Today I'm going to present a look on why I think that the Bitshares platform is getting stronger every day, because it really does. You just need to dive down a little and look on all the things that's happening in the ecosystem to know about it.

New features evolves almost every month at the moment

There are so many new cool features that comes in to the platform, almost every month. It's an exiting, and very busy, time to be involved and the UI team has a busy schedule to keep up.

Hashed Time-Locked Contract

We now have basic HTCL (Hashed Time-Locked Contract) support in the UI, that the core team introduced on the new Bitshares core 3.0 in the end of may.

The ability to securely hold tokenized assets within a hashed time-locked contract on the BitShares blockchain is a desirable feature that could be used by many persons, services, and businesses to mitigate risks between participants during asset transfer. HTLC implement conditional transfers, whereby a designated party (the "recipient") will reveal the preimage of a hash in order to execute the asset transfers from a second party (the "depositor"), else after time lock expiry "depositor" may retrieve their assets. No third-party escrow agent is required, rather the HTLC operation enforces conditions, evaluations and transfers through the BitShares consensus protocol.

The UI supports basic HTCL since version 3.1.190618.

More about HTCL can be read in BSIP-44.

Market Fee Sharing

As a lifetime member (LTM) you get 80% in return on any fee on the chain, but since a few months any asset owner can now share the fees on the market with their traders!

When someone trades on the DEX, an asset can have a specified fee. This fee goes to a pool that the owner can claim the value, but now it enables the users that does the trading to do this as well. If you're a LTM and your referrals trade, you will receive a share of their fees paid to the asset owner!

To get cashback on trades and fees you have to sign up to a Lifetime Membership (LTM), which at this point is a ~3000 BTS, or 135 USD. A pretty nice deal if you ask me.

The UI will support Market fee sharing claims in the next release!

More details about Market fee sharing can be read in BSIP-43.

Direct Debit (Recurring Payments)

The reference wallet created the support of recurring payments and has been supported since the release in May.

It enables an account holder to add authorization for someone else to withdraw a specific amount at a specific interval.

You can read more about recurring payments support on GitHub.

Lending for Margin Trading (in Draft)

If all these new features wasn't enough, the community is very active in finding new things to create. There are BSIPs (BitShares Improvement Proposals and Protocols), which are worked on before the actual implementation, sometimes for months!

One specific feature I'd like to highlight that I find especially nice is BSIP-70, Lending for Margin Trading.

It's a very large, and documented, feature request to the chain. It would allow lending directly on the blockchain for a borrower to trade an asset for possible profits.

If this sounds interesting, I would recommend joining the conversations about it!

A very active UI Team

The bitshares also supports a very active UI team for their reference wallet, which aims to support as much new features, that the bitshares core team creates, as possible. The wallet serves a large community, it is not the only wallet being developed but it is the oldest and most feature rich one.

The goal of the reference wallet is to act as a platform for developers to view what is possible, which may not always have been the most UI creative approach. Something that we hope will change as the team is working on creating a new UI framwork.

Taking a look at the latest release of 3.1.190618, we have 18 issues closed for new features, and a whole array of fixes found by both the team and a very helpful community.

Anyone that wish to support the reference wallet should visit the GitHub repository. During testing phases of new releases, which comes at around every 5-6 weeks, there are some very easy bounties for testing and translations that can earn some nice rewards!

Read more about the Bitshares reference wallet UI on the worker document.

More reading on UI Releases

• The BitShares Blockchain: UI Release 20190618
• BitShares UI release candidate - 190618
• The BitShares Blockchain: UI Release 20190423
• BitShares UI release candidate - 190410

Hack The Dex - Get rewards!

The community also voted to support HackTheDEX, a bounty program for rewarding anyone that find vulnerabilities to the platform. Read the worker document here.

Find flaws, get cash!

Summarized

Let's just say that I think that Bitshares as a platform has a bright future. With this much activity and development it's bound to great things.

Ryan R. Fox, team leader of the Bitshares core development, last month attended the DEVCon in Shanghai, be sure to check that video out, right here, where he goes through some more of the latest cool features and the future. With a large development fund, we are far from done here!

Did you know that your assets ont Bitshares are always secured by the blockchain and never owned by anyone else, they can never be seized or taken away from you!

Here are some more reading for anyone interested

• Bitshares Presentation on DEVCon in Shanghai
• The BitShares Blockchain - Overview
• BitShares: A Fully Decentralized Platform & Community
• BitShares - Severly Underrated?

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