Crypto Uncovered

  As time goes on it's becoming clear that many of the planned Ethereum killers haven't yet been successful at killing ETH.  Some projects still believe in the imminent ETH demise, others have become a second layer solution and other's still believe ETH 2.0 will fix a number of the scaling problems.  If you are not familiar with ETH 2.0 I wrote a brief TL;DR that you can check out here.   Being your own chain can be, and is for those that do it successfully, very powerful.  Don't get me wrong, this is not meant as a slight to those projects that are making it, they are important projects and having their own chain makes sense for their use case.  I want to see a diverse cryptoverse with options, I don't support widespread consolidation.  But it is really hard to establish your own ecosystem, woo developers, onboard users and dapps and everything needed to make it work.  Then you need to convince exchanges to build a wallet and integration for your chain as

In a Reddit post made earlier today on another subject one of the mods for the BAT Project subreddit replied to a posters comment regarding the timeline for options other than Uphold as the only custodian coming this year.  The mod would not commit to a timeline, and rightly so I would add, but he did suggest that it would come this year.   These options have been talked about a lot in the past, but I have never seen anything that suggested a timeline.  I fully admit, I probably have missed some clues over the course of many different subs and social media outlets.  That said, this feels noteworthy to me.  Having had the experience of jumping through a lot of hoops with Uphold myself this is something that I consider to be exciting and I think a lot of other BAT and Brave fans would agree.   If anyone has any other clues to timeline please feel free to leave them in the comments section. 

So I was poking around the Ether-1 discord the other day and started talking to some of the community members there about their nodes.  They have both mining and masternodes to support their project, you can read a little more about that in a previous post I made about the project here .  I found their options for operating nodes pretty interesting.   Now, you can go about things the normal way.  Buy the necessary $ETHO as collateral and set up your VPS or whatever hosting you want to use, get the necessary items installed, and then setup and maintain your node.  But, what if you want to set up a node but just don't know how to do all the technical stuff?  Or what if you know how to do all the technical stuff but can't purchase all the needed collateral up front?  You are just stuck, right?  Actually no, you have another option.  Ether-1 has a pretty slick options they have set up through their staking site.  This isn't your normal staking pool where you send off your co

There has been a lot of confusion about what ETH 2.0 is, and what it's not, and how it's all going to happen.  There are a lot of detailed explanations out there, extensive FAQs and good analysis of the technology.  I found one done by Consensus that is formatted as an FAQ, if you want to dive deeper into the details it can be found here .  This post that I am writing is targeted at those that just want a high level understanding without too much technical jargon just to know what is going on. ETH 2.0 (ETH2 for the remainder of this article) isn't just a change, it's instead a series of events put together over several years to move to an entirely new chain or set of chains to be more accurate.  Both the current form of Ethereum (ETH1) and ETH2 will exist together for a period of time.  ETH1 is the current proof of work chain where rewards are given to miners and ETH2 will be a staking chain where rewards are given to those locking up their ETH.  There are 3 total phase

The BPSAA is the Blockchain Privacy, Security & Adoption Alliance.  You may not have heard of the BPSAA yet, but that is in part because they are a fairly new group just forming this year.  The original idea came from a conversation between members of Pirate Chain and Turtle Network .  The Alliance finally came to fruition with these two projects as well as Sentinel and Ether-1 .  Their official launch was February 12, 2020. The mission as stated on their website is "The Blockchain Privacy, Security & Adoption Alliance (BPSAA) sets the standard for collaboration and the products and services produced. We create solutions that allow us to accomplish our personal project goals, as well as create interoperability between our ecosystem’s products and services."  They go on to state their core values as: Privacy, Security, Adoption, and Collaboration.  This nicely aligns with their name and is a succinct description of values for which they stand. The value of a working