This Week in Blockfolio Signal — May 3rd

Every week we comb through hundreds of Blockfolio Signals to bring you the most significant team updates with brief analyses to help you understand the latest developments in blockchain.

Published in
8 min readMay 3, 2019

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In this week’s issue:

IOTA (IOTA) Partners with Jaguar Land Rover

Jaguar Land Rover partnered with IOTA Foundation to integrate Smart Wallets into its cars. Drivers will be able to earn IOTA cryptocurrency and make payments on the move using innovative connected car services being tested by Jaguar Land Rover.” Read More

— Cara Harbor, Director of Communications

Summary

  • Innovative ‘Smart Wallet’ technology will let drivers earn cryptocurrency on the go.
  • Credits can be earned for sharing info about traffic jams and potholes and used to automatically pay for tolls, parking, and electric charging.
  • Connected services are part of Jaguar Land Rover’s Destination Zero vision — zero accidents, zero congestion, and zero emissions.
  • The technology is on test at the new Jaguar Land Rover software engineering centre in Shannon, Republic of Ireland.

Significance

This is a big win for IOTA, as Jaguar Land Rover is one of the world’s top high-performance luxury car makers. They chose IOTA above dozens of other tokens competing in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) space.

The reporting of road condition data such as traffic congestion or potholes to navigation providers or local authorities should make the roads safer and easier to navigate. The built-in incentive structure rewarding drivers with IOTA for the input will ensure higher-than-normal participation from drivers. Furthermore, the ‘Smart Wallet’ increases driver convenience, by removing the need for drivers to hunt for loose change or sign up to multiple accounts to pay for a variety of everyday services.

IOTA’s tangle requires no transaction fee to operate and over time transactions will get faster across the entire network, forecast to include some 75 billion connected devices by 2025. IOTA is securing early-mover advantage with this partnership and will be able to demonstrate their technology in real-world use. This should help to increase the adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in general, which is a big win for the ecosystem.

Furthermore, it helps to demonstrate the capabilities of IOTA’s tangle and advance Jaguar’s Destination Zero strategy. This initiative aims to achieve zero emissions, zero accidents, and zero congestion through the use of various emerging technologies, which benefits humanity at large.

IOTA price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.313. View IOTA on Blockfolio.

Decred (DCR) Gets Struck by Lightning

Lightning has struck Decred! We’re pleased to announce that the Lightning Network is now live on our testnet. For all the details see the article below by dev Matheus Degiovani.” Read More

— jz, International Ops Lead

Summary

  • Decred development team unveils the official testnet release for dcrlnd — their Lightning Network wallet and node software.
  • The Lightning Network peer-to-peer payment protocol promises to deliver improved scalability, privacy, and speed for Decred.
  • The next major milestone is getting it mainnetworthy and Decred is asking their users to test the initial Lightning Network deployment.

Significance

The Lightning Network will help Decred significantly improve the scalability, privacy, and speed of their network. At the end of 2017, Decred activated the on-chain consensus rules required to develop DCR Lightning Network. The approval of this change was nearly unanimous at 99.50%, and developers began working on building the foundation for LN features.

Addressing these key challenges in the blockchain space will lead to increased adoption, not only for Decred, but for the cryptocurrency sector overall.

DCR price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $23.51. View DCR on Blockfolio.

NEO (NEO) Announces Roadmap and New Features for NEO 3.0 Release

The mass adoption of blockchain tech is imminent. NEO 3.0 will be a large scale commercial application ready implementation with high throughput, enhanced stability, an optimized smart contract system, and a feature-packed infrastructure set.” Read More

— Erik Zhang, Founder & Core Developer

Summary

  • NEO 3.0 will be a robust blockchain implementation with high throughput, enhanced stability and security, an optimized smart contract system, and a feature-packed infrastructure set.
  • The company is exploring various governance mechanisms including liquid democracy, futarchy, and some others emerged in recent times.
  • A set of new features will be rolled out this year as they move to NEO 3.0. These include Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT), reduced smart contract costs, a built-in oracle implementation that allows smart contracts to access Internet resources, a redesigned P2P protocol with much higher TPS, a virtual machine for executing smart contracts, a distributed decentralized object storage platform, NeoID digital identify and more.

Significance

NEO was an early favorite amongst crypto enthusiasts, back when they still went by the name Antshares. The Crypto Winter took a toll on the project and there appeared to be little for early investors to be excited about. But with this new roadmap and feature set for NEO 3.0, the company appears to be moving forward with major advancements that will address many of the shortcomings of early smart contract implementations.

With the new feature-packed infrastructure, they have a vision of supporting large-scale commercial applications with blockchain technology. In dBFT 2.0, NEO added a recovery mechanism that greatly improved the stability of the consensus algorithm. This new feature will be rolled out shortly according to the company.

The reduced fees for smart contract execution and built-in oracle implementation that allows smart contracts to access Internet resources should increase the usability and adoption of their platform going forward. This will help to spread blockchain technology and smart contract functionality in China, across Asia and globally.

NEO price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $9.61. View NEO on Blockfolio.

QuarkChain (QKC) Implements State Sharding with Mainnet v1.0 Release

Dear Community Members,

Mainnet V1.0 Singularity will officially launch at 23:59 PM. Beijing time on April 30! It is one of the first public chains that successfully implemented state sharding technology in the world. QuarkChain realizes the customization of four dimensions: different shards have different consensus algorithms, ledger models, transaction models, and token economics. It has become a flexible, highly scalable and easy-to-use blockchain underlying architecture that integrates security, decentralization, and efficiency. Please click and read more about QuarkChain mainnet v1.0 Singularity’s design concept, technical configurations, ecosystem, and future plans.” Read More

— Qi Zhou, Founder & CEO

Summary

  • Officially introducing QuarkChain’s mainnet V1.0 “Singularity” with the goal to design a blockchain system which can satisfy decentralization, security, and scalability at the same time.
  • After analyzing many solutions, QuarkChain views state sharding as the most efficient and difficult solution to achieve. QuarkChain uses state sharding technology and a system structure of root chain-shards which can compatible with various consensus mechanisms.
  • Boson consensus, exclusively developed by QuarkChain, enables every shard to have different consensus algorithms, ledger models, transaction models, and token economics.
  • The multi-native token mechanism is another innovation of QuarkChain. The tokens generated on QuarkChain are not like contract tokens such as ERC20 and TRC20, but have all the functions of a native token. The core is that the ledger model can directly support multiple native tokens.
  • QuarkChain launched six versions of the testnet (testnet 2.0–2.6) and released 13 small versions after continuous improvements. They expect to start mainnet token swap after running stable for at least three months.

Significance

QuarkChain is pushing forward with many of the latest technologies for their V1.0 launch. It is the first public chain to implement state sharding channels. The result is a highly flexible, highly scalable and easy-to-use blockchain underlying architecture that integrates security, decentralization, and efficiency in one solution. Their model also means they will be able to address interoperability and easily implement the latest and best technologies across a wide spectrum of approaches.

The end result should be a major advance in the scalability and usability of blockchain technology. This will help to drive adoption of the tech and QuarkChain has already signed cooperation agreements with a number of enterprise partners that will validate their approach and help spread awareness of the technology.

QKC price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.027. View QKC on Blockfolio.

Spectrecoin (XSPEC) Launches Proof-of-Anonymous-Stake Protocol

The Spectrecoin Foundation is thrilled to present the brand new release of Spectrecoin v3.x with our novel ‘Proof-of-Anonymous-Stake’ protocol. This release has been nearly 10 months in development and testing and introduces the first fully anonymous staking system on a trustless setup.

You MUST update your wallet and reindex the blockchain or use the bootstrap method before the hard-fork which will be at the following time:

17/05/2019 (17th May 2019)

2000 GMT (UTC) London.” Read More

— Mandica, Founder

Summary

  • Spectrecoin announces production version of Spectrecoin v3.x with novel ‘Proof-of-Anonymous-Stake’ (PoAS) protocol and privacy/security upgrades.
  • This launch introduces the first fully anonymous staking system on a trustless setup.
  • A hard fork is planned for 17/05/2019 @ 2000 hours (GMT), but this is a MANDATORY upgrade to get the v3.x wallet up and running ahead of the hard-fork to be able to use PoAS and continue to stake.

Significance

The concept of ‘Stealth Staking’ has been bandied around for a while and there has been much speculation on how it might work. Spectrecoin has designed and implemented a unique anonymous staking protocol based on the well-known PoSv3. Token holders can now experience first-hand the new staking protocol and generate 100% private staking rewards. Increased privacy safeguards should lead to increased staking and increased adoption of this consensus mechanism.

XSPEC price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.452. View XSPEC on Blockfolio.

Quote of the Week:

PayPal had these goals of creating a new currency. We failed at that, and we just created a new payment system. I think Bitcoin has succeeded on the level of a new currency.”

— Peter Thiel (Venture Capitalist and Founder of PayPal)

Thanks for joining us and we look forward to bringing you our top Blockfolio Signals again next week.

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Jason Hamlin

Ecosystem Insights & Development @ Blockfolio

Blockfolio Signal is a first-of-its-kind communications platform built exclusively for token teams to connect and engage with their communities. Over 400 token team CEOs and team leaders actively use the platform to provide relevant project updates directly to Blockfolio’s five million plus users. Learn more at www.blockfolio.com/signal.

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Disclaimer: No information included herein constitutes an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any investment product, or legal, tax, accounting, or investment advice.

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Ecosystem Insights @ FTX. Newsletter writer @ Nicoya Research. Data analytics and market research @ Nielsen.