The Lay of the Cryptoland - Part I: Coins, Wallets, and Exchanges

A bit of background

2021 has been an eventful year for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin’s price breached $60,000 in April from around $7,000 where it was in April 2020. Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States listed on NASDAQ around the same time and for some time had a market cap higher than $100 Billion. A few months later, El Salvador, a country in Central America with a population of 6.8 million people, that had been using US Dollars as its official currency, passed legislation making Bitcoin a legal tender.

I bought my first Bitcoin few years back, more out of curiosity than anything else. Since then, I had followed cryptocurrencies passively from the sidelines. But as this multitude of events unfolded in 2021, I couldn’t resist taking a deeper look.

While there is a lot of noise about the prices of cryptocurrencies in media and Twitterverse, the one statistic that stood out for me was the number of crypto users which had surpassed 100 Million. I was surprised. And what was more surprising is that it was growing almost 100% Year on Year. You could see the parallels between the growth of the internet and smartphones with that of cryptocurrency.

How it began

Back in 2008, the world was grappling with the Subprime Crisis. Bear Stearns, one of the largest securities firms was sold to JP Morgan in March 2008. A few months later in September, within a span of a week, the Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac happened, Merril Lynch got sold to Bank of America, and Lehman Brothers collapsed. The IMF estimated that US and European banks lost over $1 Trillion on bad assets and loans. Regular people lost their retirement savings and millions were unemployed. It was amidst the global financial crisis, Bitcoin was born.

On October 31, 2008, a pseudonymous person with the name Satoshi Nakamoto shared a link to a paper on a cryptography mailing list. The paper was titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The first Bitcoin block was mined on January 3, 2009. Embedded in the first block was a message

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

A world of coins

Soon after Bitcoin new coins started emerging. Ethereum, which is presently the second-largest cryptocurrency in terms of market cap, launched in 2015. Where Bitcoin was built primarily as a decentralized currency, Etherium aimed to be a platform for decentralized applications. This ushered an era of innovation that was hard to imagine in the early days of Bitcoin.

There are 5821 coins listed on Coinmarketcap as of now. To call all of them, cryptocurrencies will not be accurate as there are coins with specific utilities other than being a currency. The lines can be a bit blurry though at times.

Currencies

Having launched in 2009, Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Hal Finney, a Computer Scientist, was the first receiver of a bitcoin transaction. In December 2020 the number of daily transactions reached 330,000.

Bitcoin by its design can process about 4-5 transactions per second. The transaction throughput is decided by the block size and the block creation time. One of the earliest altcoins, Litecoin was a source code fork that had lower block creation time.

The block size had been a point of debate for the Bitcoin developer community which saw multiple forks happening in the blockchain in 2017. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and Bitcoin SV (forked from Bitcoin Cash) were born out of these forks. However, the forks could not displace Bitcoin, which continues to be the most well-known and adopted cryptocurrency. Lightning Network, a Layer 2 payment protocol has been gaining traction rapidly. It is expected to support millions of transactions per second.

Cryptocurrencies are a new asset class and extremely volatile. For instance, Bitcoin which peaked in April 2021 at $63000 is presently (August 2021) at $42000. Price fluctuations of 10% or higher over a day are not rare. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are typically pegged to a fiat currency. People use Stablecoins as a medium to buy cryptocurrencies but also as a bridge to access services and assets on blockchains that they couldn’t through fiat currencies. Tether is the largest stablecoin with over $60 Billion of coins in circulation. It is followed by USDC which has over $20 Billion in circulation. Both USDC and Tether are fiat-backed and claim to be holding reserves in fiat currencies to back the peg.

DAI is another stablecoin created by the Maker Dao Foundation. DAI uses automated smart contracts to give out loans in DAI against over-collateralized crypto assets and maintains its peg against the dollar by controlling the assets, the interest rates, and collateralization ratios.

There are a few other coins that attempt to improve cryptocurrencies on different dimensions. Nano focused on faster transactions at lower cost and has demonstrated 1000-1200 transactions per second on its beta network. Monero focused on enhanced privacy features and complete anonymity in transactions despite having a public ledger.

Smart Contract Platforms

In late 2013, Vitalik Buterin a young Canadian programmer of Russian origin published a whitepaper about a general-purpose blockchain called Ethereum. His vision was to create a platform that enables secure decentralized applications to extend the utility of blockchains beyond money.

Ether is the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin with a market cap of $287 Billion. But the more interesting stat is that owning to its richer ecosystem, over a million transactions happened per day in July 2021 on Ethereum. New currencies, new kinds of decentralized organizations, exchanges, and derivatives markets have been built over Ethereum.

Charles Hoskinson, one of the co-founders of Ethereum started Cardano. It launched in 2017 although the smart contract capability is expected to launch sometime later this year in 2021. Polkadot is another smart contract platform developed by Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum. More than the technical differences, what stands out is how these three projects with shared history operate. Cardano has taken an approach akin to Academic Research where each proposal is peer-reviewed and goes through a lot of rigor before getting implemented. This translates into longer development cycles. Polkadot differs in terms of governance where all of its governance is on-chain. The proposals go through voting systems and the one with majority votes is accepted.

While Polkadot and Cardano are still getting started in terms of becoming a smart contract platform, Binance, one of the largest crypto exchanges launched Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in 2020 and has grown rapidly in adoption. Binance surpassed Ethereum in the number of transactions on February 2021 and is presently doing almost five times the transaction volumes on Ethereum. This was largely driven by interoperability with Ethereum Applications and much lower gas fees. A fundamental way in which BSC differs from Ethereum is that it follows a semi-decentralized model. The top 21 holders of Binance Coins act as validators of the transactions. This is in contrast with Ethereum which has more than 6000 validators.

Governance Tokens

Governance Tokens allow you to participate in the governance of different decentralized applications. You can use your tokens to cast vote on changes being proposed in these protocols. Otherwise, you can delegate your tokens to someone who can represent you in these discussions. For instance, Maker Dao, the foundation behind the stable coin DAI, issued a token on Ethereum (such tokens are called ERC-20 tokens) called MKR that allows you governance rights. There are 1 Million MKR issued. These tokens don’t pay dividends. MKR token acts as an incentive mechanism for ensuring DAI is pegged at a dollar value.

Utility Coins

Utility coins or tokens are primarily used as an incentive mechanism for a specific use case. For instance, filecoin is a distributed and decentralized storage service where the token is used as an incentive for the storage miners to store the data of clients. Enjin Coin acts as a backing for digital gaming assets created on its platform. The process is reversible and the assets can be melted back into the coin. Polygon is a Layer 2 Scaling Solution for Ethereum. It supports faster and cheaper transactions while still maintaining Ethereum as the final settlement layer. MATIC is the native token for Polygon and is used as a medium for payment of services on Polygon Network. If there is a decentralized app on Ethereum you are interested in trying out, you will find it cheaper to give it a go on Polygon than do it directly on Ethereum.

Meme Coins

No conversation on cryptocurrency is complete without mentioning Meme Coins. Meme Coins emerged as a phenomenon in the last few years with Dogecoin being the most prominent one.

Dogecoin started as a joke with the source code forked from Bitcoin. For a while, it didn’t have any active development happening. The distinct thing about Dogecoin was the face of a Shiba Inu dog on its logo. For whatever reason, sometime in early 2021 Elon Musk started tweeting about Dogecoin which rose a frenzy. Its prices grew from a mere 5 cents to almost 68 cents during a Saturday Night Live show hosted by Elon Musk where he gifted a Dogecoin to his mom. While its prices have since crashed, Dogecoin played its role in history in a strange way by growing the awareness of cryptocurrencies.

Acquiring and storing cryptocurrencies

There are multiple ways of acquiring cryptocurrencies. The simplest being buying them on exchanges such as Coinbase or Binance. There are over 300 exchanges listed on coinmarketcap and you should do your due diligence to identify which one works best for you. A few aspects you should look into while selecting an exchange are the reputation of the exchange, the liquidity in the exchange, and the number of assets listed on it.

The other way you can earn cryptocurrencies is by using programs such as Coinbase Earn, 1729, and Coinmarketcap Earn that will pay you in cryptocurrencies for finishing learning assignments on their platforms. If you are really want to get into the weeds, you can build a mining setup to earn. Miners act as validators of the transactions on the blockchain and in exchange for this service they get paid in the cryptocurrency native to the blockchain.

If you are buying cryptocurrency from an exchange, one way to store the currency is on the exchange itself. But in some way, it defeats the purpose of cryptocurrencies which are supposed to be decentralized. When you hold the currency on an exchange, it is the exchange that has the custody of your holdings. Your account can get frozen. Or worse the exchange can get hacked and you can lose your money. The most infamous being that of Mt Gox which at one time was handling 70% of bitcoin trades.

Not your keys, not your coins.

A popular crypto saying.

Today’s exchanges are probably more secure. Still, if you have a sizeable amount of crypto assets built up, you should set yourself a wallet and transfer it there. A wallet essentially stores the public key and the private key. The private key is used to access the fund and transfer them. In Bitcoin, the private key is 256 bits number i.e. a number with 78 digits. The public key is 256 bits too and the wallet address is a hash of the public key. Since the private key is not human readable, most wallets use a set of 12 or 24 words called seed phrase to generate the key. In case your device crashes, you can use the seed phrase to access your funds.

Here is an interesting detail. When you create an address for yourself, the address details remain on your device or software unless you share it. There is no registration event involved. The blockchain only maintains the transactions getting debited and credited between different addresses. Technically, you can create an address completely offline. This does present the error possibility where people send crypto to an incorrect address and unlike email, here all addresses even the ones that were never seen before are valid.

Cryptocurrency Wallets come in different flavors. You have Hardware Wallets that store the public key and private key in a secure device. Hardware Wallets are the most secure of storing your cryptocurrencies. However, they are expensive and might be an overkill unless you are holding a large amount of crypto. Trezor and Ledger are some of the well known hardware wallets.

Then you have Software wallets that are mobile apps, desktop app and even chrome apps. Metamask, Exodus, Trust, and Coinbase some of the well known crypto wallets. While choosing a wallet, a few things that you should be looking at are its reputation, security, and the cryptocurrencies that it supports.

Most cryptocurrency owners still hold their assets on the exchanges. This is reflected in the fact that popular cryptocurrency wallets have anywhere between 10 to 20 Million Installed userbase as of now. However, a vibrant ecosystem of decentralised applications is getting built that provides interesting ways of using your cryptocurrencies. As the adoption of such application increases, wallets will play a critical role as they will be the gateway to access and utilise them.

These are still early days of cryptocurrencies and decentralised applications. It is a highly debated field and opinions range from that cryptocurrencies will change how we live our lives to that it is an anarchic phenomenon. But what started as a niche technology used by geeks is slowly signs of going mainstream. And what no one can dispute is how interesting the technology is. Irrespective of where you stand, you should explore the space and know on your own. There is a high chance, the world will look very different from how it is in next ten years.

References

• The Bitcoin Whitepaper - https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

• BBC Article on El Salvador declaring Bitcoin as legal tender https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57398274#:\~:text=El Salvador has become the, possible votes on Tuesday night.&text=Bitcoin will become legal tender, US dollar%2C in 90 days.

• Crypto.com research on crypto users https://assets.ctfassets.net/hfgyig42jimx/5u8QqK4lqjEgL506mOx4m3/d44d8e204aecfc75a839e2a9d505f5d1/Crypto.com_Data_Report_-_On-chain_Market_Sizing.pdf

• Statista Global Cryptocurrency Users https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202503/global-cryptocurrency-user-base/

• Subprime Crisis Bank Losses https://www.reuters.com/article/banks-writedowns-losses-idCNL554155620091105

• Satoshi’s mail introducing Bitcoin - https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html

• Questions on Tether Dollar Backing https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tether-controversies-seem-never-ending-084512532.html#:\~:text=In 2018%2C Tether failed to,record high of roughly %2420%2C000.

• Crypto School https://a16z.com/crypto-startup-school/?video=12 #tech

• Daily Bitcoin Transactions https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-bitcoin-transactions/

• Daily Ether Transactions https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-bitcoin-transactions/

• A Deep Dive of Filecoin https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-decentralized-storage-a-deep-dive-by-filecoin

• How to mine bitcoin - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBStK_vj6j4