Crypto Academy Beginners' Course - Homework Post for Task 2: Steem & Tron by @cryptogecko

Hello Everybody,

This is @cryptogecko, I hope everyone is doing fine in their life and I wish you a more prosperous life in the future.

Steem Crypto Academy had launched introductory courses in June of 2021 to make it easier for newbies to understand the basic concepts about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and they are launched to make the transition from introductory courses to beginner level, intermediate courses and advanced level courses easier for newbies.

In this first task, we are required to talk about the Steem and Tron based cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

I have chosen to answer the second optional question given in this first task, which is to differentiate between Steem & Tron cryptocurrencies, and understanding the analytics of transactions done on both of these blockchains.

There are two different currencies available to us on the Steem blockchain, namely Steem and Steem Backed Dollar, both of which are liquid and can be bought/sold/transferred to any account or exchange at any time.

Let us understand all of the available currencies on the steem blockchain one by one.

• Steem: This is the fundamental and native currency to the Steem Blockchain. It is the main currency on which the values of the other two depends upon.

  New Steem is created daily to be added to the reward pool which is then distributed among the stakeholders.

  1. Steem Power (SP) holders get 15% of the reward pool,
  2. Witnesses get 10% of the reward pool,
  3. Steem Proposal System is allotted 10% from the reward pool,
  4. Content Creators & Curators get 65% of the reward pool, this part of the reward has its own calculation for further compensation to the authors and curators.

Below you can find the perfect representation by author @sapwood, that shows the currency distribution mechanism of the reward pool on the Steem Blockchain.

• SBD (Steem Backed Dollar): The stability of a currency is crucial for any economy to prosper and become successful. Steem Backed Dollar was created to bring stability to the Steem crypto currency ecosystem, planned to be pegged equally to 1 USD at all times, with some exceptions.

  Market trading and demand of this currency (SBD) have made its price fluctuate many times in the past, and even now the price of the SBD is trading far above 7.5 US Dollars each.

  SBD is a debt instrument for the Steem Blockchain. Considering that the SBD rate always trades at the price of 1 US Dollar each, people can always exchange their Steem tokens to SBD to secure themselves from the uncertainties and price fluctuations in the market for the Steem token.

• SP (Steem Power): Steem Power (SP) is the only currency that is locked for a certain period of time, (Currently the locking period is 4 Weeks). Earlier, the Steem Power Locking period was 13 weeks.

  Unlike Steem & SBD, Steem Power cannot be traded on exchanges. If a person intends to liquidate their locked SP, they have to choose the power down option given beside the SP amount in Steemit Wallet, this process is known as powering down.

  The amount powered down is automatically added to the account’s liquid steem balance in 4 partial payments (current situation), and this happens at the end of each week from the power down request initiation.

  Locking SP has its own benefits, as you’ve read above that SP holders get 15% from the reward pool, and SP holders can also vote posts that add value to communities and also add value to the Steem ecosystem as a whole. Voting posts that add value to the ecosystem can then further be found and voted by other curators. This curation method also adds more steem to the SP amount in the form of curation reward, increasing the SP holder’s share in the ecosystem.

  Steem was built with the concept of communities, and for every community to grow on the Steem platform, they must have a long-term plan/purpose. A community can lock their liquid rewards in their respective accounts and then delegate that SP to their community’s curation account. This delegated steem power to the community's curation account can be used for the curation of posts by the community member account.

Now, let us talk about the Tron Blockchain.

“Tron is an open-source permissionless Blockchain that seeks to offer a cost-effective solution for smart contract platforms, ideally, an underlying Blockchain infrastructure where anyone can create a decentralized application, TRC standard tokens, Smart contracts, etc. It is similar to what Etherum offers, but with better scalability and almost no transaction fee, which is the cornerstone for widespread adoption of Blockchain and smart contract platform.” - Source: @sapwood

• TRX: TRX mainnet token is the popular cryptocurrency used for all the transactions on the Tron Blockchain, and is also known as Tronix.

  Tron blockchain has been integrated with the Steem blockchain and now we get rewards in TRX currency in 1:1 ratio with the Steem Power we get from the author or curation rewards. These coins are issued by the Tron foundation.

  It is the basic unit of value on the Tron blockchain and other systems on the Tron blockchain like Energy, Tron Power, derive value from this currency.

  TRX can be used for voting super representatives just like our steem witnesses on the Steem blockchain. Staking the TRX coins in a user's wallet gives out TRON Power (TP), which is used to vote Super Representatives (SRs).

TRC stands for Tron Requests for Comments, and this is a standard through which a business/individual entity can offer new tokens to their users. This standard provides all the functionalities for the development process. So, let us see the available TRC standards, TRC10 & TRC20.

• TRC10: Issued by the Tron specific system contract, the TRC10 token is a well defined token standard supported by the TRON blockchain natively. TRC10 token standard does not need the TRON Virtual Machine (TVM) for its functionality.

  Every active account can issue tokens at a meagre price of 1024 TRX only. Before issuing the tokens, the issuer must specify some properties related to the token being issued for the community members like the name of the token and its acronym to be used is mainly the most visible property that the issuer must mention before creating the tokens.

  The issuer must also specify the total maximum supply of the token, and its exchange rate to the Tron token TRX. Description, project-specific website, and other such properties of the token must be specified beforehand.

• TRC20: The TRC20 is a technical standard used for smart contracts on the Tron blockchain. This token standard uses the Tron Virtual Machine (TVM) for the implementation of the tokens on the Tron blockchain. This token standard is written with Solidity, the same language used for implementation of the Ethereum based smart contracts.

  Though the token name, token's abbreviation, and token precision after the decimals are the optional requirements, there are some required requirements that one needs to mention while creating a smart contract on the Tron blockchain. They are:

  1. Total Supply: The total number of tokens in the supply.
  2. Balance Of: This returns the total balance available on any account's address.
  3. Transfer: This is used to transfer a specified amount to any other account.
  4. Approve: This is used to authorize any third-party app to transfer tokens from the token owner's account.
  5. Transfer From: This allows the third party to transfer the token amount from the owner's account to a receiver's account.
  6. Allowance: This helps in getting the amount that a third party can transfer.

1. CoinMarketCap's New Homepage Design

Coinmarketcap.com has rolled out its new homepage, and it is looking better. Now, the trending, the top earner's report, and the newly listen coins are shown on the homepage at the top.

Currently, at the time of writing this post, the total marketing cap of all the crypto tokens combined is around $2.09 Trillion Dollars. The total value of transactions done in the past 24 hours stands at $94.86 Billion Dollars. BTC (Bitcoin) is currently dominating the market with a total market share of about 43.8%, and ETH (Ethereum) currently holds an 18.1% share in the market dominance.

2. Rank, CoinMarketCap, and Marketing Supply of Steem

Steem has had a beautiful journey in the last five years of its journey. Most users who joined early know that Steem at one point came in the top 30 ranked cryptocurrencies. Now, at the time of writing this post, the rank of Steem is 184, which is not good but I know that we will do better and one day in the future, we will have a better ranking.

Steem Rank: 184
Steem Market Cap: $224 Million Dollars
Steem Circulating Supply: 387.4 Million Steem

3. Rank, CoinMarketCap, and Marketing Supply of Tron

Tron was founded by Justin Sun and it has reached great heights under his leadership. Tron is currently ranked at 26th position and has the potential to reach higher rank positions in the future.

Tron Rank: 26 (Where Steem once was)
Tron Market Cap: $6.24 Billion Dollars
Tron Circulating Supply: 71.66 Billion Tron

Exchanges are the backbone of the cryptocurrency economy, and most of the assets traded or transacted are done through these exchanges. Nowadays, Decentralized exchanges are on the rise and most of them have had a successful past year.

My favourite exchanges where both Steem and Tron are traded are:

1. Binance - Binance is the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange that has both Steem and Tron listed on its platform. I have traded Steem and Tron many times on this exchange and this is my go-to place for all crypto-related transactions.

   Binance is a major cryptocurrency exchange player, it has several ways of earning through crypto investments. You can Join Binance using this link.

2. Bittrex - Bittrex is another exchange where both the Steem and Tron cryptocurrencies are listed and can be exchanged instantly, but a few weeks ago when I checked the platform, I saw that the volume of the transactions on Bittrex was very low and a limit order took around 1 hour to complete.

3. WazirX - WazirX is an Indian cryptocurrency exchange recently bought by Binance. Even though they have listed Steem in the Rapid Listing Initiative, where you can not withdraw or deposit the cryptocurrency, the Tron crypto coins can be deposited and withdrawn at any time with low fees.

   WazirX is the leading cryptocurrency exchange in India and is growing each day adding/listing new cryptocurrencies everyday. You can join WazirX from this link.

4. CoinDCX - I have never used this exchange but I have heard about it from my friends. I have also seen some of the adverts created to promote the exchange on local television. I have also read many tweets related to CoinDCX. Many YouTubers are heavily sponsored by the exchanges and CoinDCX does the same. After reading the post of this assignment by @sapwood, I came to know that Steem and Tron both can be traded on CoinDCX. I will open this exchange to try trading on it.

5. Upbit - I have used Upbit only once when I was looking for the opportunities of price differences on all the exchanges and when I noticed that there was a huge difference in the price of a crypto coin and I wanted to profit from the coin buying and selling at Upbit, but opposite to my expectation, the transaction happened instantly for buying the coins, but they would not pass the withdraw request made to transfer my coin to other exchanges. So I would recommend everybody that you should check twice before making any decision on trading cryptocurrencies on such exchanges. Upbit deliberately took more than a week to give me back my coins.

Transactions on both Steem and Tron are fast and also scalable to new limits. When talking about Steem, there is no transaction fees applied to transfers done on the Steem blockchain from one account to another account on the blockchain. Since, all echanges have their Steem accounts on the Steem blockchain, the transfers done to any of these exchange accounts will also be transaction fee free.

While transfers made to other Steem accounts does not need a memo, but when transaferring to exchange accounts, they will ask for a particular memo assigned to your account for tracking purposes.

So, there is no transfer charge on any transaction done through Steem. While, there is no charge on the transactions made on the Steem blockchain, there is another way an account can make only a limited number of transactions if their account does not have enough Steem Power (SP), it is called Resource Credits (RCs). This number represents the total number of credits an account can use to make any transaction on the Steem blockchain.

Tron transactions are of two types, if you are transacting TRC10 tokens, the blockchain only takes away some of your bandwidth which is given by default and is increased in 24 hours to its fullest. So any TRC10 transaction will noly deplete your bandwidth.

But when transacting TRC20 tokens, you will have to pay bandwidth and energy. Energy can only be obtained by locking away your TRX token in your wallet. If the energy bar reaches to zero, then you have to pay TRX for the equivalent energy consumption.

While transferring any amount from our wallet to any exchange account we are asked to use a particular memo string assigned to us. We have to use that same memo string to send any amount from our accounts to our exchange account. That way exhcanges can track all the transactions made by an account on that exchange.

But when we transfer any amount from our exchange account to our Steem account, we do not need any memo to put in our memo field. It is optional while sending amount from exchange to our Steem account. We can put a memo for our own personal use. Maybe a person can use memo to remember why they transferred the amount.

So, I gues this wraps up all the question asked in the assignment.

Thank you so much for reading this post.

CC:

1. @awesononso
2. @lenonmc21
3. @reminiscence01
4. @wahyunahrul
5. @sapwood