AGORACOM Small-cap Investor Relations Blog

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital Inc. (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click Here For More Information.

How To Keep Your Crypto Safe Against Exchange Hackers

• Exchange hacks appear to be one of the critical problems without any kind of a solution in sight. 
• This year alone, there have been several high-profile attacks.

By Adrian Barkley

Despite all the developments and innovations in the cryptocurrency space over recent years, exchange hacks appear to be one of the critical problems without any kind of a solution in sight. These days, cryptocurrencies are far more distributed across hundreds of exchanges than they were back in 2014 when Mt.Gox was hit, derailing the price of Bitcoin overnight. Nevertheless, exchanges remain prime targets for hackers. 

This year alone, there have been several high-profile attacks. Cryptopia was one of the first, subject two separate incidents that ultimately crippled the New Zealand-based exchange, causing it to close its doors for good.

After that, Singaporean DragonEx and Korean Bithumb were both targeted, before trading behemoth Binance was hit in May this year. Although the company was quick to reassure users that their account balances were protected by its insurance fund, the attack left a smear on Binance’s previously unblemished record of security. 

The latest exchange to fall prey to hackers is Upbit, which lost $50 million worth of ETH in late November. 

So, what are crypto users to do, to keep their funds safe? In light of the ongoing hacking issues, many exchanges are now starting to sell themselves on their enhanced security measures. 

Going the Extra Mile to Prevent Attacks

For a while, two-factor authentication was the established means of ensuring user account. However, many exchanges are now taking additional measures, such as IP binding. This means that you can restrict access to your exchange accounts to only a single IP address. If someone attempts to log in from another machine than your own, you’ll be notified. 

Singaporean exchange ecxx is one example of an exchange following this practice, along with other measures to help keep your funds safe from theft. The exchange keeps user funds in cold wallets, requiring multiple signatures from the company to access. 

Earlier this year, QuadrigaCX users found their funds had gone missing after the exchange founder died abroad as the only person holding the private keys to access his company’s wallet. Multi-signature wallets are a way of protecting against this risk. 

Furthermore, ecxx has integrated with MyInfo, the government of Singapore’s user portal. It enables Singaporean citizens and residents to interact with government agencies and private companies online. The integration offers local users in Singapore a trusted means of logging on to the ecxx platform with their existing MyInfo credentials. 

For institutions, ecxx has also partnered with Ledger, one of the global leaders in digital asset cold storage. Professional traders and investors can choose to have their funds stored in a Ledger Vault, meaning that ecxx doesn’t take custody of funds at all. 

Decentralized Exchanges – a Non-Custodial Solution

Another option for exchanging tokens without incurring the security risks of hacking is to use a decentralized exchange (DEX.) A DEX generally doesn’t take custody of your accounts, meaning that you’re solely responsible for fund security. 

At this point in the evolution of cryptocurrency, users have their pick of DEXs, with various different models for enabling trading. However, a critical challenge of peer-to-peer DEXs is that many are underused, meaning they suffer from low liquidity. Unless you’re trading Bitcoin or one of the major alts, you may find your trade left hanging while the matching engine searches for a counterpart with whom to trade. Therefore, it makes sense to find a DEX with high liquidity. 

IDEX is one of the more popular DEXs, meaning that liquidity is less of a challenge. Users manage their funds via the platform’s Ethereum-based smart contract. Users can access the smart contract via four methods – a Metamask wallet, a Ledger Nano S cold storage wallet, a Keystore file, or a manual private key entry. 

Another safe option is to use a liquidity protocol, which is a kind of DEX using a third token to enable swaps between a wide variety of tokens. Bancor and Uniswap are both examples of liquidity protocols. 

Wallets

If you do prefer to stick with centralized exchanges, then conventional wisdom says that you should only keep your funds in your exchange account when you’re actively trading. Therefore, if you’re planning on keeping your investments in crypto, get yourself a wallet. Hot storage wallets such as Atomic or Edge are very easy to get started using only a smartphone app. 

An even safer option for long-term HODLers is to use a cold storage wallet such as a Ledger Nano S or Trezor. Just make sure you have a safe method of storing your recovery seed.

Source: https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2019/12/how-to-keep-your-crypto-safe-against-exchange-hackers

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital Inc. (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click Here For More Information.

Gaming Is Key to the Mass Adoption of Crypto

• A whole new exciting world of value is being coded into life right now by gamers
• While it may be a far cry from the lofty ideals of banking the unbanked and taking down the global banking system, gaming is gearing up to be a massive force in the crypto space

By Lark Davis

A whole new exciting world of value is being coded into life right now by gamers. While it may be a far cry from the lofty ideals of banking the unbanked and taking down the global banking system, gaming is gearing up to be a massive force in the crypto space.

Addictively fun games will draw a whole new base of users into the crypto economy. Gamers are an excellent target market for adoption because many gamers are a touch more tech savvy than the average internet user and tend to be a bit more open to new ideas.

Just imagine this — a gamer beating a monster, picking up a rare item, selling that item for Ether (ETH) on a secondary market, and then using that Ether to buy a new hat online. This creates a whole new network of value that is liquid, fast and global — and most importantly, taps into gamers’ existing behavior: playing games.

But for this exciting future to transpire, games need to be fun… addictively fun. Up until now, most crypto games have been little more than retro 1980s throwbacks — with very simple graphics and limited playability — which is nice for nostalgia but will not add anything significant to the crypto economy. However, a new class of games is changing this scenario and is set to take crypto games into the leagues of the truly great online games.

NFTs pave the way

Before looking at some examples, it is important to note that all of this has been enabled by nonfungible token technology, which allows for the proliferation of in-game digital assets on public blockchains.

Gaming could possibly be one of the major contributors to the crypto economy, with game developers making new token standards and technical developments that benefit the entire ecosystem — as well as the players of these games generating significant on-chain activity that helps to feed the miners. So, let us not make the mistake of thinking that crypto games are not lifting their weight in terms of ecosystem development.

Here are a couple of examples of what is being built and played.

Gods Unchained is bringing the wonder and excitement of a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering to Ethereum. Gods Unchained is graphically enticing and has a great in-game flow of animations that keep the action rolling. The game has already attracted thousands of players to tournaments and continues to find a growing community of enthusiasts. Under the hood, players own the cards that they play with, storing the unique nonfungible tokens in their Ethereum wallet. Rarity is provable on-chain, and swaps on the secondary market are seamless. In February, a card sold for $62,000, which is astonishing for such a new game and really underlines the excitement building around crypto games.

Related: Blizzard Bans Hearthstone Player, Blockchain Comes to Rescue

Then, there is the Enjinverse, which is a growing multi-game experience that allows for in-game items to be used and moved seamlessly between dozens of games. Enjin itself is one of the most important cryptocurrencies in the gaming realm. One of the most interesting games in the Enjinverse is Age of Rust, which is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure with stunning graphics and an enticing story. Looking at the popularity of games like Dead Space or Fallout, it becomes clear that Age of Rust stands a good chance of gaining significant popularity.

While the game itself is exciting, it is the underlying tech that really makes Age of Rust stand out: Not only are Enjin assets interoperable between games, but they also have value baked into them. So, regardless of the long-term outcome of the game itself, the items you acquire in the game all are forged with Enjin tokens melted into the in-game asset. These assets can be melted back down at any time, enabling you to claim the tokens underpinning the value of the item — as well as creating increased scarcity for the item class, as once it is melted, that item it gone forever.

Here are some major players to watch. Enjin is working closely with Unity, which accounts for nearly half of all game developers globally. Cocos has 1.4 million game developers using its engine, and the launch of its blockchain is likely to bring many of those developers over. Loom is focused on interchain operability and on enabling fun, user-facing games that will draw more users into crypto — with such titles as Neon District, which is a Blade Runner-esque RPG.

According to the recent research conducted by a gaming and e-sport analytics provider, the gaming industry as a whole is expected to be worth $180 billion by 2021, so the opportunity for crypto gaming is massive. For players, there will be better experiences; for developers, there will be more tools to attract players to their games; and for investors, there will be the ability to own the cryptos that will be at the forefront of a major trend — but that has not yet taken off.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/gaming-is-key-to-the-mass-adoption-of-crypto