edge in the market.

Also interesting, the project is running a collective business in which the whole community participates. Superalgos is a very ambitious project with a great vision to make markets more accessible.

To learn more read our Superalgos Review.

Also, Read

What is Margin Trading | 3Commas vs HaasOnline
Grid Trading | 3Commas vs Coinrule
3Commas Review | Pionex Review | Coinrule review
AAX Exchange Review | Deribit Review |FTX Exchange Review
NGRAVE ZERO review | Phemex Review | PrimeXBT Review
Bybit Exchange Review | Bityard Review | CoinSpot Review
3Commas vs Cryptohopper | Earn crypto interest
The Best Bitcoin Hardware wallet | BitBox02 Review
Ledger vs Ngrave | Ledger nano s vs x | Bitsgap vs 3Commas vs Quadency
Crypto Copy Trading Platforms | Quadency vs Bitsgap vs NapBots
YouHodler Review | BlockFi Review
Cryptohopper vs 3Commas vs Shrimpy
The Best Crypto Tax Software | CoinTracking Review
Best Crypto Lending Platforms | Leveraged Token
BlockFi vs Celsius | Hodlnaut Review Wunderbit review
HyperTrader review | Coygo review | CryptoHopper vs TradeSanta
CLEO.one Review | Stackedinvest review
Bitsgap review | Quadency Review | Bitbns Review
Ellipal Titan Review | SecuX Stone Review
LocalBitcoins Review | Cryptocurrency Savings Accounts
Best Blockchain Analysis Tools | Earn Bitcoin
Crypto arbitrage Guide | How to Short Bitcoin
Best Crypto Charting Tool | Best Crypto Exchange
How to buy Bitcoin in India? | WazirX Review
Bitcoin exchange in India | Bitcoin Savings Account
CoinDCX Review | Crypto Margin Trading Exchanges

Disclosure: Article contains affiliate links

Building Modern Web Dapp with Flutter

CoinMonks — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 19:38:22 +0000

No more React! No more JS!(jk) We are now in the Flutter era!

Introduction

Today I will show you how to build a modern web Dapp with Flutter!

We will use the flutter_web3 package for interacting with the Ethereum object, connecting with Metamask, Wallet Connect, and other providers.

This package also includes other nice utilities to connect to providers like Ethers Js and Wallet Connect.

Talk no more, let's get started!

Setting Up

First, create a Flutter project.

flutter create coolassname

And add some package into pubspec.yaml. This time I’ll be using Getx for simple state management, Niku for cool property builder, and our package flutter_web3.

dependencies:
  flutter:
    sdk: flutter

  flutter_web3:
  niku:
  get:

And start Flutter with

flutter run -d web-server

Because extensions like Metamask can’t be used in Chrome debug browser (sad).

Building The Website

Planning The Features

The topic we will cover today is

Using the Ethereum object and its method like requestAccount.
Using Ethers js to interact with smart contracts.
Using default ContractERC20 to construct the contract that has ERC20 standard.

Note that these are not all the package features; make sure to check the documentation out for all APIs and features.

So we’ll try to make Pancake Swap Interactor then, for the sake of simplicity.

Connect To Account

We first define the basic structure of the website. Then we’ll work on the web3 part after that.

Define some extensions to make life easier.

For the Web3 part, We’ll put it in HomeController .

For explanation, let’s go line by line.

Line 2, Check if we can access the Ethereum object getter. From the implementation below, the Etherum object can be null if the browser doesn’t have any provider available. i.e. Metamask, Wallet Connect, Binance Chain Wallet, etc.

Line 4, Check for the chain that is currently connected to is Binance Smart Chain or not (chain id 56).
Line 6, Overall check for connection to the website. ethereum.isConnected() is only used for provider availability, so we have to check from the address that is exposed from the node.
Line 9 and 11 is to store the state variable.
Line 15, Connect to provider and update currentAddress and currentChain . By using ethereum.requestAccount we can prompt the provider to make the connection with the website. (i.e. Metamask modal) that returns the list of addresses, the first address in that list is the current address that will be used. Be sure to handle errors if the user rejects the modal (In this case I don’t, which I shouldn’t do.) And using ethereum.getChainId to update currentChain
Line 26, Handle accountChanged and chainChanged events. This will call clear every time the user changed his account or chain and update the variable above.

Then we can build a super simple UI to show that we’re connected or not. If not, click a connect button to prompt the provider to connect.

So we got the account connection part completed. I will only show crude UI implementation here, you guys can make it your own as good as you want.

Connect Button

Connecting to the provider

Connected

Connect To Ethers js Provider

There are many providers in Ethers js, two of them are Web3Provider and JsonRPCProvider.

Both can be used to read data from the Blockchain, Web3Provider instantiates by putting Ethereum provider into the constructor. JsonRPCProvider instantiates by putting RPC Url into the constructor.

For simplicity, We can connect and get Web3 by using the default provider getter. The implementation is below.

Interacting With Contract

We’ll divide this into two sections, interacting with Cake token contract and interacting with the Masterchef contract.

For the Cake token contract, we’ll use ContractERC20 .

For the Masterchef contract, we’ll use normal Ethers Contract and specify our own ABI.

Cake Token Contract

It’s super simple! Just instantiate ContractERC20 class with the token address.

We’ll also add an end function that burns 1 gwei of your Cake! Spicy!

We’ll go line by line here again.

Line 3, 5 stores our variable about the Cake token and our token balance.
Line 7, Instantiate cakeToken object if null. And get our Cake balance from balanceOf function.
Line 15, Burn 1 gwei of Cake from your pocket. First, check if your balance is more than 1 gwei (So you have enough to burn and have some left, haha!) then transfer your cake into addressZero , or 0x0. Then update your cake balance again.

To build the UI for our contract, we first need to make sure that the Ethereum object is not null and then build it normally.

Fetch cake and burn cake button

After fetching Cake

Burning 1 gwei of Cake

Burned

Masterchef Contract

Since we need to create our own Contract instance, we’ll also need the contract’s abi. We can look this up at block explorer of your choice.

We can look into the code of the contract using BscScan.

We will select some property, constant function and write function to be our example.

First, we need to obtain the abi. For abi specification and type, please refer at Ethers js documentation.

We’ll use minimal human-readable abi here for simplicity, You can also use JSON abi that generated from solidity and paste it here.

So referring to the docs, our abi is.

Then we can create our Contract and call that function. Note that all function that have uint return type is actually BigNumber in Dart.

For explanation,

Line 16, Create Masterchef contract if null, and get cakePerBlock and poolLength with annotated type BigNumber and converted that to int .
Line 24, Call emergencyWithdraw with 0 indicating pool number as argument.

After that, we proceed to build our UI.

Fetch information button

After fetching information

Conclusion

Although Flutter ecosystem for developing Dapp is nowhere to be seen before. But through Dart2js and many Flutter packages that is popping up to strengthen cryptography and web3 utility, this make Flutter a Strong contender for Dapp development in the Future.

Crude example that I’ve shown already prove that Flutter really has the potential to develop complex Dapp using Dart’s extensive capability.

You can find source code for this example here.

Also, Read

Top 5 CryptoHopper Alternatives 2021

CoinMonks — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 10:20:10 +0000

CryptoHopper Alternatives

CryptoHopper is one the best place to go if you’re looking for trading bots. Furthermore, the platform is particularly known for its MarketPlace. However, in this article, we will look at the five best CryptoHopper alternatives. As you must not stick to a particular platform, rather try all the options available in the market.

Summary (TL;DR)

CryptoHopper is one of the best places to go for crypto trading bots.
Firstly Napbots, once available exclusively to hedge funds, is a cloud-based, AI-powered system that lets everyone trade crypto assets.
Secondly TradeSanta, a platform for crypto trading bots that concentrates on automating trading strategies.
Then Zignaly, the cloud-based crypto trading bot platform with various useful functions for a wide variety of investors.
3Commas is a very well-known cryptocurrency trading bot platform headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, and was launched in 2017.
Finally Bitsgap, a crypto trading bot, and you can connect it to over 25 of the most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges.

What is CryptoHopper?

CryptoHopper is one of the most well-designed crypto trading bot platforms on the market. Furthermore, its MarketPlace offers you various products such as crypto signals, trading strategies, Dapps, and templates.

CryptoHopper is a cryptocurrency trading robot meant to assist traders of all levels, make the most of their trading skills, optimize their earnings, and minimize their risks.

The platform is appropriate for traders, including newbies, because of its intuitive design and simple functions. In a nutshell, CryptoHopper is the industry standard for crypto bot trading.

To learn more, read the CryptoHopper review. You can also refer to the Top 5 CryptoHopper apps for everyone.

However, in today’s article, we’ll look at the competitors of CryptoHopper that are just as simple to use.

Best Cryptohopper Alternatives

There are many crypto trading bots providers in the market. Furthermore, very few of them provide as many services as CryptoHopper does. However, we’d still be listing the best 5 CryptoHopper alternatives below.

CryptoHopper Alternatives: NapBots

What is Napbots?

Napbots, which was previously only available to hedge firms, is a cloud-based, AI-powered application that allows everyone to trade crypto assets.

This implies that you can execute trades based on the crypto strategy you select from the available options. Professional traders with over 15 years of trading expertise brought these techniques into existence.

The AMF governs Napoleon Group, and its sister business, Napbots, provides a trading bot service. Napbots began developing crypto-trading techniques around three years ago, and the platform presented its first strategy to the public in April 2018. Since then, 20 additional strategies have been released, each with essential KPIs and testing templates.

For example, their oldest technique, “BTC LO,” provides manual crypto trading signals, and its automated version is currently accessible and on its approach to breaking the new ATH.

Furthermore, over a year, the flagship strategy BTC/ ETH/ USD outperforms the underlying by 233 percent. Because it allows for short, this technique is more aggressive. However, past achievement does not guarantee future success.

In reality, the primary database for Napbots‘ techniques is price, and the team offers both trend-following and mean reversion methods (weekly, daily, and hourly).

Apart from that, the beauty of NapBots is that it is a trading bot for investors of all backgrounds. Not just for beginners or casual traders who can simply let the bot handle everything, but also for seasoned traders who can turn off “Bot Only mode” and place trades without utilizing the bot’s automated systems. It is the only bitcoin trading bot that allows you to combine tactics.

Napbots will operate in the user’s place depending on data such as market price changes. To learn more, read the Napbots review.

How to Get Started with NapBots and Make Money?

You may achieve financial independence with NapBots by trading cryptocurrencies on autopilot and earning money. To get it working, follow the following steps:

Firstly, connect to one of the available trading exchanges first.
Secondly, choose from NapBots‘ impressive list of performing Bots.
Finally, pick an investing strategy that suits you the most.

NapBots is ready to trade cryptos and generate money for you once you’ve done these three steps. Happy trading!

Napbots: Supported Exchanges

The platform allows you to choose from eight of the most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges for your initial leap. Among them are Binance, Bitmex, Bitfinex, Okex, Phemex, Kraken, Bitpanda, and Bitstamp. CoinBase, Kucoin, HitBTC, and many others will be added soon. With such a wide range of exchanges, it can implement its algorithmic methods with ease.

Connecting Napbots to your exchange is simple. You just need to generate an API key from your selected Exchange account and enter it on the Napbots website.

Napbots Pricing

The NapBots pricing packages are divided into three different price plans tailored to all budgets and vary based on the volume transacted. Each plan comes with a trading limit that may be increased to $25,000 by paying an additional fee, as seen below:

Why Choose NapBots?

By applying their established trading techniques, the platform can offer quantitative trading strategies formerly reserved for hedge funds to the public.
The distinctive and straightforward methodology of NapBots results in outstanding ROI. Furthermore, the creators of NapBots have considerable financial market expertise. Additionally, passive sources of income like this service function even when you’re asleep.
Pricing is straightforward, and there are no startup costs.

CryptoHopper Alternatives: TradeSanta

What is TradeSanta?

TradeSanta is a crypto trading bot platform that focuses on trading strategy automation. It was first released in 2018, but it gained popularity in the latter half of 2019. It now boasts a thriving community of 25,000+ members who have completed over a million transactions.

TradeSanta has simplified the crypto trading bot universe and provides its members with some excellent trading tools. It now boasts the most active trading bots among its competitors, with over 6,400.

A lengthy bot template, a short bot template, and a custom bot template are all available. Extra orders, martingale, purchasing coins for commissions, complex technical indicators, and other TradeSanta features are available.

To learn more, read the TradeSanta review.

TradeSanta Supported Exchanges

It now links to seven major cryptocurrency exchanges, including HitBTC, Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Huobi, Upbit, and OKEx, which is to add BitMEX shortly.

TradeSanta Pricing

When compared to other crypto trading bot platforms, TradeSanta is relatively cheap. MINIMUM (free plan), BASIC ($14/ month), ADVANCED ($20/ month), and MAXIMUM ($30/ month) are the four options when purchased annually.

What are the benefits of using TradeSanta?

The platform that is simple and basic
TradeSanta supports several different trading bots and other trading tools.
The platform is hosted on the cloud.

CryptoHopper Alternatives: Zignaly

What is Zignaly?

Zignaly is a next-generation cloud-based crypto trading bot platform with several handy features that cater to a wide range of traders. Only Binance and KuCoin are now linked to the trading platform, but other crypto exchanges are expected to be added in the future.

It primarily offers copy trading, a crypto trading bot, and a trading terminal. One of the distinctive characteristics is that it allows you to trade automatically using third-party crypto trading signals. It now supports over 21 distinct crypto signal sources, all of which produce high-quality signals.

Users may presently utilize Zignaly for free, with unlimited exchange accounts, coin pairings, positions, and priority support.

Zignaly Pricing

The Zignaly trading bot platform does not have a subscription charge and is completely free.

What are the benefits of using Zignaly?

Integrating third-party signal providers has several advantages.
You can set up a free account at Zignaly.
The platform is hosted on the cloud.

CryptoHopper Alternatives: 3Commas

What is 3Commas?

3Commas is a well-known crypto trading bot platform based in Vancouver, Canada, founded in 2017. The application links to up to 23 major cryptocurrency exchanges and allows you to manage all of your cryptocurrency accounts in one place. It has a sophisticated trading terminal that will enable you to design your trading methods and mimic successful traders’ trading tactics.

Short bots, simple bots, composite bots, and composite short bots are the four varieties of bots offered by 3Commas. Options Bot, for example, allows you to automate your options trading strategies. To learn more, read the 3Commas review.

3Commas Pricing

There is no free account with 3Commas, and the STARTER plan costs $14.50 per month. The PRO and ADVANCED programs include monthly charges of $49.50 and $24.50, respectively. The trading bot is only available to PRO and ADVANCED account holders.

What are the benefits of using 3Commas?

3Commas provides access to the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges.
Provides options for social trading.

CryptoHopper Alternatives: BitsGap

What is Bitsgap?

Bitsgap is an all-in-one crypto trading platform situated in Estonia that was created in 2018. The software allows you to connect to over 25 of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges and trade them all in one spot.

You can trade and analyze signals in over 10,000 crypto pairings using the Bitsgap platform, arbitrage from price differences between exchanges, automate your trading techniques, and automatically find signals of currencies with the most potential using the Bitsgap platform.

To learn more, read the Bitsgap review. If you’re looking for a Futures trading bot, then you can go with one of a kind Bitsgap Binance futures trading bot.

Bitsgap Pricing

The Bitsgap free plan comes with standard functionality and a trading limit of $1000. The BASIC plan costs $19 per month and includes a $25,000 transaction limit and access to two trading bots. The ADVANCED and PRO accounts have monthly fees of $44 and $110, respectively.

What are the benefits of Bitsgap?

Close to 30 cryptocurrency exchanges are included.
A large number of trading options are available, and the ability to set up multiple monetary accounts.
Bitsgap allows for fiat currency conversion.

CryptoHopper Alternatives: Conclusion

As you can see, there are many Cryptohopper options to select from, and each platform has its own set of features.

The trading Bots mentioned here are among the best and most reliable crypto trading bot platforms available. However, Napbots is much more advanced in terms of functionality and capabilities.

Crypto trading bots are the future of cryptocurrency trading, allowing you to benefit from every market opportunity that would otherwise be unavailable. As a result, select the platform intelligently, and you will be well recognized.

Disclosure — Affiliate Links Included

Originally published at https://blog.coincodecap.com on June 25, 2021.

Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake: Beginner’s Guide!

CoinMonks — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 23:56:39 +0000

Proof of Stake is strongly coming to unveil in a couple of months. So, which one is better, affordable, faster, decentralized, safer…

Continue reading on Coinmonks »

DEV Community: CoinMonks

What can I do with Remix IDE?

Bitsgap Alternatives

Top 5 Bitsgap Alternatives [2021]

Summary (TL;DR)

What is Bitsgap?

First Bitsgap Alternative: NapBots

What is Napbots?

Napbots Features

How to use NapBots?

Napbots Supported exchanges

Napbots Pricing

Why Choose NapBots?

Second Bitsgap Alternative: CryptoHopper

What is CryptoHopper?

CryptoHopper supported exchanges

CryptoHopper Pricing

What are the benefits of using Cryptohopper?

Third Bitsgap Alternative: Zignaly

What is Zignaly?

Zignaly Pricing

What are the benefits of using Zignaly?

Fourth Bitsgap Alternative: 3Commas

What is 3Commas?

What are the benefits of using 3Commas?

3Commas Pricing

Fifth Bitsgap Alternative: TradeSanta

What is TradeSanta?

TradeSanta supported exchanges

TradeSanta Pricing

What are the benefits of using TradeSanta?

Bitsgap Alternatives: Conclusion

Also, Read

How to test a BEP20 token with Hardhat and not get SCAMmed

Table of contents

1. Why was SCAM token chosen for this post?

2. Inspect the SCAM contract source code

3. Prepare tests for it

4. Conclusion

Also, Read

Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 2: How Does Staking Actually Work?

Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 2: How Does Staking Actually Work?

ETH 2.0 In Phases

Beacon Chain

Slots and Epochs

Validators and Attestations

Crosslinks

Committees & Proposers

Checkpoints, LMD Ghost, and Casper FFG, and Finality

RANDAO — ETH 2.0’s Random Number Generator

Rewards and Penalties

Exiting/Withdrawing your ETH as a Validator

How Can I Get Involved?

Summary

Also, Read

Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 1: Why Upgrade?

Ethereum 2.0 For Dummies — Part 1: Why Upgrade?

Introduction

Glossary

Problems/Rationale — What are we solving for?

Summary

Also, Read

Working with Ethereum and IPFS

Ethereum Setup and Code

Truffle

Ganache

Writing smart contract

Deploying smart contract

Setting up IPFS

Getting data back from IPFS

Also, Read

Kucoin Trading Bot — Automate Your Trades

Kucoin Trading Bot — Automate Your Trades

Trading Bots by Kucoin Team and Other Bitcoin bot solutions that work with Kucoin

Summary (TL;DR)

What are crypto trading bots?

How does trading bot work?

What is Kucoin?

Kucoin Trading Bot (Their Own)

Kucoin Bot: Features