I’m proud to announce that Bitlit has made the decision to accept CENTRE’s US Dollar Coin (USDC) for all purchases. This is an awesome milestone not only for us as a company but also for the field of technology. As one of the first merchants to accept this asset, we pride ourselves on helping pioneer the adoption of cryptocurrency in E-Commerce.

Why Stablecoins?

It’s very difficult to use cryptocurrencies for online commerce in their current state. The frequency of large, rapid swings in the prices of cryptocurrencies means that the assets are not ideal for purchasing other items. This is because the price of an asset can shift drastically before, during, or after a transaction, which results in one of the two transacting parties being at a monetary disadvantage. This is incredibly risky for participants in a transaction and is a large factor in the slow adoption of cryptocurrencies today.

Stablecoins eliminate this risk by maintaining a constant price with another asset, like the US Dollar in our case. When our customers check out using USDC, it’s a nearly identical experience to checking out using US Dollars from a credit card, as 1 USDC always equals 1 USD. This way, customers can have the full ownership of their money provided by a cryptocurrency while still having the constant value of a US Dollar in their wallet.

What This Means for the Future

Our adoption of USDC means that underbanked and unbanked individuals can purchase our items without relying on traditional banking infrastructure to mediate the transactions. And, USDC is the first ERC20 token that we’ve chosen to accept yet surely not the last. This marks the beginning of our exploration into accepting more ERC20 tokens in the future.

We’re very excited to make this announcement, and we hope to see more adoption of USDC as more of our customers begin to use cryptocurrency. If you’d like to exchange your US Dollars for USDC, Coinbase and Circle are excellent services for doing so. To start purchasing Bitlit items using USDC, simply go to our checkout page with an Ethereum wallet with a USDC balance and select USDC as your payment method!

Bitlit Accepts USDC was originally published in Get a Bitlit! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Howard University Blockchain Lab, a premier university level blockchain community, has turned one. To help celebrate, we wanted to provide a clear explanation of who we are. Founded in late 2017 at Howard University, our mission is to serve as a central resource for education about blockchain technology, entrepreneurship, and investment. To work toward that mission, we actively conduct research, engage in development, and build community on our campus and in the Greater DC area. That’s a quick summary of what we do, but let’s go more in depth about what all that means and why we do it.

Conducting Research

Blockchains and other web 3.0 technologies are extremely young and susceptible to advancing a myriad of fields including cryptography, distributed systems, economics, finance, and many more. We at the Lab recognize this potential and are committed to advancing the body of knowledge in this space. From exploring the feasability and implications of consensus algorithms to studying the best user experiences when using decentralized applications, we’re just as curious as the next organization about how blockchain will impact our lives and the world around us.

Building Community

Being so new, blockchain is still a niche technology, so the communities surrounding it are relatively small. It’s evident that this will change, however, as the communities of those who take an interest in blockchain have grown alongside the global awareness of blockchain. With our location in the global city of Washington, DC, we’ve noticed that we’re in a unique position to not only help grow the area’s existing community but also leverage our position to expand outreach to politicians, policymakers, financiers, students, and more in addition to creating a welcoming environment to provide education and engagement with respect to this new, high tech field.

Engaging in Development

As this space matures, it will need an increasing amount of infrastructure on which it can grow. And, said infrastructure comes from both the communities that help provide knowledge, education, and discussion about blockchain and the technological protocols, paradigms, standards, and libraries that not only comprise the blockchains themselves but also enable developers, designers, product people, and entrepreneurs to build next generation applications around these novel technologies. We’re on the front lines of this effort.

Why We Do It All

Blockchain will change our lives, and it’s our decision whether we want to help drive the discussion and innovation or become the laggards as this technology approaches mainstream usage. We want to play a huge part in this, which is why we’ve given ourselves a set of goals to accomplish: to establish a space for blockchain education, research, and analysis at Howard University and the Greater DC community and to create an alliance with other student and professional organizations to spur innovation driven by blockchain technology, ideation, and cross-discipline collaboration.

We can’t do all this without you! If you’re curious about Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, or blockchain, be sure to follow us on Twitter or shoot us an email at HUBlockchainLabs@gmail.com to learn how you can get involved and join today!

Howard University Blockchain Lab Turns One was originally published in Howard University Blockchain Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

*Please Note: Bitlit LLC is not creating an ICO at the time of this writing, and the content in this article does not consist of financial advice.*

With the increasing prevalence of companies choosing to raise funds via Initial Coin Offerings, many often ask what value investors in said ICOs are receiving in return for their capital.

The Utility Token

Companies and organizations often label their tokens as utility tokens for this reason: the inherent value that recipients of utility tokens is the ability to utilize a service or application that is restricted to those who don’t own the tokens. The utility token model has lost a considerable amount of its credibility due to scams, however, as several projects that have sold utility tokens ultimately develop products that do not require a standalone token and appear to have mishandled the money of their investors. Utility token models are also overlooked by some regulators. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission does not honor the concept of a utility token, for example, and labels nearly all tokens sold during ICOs as securities.

The Security Token

On the other hand, companies can opt to label their tokens as security tokens and provide their investors with corporate stake, voting rights, or the ability to resell their tokens for profit at a later time. The value in these security token models is relatively limited at times, though. Traditional securities such as equities often provide the aforementioned value proposals in addition to dividends.

The Dvdnd Token

We at Bitlit believe that dividend-paying tokens are the next step in formulating a decentralized financial system that can rival the systems of today. With this being said, I’d like to propose the Dvdnd token to kickstart the development and experimentation of dividend-paying tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

Found here, the Dvdnd token is an ERC20-compatible token that allows token holders to redeem a portion of the token contract’s Ether balance in the form of a dividend. The amount of the contract balance that holders are allowed to withdraw is directly proportional to the amount of the total token supply that the holders own; users who own more tokens are allowed to withdraw more Ether. The owner of the contract (the address that deploys it) can load earnings as Ether into the contract for users to redeem as dividends and can transfer ownership to other users for them to have the responsibility to load the contract with Ether. I invite all to contribute to the development of the Dvdnd project at https://github.com/getabitlit/dvdnd.

The Dvdnd project is meant to be forked, modified, and incorporated into other projects so that dividend-paying tokens can become more common in the Ethereum ecosystem. Any feedback would be very appreciated.

Bitlit (getabitlit.com) offers a catalog of fun and interesting clothing items that breathe new life into the modern day technologist. Designers, programmers, administrators, entrepreneurs, and daily users of technology can now feel represented when wearing Bitlit apparel. Remember: when you get a Bitlit, you gotta show it off!

Introducing Dvdnd was originally published in Get a Bitlit! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we celebrate more than 9 years of Bitcoin’s operation, I’d recently found myself pensive about the origins of the world’s longest standing decentralized cryptocurrency. To satisfy my curiosity, I decided to perform some analysis of Bitcoin’s first month of operation: specifically, the first 3000 blocks.

I was inspired to do this analysis after reading an article written by Balaji S. Srinivasan in which he proposed a measure for quantifying a cryptocurrency’s decentralization. I was particularly interested in his analysis of coin decentralization. Defined as the distribution of coins among known addresses, coin decentralization can also be thought of as the total wealth equality among owners of a cryptocurrency. I was curious as to whether the wealth equality among Bitcoin owners changed within the first month of its operation and, if so, why it changed.

Before we start, it’s necessary to ask how we can formally define wealth equality. Interestingly enough, it’s easier to define wealth inequality than it is wealth equality.

Wealth Inequality — The unequal distribution of assets among individuals in an economic system.

In our context, wealth inequality is the unequal distribution of the total circulating supply of Bitcoin among all Bitcoin owners. To think of this in a more practical sense, we can imagine that there are 10 Bitcoin in circulation and 10 total Bitcoin addresses in existence. If 1 address owns all 10 Bitcoin, then the wealth among the addresses is very unequal since one address owns all of the money and the 9 others have none to spend. Conversely, if the 10 Bitcoin are equally distributed among all 10 of the Bitcoin addresses, then the wealth among the addresses is completely equal since each address owns the same amount (1 Bitcoin).

Economists often quantify wealth inequality using the Gini Coefficient. The Gini Coefficient can range from 0 to 1, where 0 represents total equality and 1 represents no equality. It’s natural to say that wealth inequality and wealth equality are inversely related, so a higher Gini Coefficient means less wealth equality. To determine how wealth equality changed in the first 3000 blocks of Bitcoin, we’ll calculate the Gini coefficient at each block and study our findings.

Using the Blockchain API, I was able to retrieve information about each block from height 0 to height 2999. After calculating the Gini Coefficient at each block by monitoring the balance at each address with respect to the total amount of coins circulating at a block, I was able to find data represented by the following chart.

As we can see, the Gini Coefficient increases over time, which means that the total wealth equality of Bitcoin owners decreases as the network neared its 3000th block. This chart is telling us that certain addresses started owning a disproportionate amount of Bitcoin in the network’s first month of operation. Why is that, though? Are miners of later blocks earning more coins than earlier miners? Were the early miners redistributing the wealth by sending their coins to other users? Did some miners mine more blocks than others? To find the answer to these questions, we need to look more closely.

Are miners of later blocks earning more coins than earlier miners?

One could reason that a factor in the increasing wealth inequality during Bitcoin’s early days is miners of newer blocks being rewarded with more Bitcoin per block than miners of older blocks. To answer this question, however, we have to see the circulating supply of Bitcoins at each block. If the rate at which new coins were minted was not constant, then it’s true that miners earned a different amount of coins over time and wealth was not equally distributed during minting of new coins. The following chart shows the supply of Bitcoin at each block.

As we can see, the rate at which new Bitcoin were minted was constant. This is evident because of the straight line: it shows us that 50 new Bitcoin existed after each new block. Therefore, the miner who mined the 3000th block earned the same amount of Bitcoin as the miner who mined the first block. This proves that a change in mining rewards alone did not factor into the increase of wealth inequality. It’s important to note that a block reward of 50 Bitcoin per block was specified by the protocol until block #210000, so we could have disregarded this option without processing the blockchain data.

There are a few more cases in which the wealth can still be unequal: miners who earn block rewards could be sending their new coins to others, and/or some addresses could be mining more blocks than others. It’s also important to keep in mind that these approaches are not mutually exclusive, however, as multiple factors can simultaneously influence wealth equality.

Did some addresses mine more blocks than others?

Another factor that could have influenced the increase in wealth inequality is whether some addresses mined more blocks than others. If some addresses mine more blocks than others, then they could be getting a disproportionate amount of block rewards. We can see if this is the case by viewing the probability distribution of each of the coinbase addresses (an address that earns block rewards) earning the reward of a block between heights 0 and 2999, where a uniform distribution means that each block was mined by a unique address and a non-uniform distribution means that a certain number of addresses mined more blocks than others. The data can be viewed below.

The above histogram shows a uniform probability distribution, which means that each block was mined by a unique address and thus proves that no address mined more of the first 3000 blocks than another. Knowing that each block was mined by a different address gives us confidence that every mining address earned 50 Bitcoin during mining.

This means that some addresses ended up owning more than others neither by earning more coins per block nor by mining more blocks. We can deduce from this that some addresses are sending Bitcoin to others and redistributing the wealth.

Were the early miners redistributing the wealth by sending coins to other users?

Although wealth redistribution is no clear indicator of increasing or decreasing wealth equality, its existence does indicate that there is a change in wealth equality. We have a record of every transaction that took place, so we can use this information to differentiate the coinbase transactions from the normal transactions and see how the normal transactions influence the wealth inequality. To see this, we’ll show the chart of the Gini Coefficient at each block again. But, we’ll also plot vertical lines whenever a user sent Bitcoin to another and redistributed the wealth.

Here, the red line is the Gini Coefficient at each block, and the blue lines are times when Bitcoin were sent from one address to another. As we can see, the wealth inequality across the network decreases (red line slopes down) after some times someone sends Bitcoin to another and increases (red line shoots up) other times after someone sends Bitcoin to another, with the cumulative inequality still tending to increase over time. With this, it’s evident that wealth redistribution has a significant influence on the wealth inequality of the network. This also gives us reason to believe that some addresses might not have always HODL’d their coins.

While I do not have data to confirm at the time of this writing, I speculate that some of the normal transactions significantly increase the total wealth inequality. I believe this is the case, because the Gini Coefficient significantly increases at the same time that a normal transaction takes place as can be seen when a vertical blue line intersects with the red line and the red line shoots up. The events of interest are circled in green.

What does this mean?

In the end, there are multiple factors that could simultaneously influence the wealth equality of the Bitcoin network. In this article, we were able to discuss a few factors that could have significantly influenced the decrease of the cumulative wealth equality (and thus coin decentralization) during Bitcoin’s first 3000 blocks. It appears as if the reason for the decrease in wealth equality is redistribution of wealth by certain addresses. More specifically, some addresses send their newly earned Bitcoin to other addresses so that more of the coins concentrate toward the balances of a shrinking group of addresses. This is likely because Bitcoin is subject to the Pareto Principle.

What doesn’t this mean?

There were a few limitations pertaining to this research. The most relevant is that the distribution of wealth among addresses does not directly correlate with the distribution of wealth among users, since creating and owning wallets is a trivial task, and each of the addresses used throughout the first 3000 blocks could have been owned by one person.

Another limitation is that we’re only studying the first 3000 blocks (since that’s all my laptop’s RAM could handle 😉). Should we have studied the first year or the entire blockchain at the time of your reading, we could have easily seen different results. As a matter of fact, Balaji reported a Gini Coefficient of 0.65 when researching Bitcoin coin decentralization in 2017.

Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies are deemed by many as new vehicles for great wealth redistribution. While they are, in fact, adding more individuals to the upper class, cryptocurrencies are still subject to the same economic laws that stratify our current societies. Whether this approach toward another unequal system will continue is up to society, but there’s no doubt that these digital currencies are changing the world around us as we know it.

This article is sponsored by Bitlit (getabitlit.com). Bitlit offers a catalog of fun and interesting clothing items that breathe new life into the modern day technologist. Designers, programmers, administrators, entrepreneurs, and daily users of technology can now feel represented when wearing Bitlit apparel. Remember: when you get a Bitlit, you gotta show it off!

As always, thank you very much for reading!

Twitter, Github

Beginnings of Bitcoin: The First 3000 was originally published in Crypto Currently on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m proud to announce that after several months of preparation, I’ve launched Bitlit, an apparel company for people in technology.

I founded Bitlit in response to my experiences growing up in technology. I’ve always found tech culture to be very unique: from putting everything on the blockchain to JavaScript-ifying everything computable, tech’s culture has always been pretty fascinating to me. Technology is always evolving, and it’s becoming an increasingly welcoming space. But, I’ve had trouble in the past with discovering clothing brands that can appeal to technology’s growingly diverse demographic.

From web developers to systems programmers and from crypto enthusiasts to design nerds and daily users of technology, everybody should have a brand that represents them regardless of their skills or appearance, and Bitlit is that brand. Bitlit’s mission is to change the world by giving all citizens an identity in our increasingly digital society through clothing.

If you’d like to be a part of our mission, check out our site at getabitlit.com. If you want to give us feedback, or if you have any comments for us email me at gerald@getabitlit.com. Feel free to follow us on Twitter (getabitlit) and Instagram (getabitlit), too!

Introducing Bitlit was originally published in Get a Bitlit! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Many have heard of the new game on the Ethereum blockchain called CryptoKitties. The new game recently made several headlines within the cryptocurrency community because of its extremely unique idea and the dent it’s made on the Ethereum network. CryptoKitties is a game in which players can buy, sell, trade, and breed digital cats. They can be thought of as “breedable Beanie Babies” in that each cat is unique in some way. This uniqueness makes the CryptoKitties extremely collectible, as someone could take interest in the characteristics of several kittens and wish to own many of them.

But collectibles aren’t limited to digital felines. Humans have always had a history of collecting things; it’s nothing new. From physical coins to Pokémon cards, people love collecting. It’s a hobby that forms as a result of a unique interest in scarce items. Similar to how the value of a commodity is related to its scarcity, the value of a collectible item to a collector is connected to its rareness among other items.

We can emulate rare, collectible items with Ethereum tokens, and each of these tokens follows a novel standard in the Ethereum community known as ERC721. Ethereum Request for Comments 721, or ERC721, is an Ethereum Improvement Proposal introduced by Dieter Shirley in late 2017. It’s a proposed* standard that would allow smart contracts to operate as tradeable tokens similar to ERC20. ERC721 tokens are unique in that the tokens are non-fungible.

ERC: Non-fungible Token Standard · Issue #721 · ethereum/EIPs

Fungible — being something (such as money or a commodity) of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in paying a debt or settling an account. Source: Merriam-Webster

Fungibility is, essentially, a characteristic of an asset, or token in this case, that determines whether items or quantities of the same or similar type can be completely interchangeable during exchange or utility. For example, the US Five Dollar bill below can be used to purchase a soda from a convenience store.

It has value and can be used to purchase items with the same or less value. However, when one goes to purchase a soda with the following baseball card, the store owner won’t accept it.

Why wouldn’t the above Carlos Santana card be accepted by the store owner when it’s worth $5, same as the above bill? This is because the baseball card and the dollar bill have differing characteristics that define their value to certain people. A 7 year old child could be willing to pay $7 for the baseball card, because they like the colors on the card. But, the store owner doesn’t even value the card at $5 simply because it wasn’t issued by the Federal Reserve like the dollar is. The unique attributes that the baseball card and dollar bill have are what take away their fungibility, as they are valued differently depending on the exchange and cannot always be used interchangeably.

In terms of collectible items, two items in a collection are not fungible if they have different characteristics. For physical coins, a gold coin is not fungible with a copper coin, because their differing characteristics give them different values to collectors.

ERC721 tokens can be used in any exchange, but their value is a result of the uniqueness and rareness associated with each token. The standard defines the functions name , symbol , totalSupply , balanceOf , ownerOf , approve , takeOwnership , transfer , tokenOfOwnerByIndex , and tokenMetadata . It also defines two events: Transfer and Approval .

Note: This is a concise declaration of an example ERC721 contract.

An overview of each field within the contract is as follows.

KEEP IN MIND: The following code is solely for educational purposes and is not tested. Please do not implement it in production applications!

ERC20-like Functions

ERC721 defines a few functions that give it some compliance with the ERC20 token standard. It does this to make it easier for existing wallets to display simple information about the token. These functions let the smart contract that fits this standard act like a common cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Ethereum by defining functions that let users perform actions such as sending tokens to others and checking balances of accounts.

name

This function is used to tell outside contracts and applications the name of this token. An example implementation of the function can be as follows.

contract MyNFT {
  function name() constant returns (string name){
    return "My Non-Fungible Token";
  }

}

symbol

This function also helps in providing compatibility with the ERC20 token standard. It provides outside programs with the token’s shorthand name, or symbol.

contract MyNFT {
  function symbol() constant returns (string symbol){
    return "MNFT";

  }

}

totalSupply

This function returns the total number of coins available on the blockchain. The supply does not have to be constant.

contract MyNFT {
  // This can be an arbitrary number

  uint256 private totalSupply = 1000000000;

  function totalSupply() constant returns (uint256 supply){
    return totalSupply;

  }

}

balanceOf

This function is used to find the number of tokens that a given address owns.

contract MyNFT {
  mapping(address => uint) private balances;

  function balanceOf(address _owner) constant returns (uint balance)
  {
    return balances[_owner];

  }

}

Ownership Functions

These functions define how the contract will handle token ownership and how ownership can be transferred. The most notable of these functions aretakeOwnership and transfer , which act like withdraw and send functions, respectively, and are essential for letting users transfer tokens between each other.

ownerOf

This function returns the address of the owner of a token. Because each ERC721 token is non-fungible and, therefore, unique, it’s referenced on the blockchain via a unique ID. We can determine the owner of a token using its ID.

contract MyNFT {
  mapping(uint256 => address) private tokenOwners;
  mapping(uint256 => bool) private tokenExists;

  function ownerOf(uint256 _tokenId)
  constant returns (address owner) {
    require(tokenExists[_tokenId]);

    return tokenOwners[_tokenId];

  }

}

approve

This function approves, or grants, another entity permission to transfer a token on the owner’s behalf. For example, if Alice owns 1 MyNFT she can call the approve function for her friend Bob. After a successful call, Bob could take ownership of or perform operations on the token at a later time on Alice’s behalf. More information on transferring ownership can be seen in the takeOwnership and transfer functions.

contract MyNFT {
  mapping(address => mapping (address => uint256)) allowed;

  function approve(address _to, uint256 _tokenId){
    require(msg.sender == ownerOf(_tokenId));
    require(msg.sender != _to);

    allowed[msg.sender][_to] = _tokenId;
    Approval(msg.sender, _to, _tokenId);

  }

}

takeOwnership

This function acts like a withdraw function, since an outside party can call it in order to take tokens out of another user’s account. Therefore, takeOwnership can be used to when a user has been approved to own a certain amount of tokens and wishes to withdraw said tokens from another user’s balance.

contract MyNFT {
  function takeOwnership(uint256 _tokenId){
    require(tokenExists[_tokenId]);

    address oldOwner = ownerOf(_tokenId);
    address newOwner = msg.sender;

    require(newOwner != oldOwner);

    require(allowed[oldOwner][newOwner] == _tokenId);
    balances[oldOwner] -= 1;
    tokenOwners[_tokenId] = newOwner;

    balances[newOwner] += 1;
    Transfer(oldOwner, newOwner, _tokenId);

  }

}

transfer

The next method of transferring tokens is using this function. transfer lets the owner of a token send it to another user, similar to a standalone cryptocurrency. However, a transfer can only be initiated if the receiving account has previously been approved to own the token by the sending account.

contract MyNFT {
  mapping(address => mapping(uint256 => uint256)) private ownerTokens;
  function removeFromTokenList(address owner, uint256 _tokenId) private {
    for(uint256 i = 0;ownerTokens[owner][i] != _tokenId;i++){
      ownerTokens[owner][i] = 0;
    }

  }

  function transfer(address _to, uint256 _tokenId){
    address currentOwner = msg.sender;
    address newOwner = _to;

    require(tokenExists[_tokenId]);

    require(currentOwner == ownerOf(_tokenId));
    require(currentOwner != newOwner);
    require(newOwner != address(0));
    removeFromTokenList(_tokenId);

    balances[oldOwner] -= 1;
    tokenOwners[_tokenId] = newOwner;

    balances[newOwner] += 1;
    Transfer(oldOwner, newOwner, _tokenId);

  }

}

tokenOfOwnerByIndex (Optional — Recommended)

Each non-fungible token owner can own more than one token at one time. Because each token is referenced by its unique ID, however, it can get difficult to keep track of the individual tokens that a user may own. To do this, the contract keeps a record of the IDs of each token that each user owns. Because of this, each individual token owned by a user can be retrieved by its index in the list (array) of tokens owned by the user. tokenOfOwnerByIndex lets us retrieve a token in this method.

contract MyNFT {
  mapping(address => mapping(uint256 => uint256)) private ownerTokens;

  function tokenOfOwnerByIndex(address _owner, uint256 _index) constant returns (uint tokenId){

    return ownerTokens[_owner][_index];

  }

}

Metadata Function

Like we’ve said before, what makes non-fungible items non-fungible is their unique set of attributes. A dollar and a baseball card are not fungible, because they have different characteristics. But, storing data on the blockchain that tell the defining characteristics of each token is extremely expensive and not recommended. To combat this, we can store references, like an IPFS hash or HTTP(S) link, to each token’s attributes on the chain so that a program outside of the chain can execute logic to find more information about the token. These references are data about data, or metadata.

tokenMetadata (Optional — Recommended)

This function lets us discover a token’s metadata, or the link to the its data.

contract MyNFT {
  mapping(uint256 => string) tokenLinks;

  function tokenMetadata(uint256 _tokenId) constant returns (string infoUrl) {
    return tokenLinks[_tokenId];

  }

}

Events

Events are fired whenever a contract calls them, and they’re broadcasted to any listening programs once they’ve been fired. Outside programs listen to blockchain events so that they can execute logic once the event is fired using the information that the event provides. The ERC721 standard defines two events that are as follow.

Transfer

This event is fired whenever a token changes hands. It’s broadcasted when a token’s ownership moves from one user to another. It details which account sent the token, which account received the token, and which token (by ID) was transferred.

contract MyNFT {
  event Transfer(address indexed _from, address indexed _to, uint256 _tokenId);

}

Approval

This event is fired whenever a user approves another user to take ownership of a token (i.e. whenever approve is executed). It details which account currently owns the token, which account is allowed to own the token in the future, and which token (by ID) is approved to have its ownership transferred.

contract MyNFT {
  event Approval(address indexed _owner, address indexed _approved, uint256 _tokenId);

}

The source code of my implementation of the ERC721 standard can be found here.

Similar to ERC20, the newly proposed ERC721 standard has opened up a gateway for new smart contracts to act as non-fungible items. As can be seen in applications like CryptoKitties, Decentraland, CryptoPunks, and many others, non-fungible tokens have proven to be very high demand products. Even WikiLeaks owns several high value CryptoKitties! But, ultimately this standard will further expand the cryptocurrency economy and help advance the field even more.

Thank you so much for reading! Be sure to follow us on Twitter.

*At the time of this writing, ERC721 is not an official standard and is still undergoing revisions.

The Anatomy of ERC721 was originally published in Crypto Currently on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve seen technology news lately, you’ve likely noticed that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in price. In just 2017 alone, Bitcoin has seen a 2035.3% increase in price at the time of this writing. And, because many coins in the cryptocurrency market are highly correlated with Bitcoin, currencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin have seen equally spectacular jumps in price. Ethereum, for example, has seen a 6365.3% increase and Litecoin a 2775.49% increase.

We know that Bitcoin is the king of crypto as of today, but its primary use at the moment is solely that of a currency. This is great for day-to-day payments, but we want more functionality; we want the ability to write software that will run ontop of a large, decentralized network like Bitcoin’s. To do this, we could create Bitcoin smart contracts, but Bitcoin’s smart contract language is limited and not very extensible.

To get our smart contracts running on a vast decentralized network, we’ll create smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is special, because it’s the first blockchain implementation to have a Turing Complete virtual machine built ontop of it. This means that an Ethereum smart contract can (theoretically) be used to accomplish any computational task. In more simpler terms, nearly any program can be run on of Ethereum.

In this post, we’ll walk through making a simple counter smart contract. The contract will be written in a programming language called Solidity, a language similar to JavaScript. Before we get started, you must have Ganache installed, which will be the tool we’ll use to create a private blockchain that runs on our machine only. You’ll also need to download your own copy of MyEtherWallet (the URL-hosted website won’t work in this case). Note: Download etherwallet-v3.xx.x.x.zip.

Once those are installed, we’ll get started by going to https://remix.ethereum.org/ in our browser, where we’ll see the following screen.

This is Remix, an online compiler for Solidity. It’s what we’ll use to write our smart contract code. When you first visit the page, the text editor is preloaded with some code. But, we don’t need what’s given, so we’ll erase all of that text and replace it with the following.

This is the code for our counter. As you can see, it has one variable and three functions. The variable, count , is an integer that’s private, which means that it can’t be accessed by anyone outside of the contract itself. The first function, incrementCounter() , changes, or mutates, the value of count by incrementing its value. The second function, decrementCounter() , mutates the value of count by decrementing its value. And, the third function, getCount() , accesses count and returns its value to whoever or whatever called the function.

When the counter code is pasted into Remix, it should look like the following and automatically compile.

We’ll leave that tab open so that we can return to it later. Now, open Ganache and you’ll see something like this.

Near the top of the screen, you can see text that says “RPC SERVER”. We’ll need it soon.

Now, unzip your MyEtherWallet download and open the folder. Then, open the index.html file in your browser to see the following screen.

In the top right corner, you can see a dropdown that tells MyEtherWallet what Ethereum network to connect to. By default, it connects to the Ethereum (ETH) main network (mainnet). We want to change this by clicking the dropdown.

Click “Add Custom Node”.

Now you can input the RPC Server information that Ganache gave us earlier. Note: You can name your node whatever you’d like.

MyEtherWallet is now connected to your self-hosted blockchain through Ganache. Let’s use MyEtherWallet to upload our Counter smart contract to our blockchain. To do this, we’ll click “Contracts” in MyEtherWallet’s top navigation bar and select “Deploy Contract”.

As you can see, MyEtherWallet asks us for the contract’s byte code. To locate this, we’ll go back to our Remix IDE and click the “Details” button.

You should now see a dialog with a lot of information about our Counter contract.

To copy the byte code, we’ll click the clipboard icon next to “BYTECODE”.

Then, we’ll go back to MyEtherWallet and paste the byte code into the dialog.

Now we can scroll down and import an account to upload the contract with. Luckily, Ganache gave us 5 addresses that we can use to interact with our private blockchain. To use one of them to upload this contract, we can go back to Ganache and click the key icon for any of the addresses.

It’ll show us the private key associated with this account.

We can copy this private key and paste it into MyEtherWallet.

Now if we click “Unlock”, MyEtherWallet will ask us if we want to sign this transaction and deploy our contract. We do.

If the transaction occurred successfully, then Ganache will increment its “Current Block” value and the transaction count of the account that we used to deploy the contract also increment.

Our contract is now uploaded to our blockchain! To interact with it by incrementing and decrementing the counter, we can go back to MyEtherWallet and select “Interact With Contract”.

MyEtherWallet now asks for the address at which our newly deployed contract resides and the Application Binary Interface (ABI) of our contract. To find the contract address, we can go back to Ganache and view our transactions log.

This page shows us the transaction that we’d created earlier when we deployed our contract. As you can see, Ganache tells us the address we’d used to deploy the contract, the address of the contract on our blockchain, and more information about the transaction. Let’s click the transaction, copy the created contract address, and paste it into MyEtherWallet.

All that’s left that we need is the ABI. This is what tells MyEtherWallet how to interact with our contract. To get it, we’ll go back to Remix and click the clipboard icon next to “INTERFACE - ABI” to copy it.

Now we can go back to MyEtherWallet, paste the ABI into its text box, and click the “Access” button.

Awesome! Now we can interact with our contract by clicking the “Select a function” dropdown.

In our code, we set count ‘s initial value to 0. To confirm that the contract is working properly, let’s call the getCount() function.

It worked! Our contract returned 0 when getting the value of count before changing it. But, we also made two other functions, incrementCounter() and decrementCounter() . Let’s call incrementCounter() to test it. We’ll do this by selecting the function dropdown again, selecting incrementCounter , and creating a new transaction.

This just incremented the value of count . Now we can call getCount() again to confirm whether the value actually changed.

As you can see, count is now equal to 1! So, our incrementCount() function works. You are free to test decrementCount() , yourself, and explore even more!

Throughout this post, we launched a blockchain on our own machine, deployed a smart contract to it, and interacted with the contract. This is very similar to the workflow of professional Ethereum smart contract developers, albeit a little different. This process works extremely well during early development of smart contracts, but what happens if you want others to interact with your smart contract without using real money by deploying it to mainnet? In that case, you can upload your contract to the Ethereum test network, or testnet, so that the contract is copied onto every machine in Ethereum’s global network but users can still use fake money to interact with it. In a later post, I’ll cover how to deploy smart contracts to testnet using a similar process to the one mentioned in this post.

Thank you very much for reading this article! Please feel free to follow Crypto Currently on Medium and Twitter, and follow me on Medium, Twitter, and Github to stay tuned for more content. Also, if you have any questions, don’t be afraid to reply below this post, DM me on Twitter, or shoot me an email.

Build Your First Smart Contract was originally published in Crypto Currently on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello readers! It’s been quite some time since I last posted. I’m currently in university, so I’m still getting acclimated to the process here. In this post, I’ll simply give some brief announcments and do a quick review of what’s happened in the world of cryptocurrencies since my last post.

As for the state of Crypto, Currently it’s been going through alot since the last post. After coming across forks that caused the coin to split into Bitcoin Cash (BCH / BCC) and Bitcoin Gold (BCG), legacy Bitcoin, always known to Crypto Currently as BTC, has hit a new all-time high of $6600 USD. The coin is now anticipating another hard fork (SegWit 2X) that’s expected to take place in the middle of November.

Ethereum has not recently seen exceptionally large fluctuations in price. The coin has, however, seen its own share of hard forks. The Ethereum mainnet has commenced hard forks to Metropolis and Byzantium in recent weeks, which, as expected, simply upgraded the network and did not result in differing coins, contrary to the belief of many.

Litecoin has seen great technological upgrades, as the network officially activated Lightning. It’s price, like Ether, has remained relatively stable, though.

As for what’s going on in Crypto Currently, there a few quick things:

1. Join the Crypto Currently Slack channel for questions or common discussion!
2. I’ll likely be resuming the series on building the tiniest blockchain (SnakeCoin) in mid-to-late December with a few posts in between.
3. Follow us on Twitter!
4. If you like what you’re seeing at Crypto Currently, don’t be afraid to donate!

BTC: 1KQ1ThvTYcMgqUSg4crbNVnMBkNpTaJV2z

ETH: 0x915121963753C2bc63f480198aCa9613A7f42D46

LTC: La2AK8dw4yeN6txjmxDTBX1sqy3AKLdQtE

As always, thank you for reading!

What’s Going On in Crypto Currently? was originally published in Crypto Currently on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stars Group aims to utilize STARS token to disrupt the sports industry. The fluidity of a single currency, full transparency of the ledger and the decentralized nature of a token based on the Ethereum blockchain provides the company’s global stakeholders with the opportunity to participate in the exponential growth of the sports industry.

Stars Group envisions a day in which €198 million transfer fees, €1.8 billion broadcasting rights, $100 million sponsorship €198 million transfer fees, €1.8 billion broadcasting rights, £4 billion club valuations will all be transaction through digital currencies.

London — 2 October 2017 — Stars Group (“Stars” or the “Company”), an ownership conglomerate of professional football (soccer) clubs, announces today the launch of an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The number of shares to be offered is 500,000,000 and the price range per share has not yet been determined. The Company will be listed under the ticker symbol “STARS” and has not yet determined which exchanges the token will be available.

The offering will be made only by means of a white paper. When available, copies of the preliminary white paper relating to the offering of these tokens may be obtained through the starsgroup.io website.

You can follow them for more updates and information on their social media.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/StarsGroupIO

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Starsgroup.io/

Telegram: https://t.me/stars_groupio

Note: This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy.

For media enquiries, please contact:

pr@starsgroup.io

In the UK

Daniel Taylor

+1 914 374–1006 (London)

In the US

Brandon Muto (New York)

+1 650 483–1644

Morgan Zoroya (Philadelphia)
+1 248 933 9038

About Stars Group

Stars is an ownership conglomerate of professional football clubs operating primarily within Western and Eastern Europe. Western and Eastern Europe includes the key markets of England, Portugal, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Slovakia and Turkey, which collectively account for over 60% of the €25 Billion European football industry. Stars, a subsidiary of the player and match agency Only4Stars, operates solely within the professional football industry. Stars is supported by 15 employees across six countries: US, UK, Greece, Netherlands, Portugal and Brazil.

* Stars Group is not affiliated with Crypto Currently.

Stars Group Issues Statement for Proposed Initial Coin Offering was originally published in Crypto Currently on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Startups are fast-paced companies that need to grow quickly. To do this, they need money from accredited investors in order to fund their ambitions. These investors could take the shape of angel investors or venture capitalists who are willing to bestow young founders and companies with millions of dollars in exchange for equity in their companies and, eventually, a good return on investment.

But startups are private companies, so there are strict rules regarding who can invest in them. Joe from down the street can’t invest in today’s unicorn startup, because he’s not an accredited investor.

What’s that? In 1933, The United States Securities and Exchange Commission, abbreviated SEC, established in a Securities Act that companies can only issue private shares to individuals with a net worth of at least $1 million and / or an annual income of at least $200,000 for two of the most recent consecutive years.* Individuals who meet said criteria are known as accredited investors.

Being classified as an accredited investor is relatively exclusive, however, provided that millionaires constituted 9% of all American households in 2016.** This makes it exceptionally hard for founders to find groups and individuals who are legally eligible to fund their company.

The supply of accredited investors is not only low compared to the amount of people in the U.S., let alone the world, but also geographically concentrated. These investors are often clustered in certain areas around the world that are inaccessible to various companies that need funding. For example, those who are interested in technology are likely knowledgeable of Silicon Valley, the proclaimed capitol of modern technological innovation. The fact that the San Fransisco Bay Area is home to many investors is one of the reasons that so many startups flock to the area, but it’s also a reason that startups in the area have lower probabilities of being funded due to nearby competition. In addition, startups that lack sufficient capital to migrate to the area are also unable to secure enough funding for their products and ideas, which leaves many founders at a loss if they can’t be in the right place.

As you can see, it‘s hard for startups to raise needed capital and minimize geographical competitiveness while abiding by the law. Now, however, there’s a different approach to this important factor of startup growth. With the increasing presence of blockchain technologies like Ethereum, young companies are now able to raise money in the form of Initial Coin Offerings.

Initial Coin Offering

An unregulated means by which funds are raised for a new cryptocurrency venture… In an ICO campaign, a percentage of the cryptocurrency is sold to early backers of the project in exchange for legal tender or other cryptocurrencies, but usually for Bitcoin [or Ethereum].

During ICOs, companies and organizations are able to raise millions of dollars in unprecedented short amounts of time while giving out digital tokens to those who provide money. Startups choose to raise money using this novel method, because it allows them to accumulate large amounts of capital without the hinderance of any government regulation or shareholder aggression.

Retaining Control

A startup that raises money using an ICO is able to glean the same amount of capital while maintaining control of how its shares are managed.

Conventional capital raising methods require businesses to accept money in exchange for shares of the company, which proves to be detrimental at times. After various rounds of funding, founders and early employees may find themselves powerless at the hands of investors who, over time, have accumulated enough shares of the company to make decisions regarding the future of the organization. These decisions may sometimes misalign with those of the original members and cause turmoil within the organization, resulting in resignations or aggressive share dilutions.

ICOs work to resolve this problem by allowing young companies to raise capital without giving away shares to others. This lets the original members of the organization continue making decisions that support the originally conceived idea of the company without the friction that could be applied by outside shareholders.

Escaping Regulation

In the same way that the early Internet provided individuals and organizations with newfound freedoms because of its decentralization and lack of government regulation, the blockchain technologies on which Initial Coin Offerings are built allow companies to raise money without regulation from the government.

This means that companies can collect an arbitrary amount of money from anyone on the Internet, which opens the door of investment to anyone with a cryptocurrency wallet and an Internet connection. Also, the psuedo-anonymity that technologies like Ethereum provide make it very difficult for state actors to track funders, and the decentralized nature of blockchain prevents these actors from controlling or inhibiting activity.

With companies free from government regulation and investors able to contribute funds without needing to meet exclusive requirements, ICOs are bringing more freedom to the market by serving as a method of circumventing government regulation and giving common people the opportunity to invest in private companies.

Globalizing Investment

Startups no longer have to migrate to a technology hub in order to secure funding. Through ICOs, companies can now accumulate money from anybody regardless of their location: the internet globalizes funding.

With that being said, one may claim that crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have already brought this concept into fruition, but the current approaches have rather important flaws. Centralized crowdfunding sites are subject to the jurisdiction of the countries in which they reside, so they are at the fault of government regulation. And, crowdfunding websites also possess identifying information about funders, so users must blindly trust that the site will respond well in the case of a security breach.

ICOs have the same features of crowdfunding as these websites, but they provide necessary solutions to the previously stated flaws. As said before, ICOs are not subject to the regulation of any government***. And, blockchain technology permits the sending and receiving of money without releasing identifying information (often no more than a wallet address). This means that someone in Bangladesh can invest in a startup in Atlanta without intervention from the Bengali and American governments while maintaining his or her anonymity via the blockchain.

Through these offerings, companies no longer have to limit their targeted investors to angels and venture capitalists in a large city. Now, money can be raised on the Internet freely and securely from anyone around the world.

Ultimately, startups favor Initial Coin Offerings over conventional means of raising capital for the freedom of operation and increased supply of potential investors. With companies able to make their own decisions about how to raise money and who can contribute funds, ICOs prove to be feasible methods of raising money.

*More information about classifying as an accredited investor can be found here.

**Source: www.cleveland.com

***The SEC has recently attempted to regulate token sales.

Why Startups are Raising Money with Tokens was originally published in Crypto Currently on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.