In Rideshare Disruption, Here Is How Cryptocurrency Payments Can Boost Local Economies And Make The Greater Good Possible

Rideshare is becoming the norm in many parts of the globe. It is a chance to promote the greater good in local communities. Here is how this can happen with crypto payments

When blockchain appeared nascent, not many people gave it a chance to make a difference. However, keen tech watchers knew that like the Internet, it was sure to stand the test of time. Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a major face of what blockchain tech can do.

Utilizing the idea of crypto payments for rideshare is basic. One great side to crypto adoption is the inevitability of decentralization. To couple the benefits of breaking down centralized systems in transportation and payments for services can be a game-changer.

How Rideshare tech works

Open the application and press the find button to locate a driver. Drivers in the zone will get a notification, and when a driver acknowledges, the rider and the driver can be linked up using the Geo-find feature.

The success of a rideshare innovation is such that municipal governments, businesses and individuals can leverage it for the betterment of the local economy. Employment opportunities for the people in the locality can be boosted and productivity will be on the upswing.

Be that as it may, paying with cash could sometimes be a limitation., as it does not offer the sort of recognizable proof confirmation that other methods offer. Also carrying cash around might be dangerous due to the crime rate in the area. Due to this factor, the rideshare can get integrated into the blockchain innovation.

Why an outright prescription in payment method could be a limiting factor in some areas, the open customizable nature of blockchain tech allows for preferences.

The developments along these lines shows that forerunners in the rideshare business are losing out in market share for far-flung areas by centralizing operations in cities. Therefore, local organizations and companies can explore options so that ride share be accepted globally beyond (beyond city centers.)

The above is a win-win situation for everybody such that the rideshare companies make more money, and it helps in the ease of transportation within those areas, also providing employment opportunities to people of the region.

Business and Social Boost

Utilization of blockchain innovation is for all intents and purposes necessary in the use of rideshare apps, and it is extremely positive to see a few organizations attempting to induce this idea into their various plans of action. Some of these have already started seeing the positive side of this blockchain invention in their ride-sharing application. The ride-sharing economy is increasing rapidly and consolidating intense types of innovation which will prompt future advancement.

With regards to understanding the idea of ridesharing, the essential objective is to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. As opposed to including new vehicles on the streets. Some of these organizations hope to benefit as much as possible from the operating system of ridesharing and are also looking at how they can benefit from blockchain-based rideshare apps.

Rideshare organizations like Uber and Lyft are handling this issue also, although they are in full control of the clients. But for clarity, it is necessary to understand that an open-source innovation is viable. This will help to increase their appeal to the public and give people an edge with the many possibilities of blockchain technology.

Better Credibility

Decentralizing transportation is not an amazingly easy task, but the presentation of blockchain innovation makes a lot of difference. The consideration is beyond the ease of settling cost by individuals, and as credibility is boosted considerably.

An area of benefit is that this development would encourage record keeping in transactions that are being made, thus encouraging transparency among the drivers. Furthermore, the appropriated record innovation would enable the organization to take correct payment percentages from their drivers.

It is sure that these ridesharing companies would make more money wherever they choose to operate. Also, companies can avoid claims of driver exploitation as both parties would have relevant records and receipts to fall back to in the case that this leads to a legal issue.

Better Employment Numbers

Another advantage of this in all regions of the country is that most drivers are scared to work in regions that are dangerous and known for the high crime rate. But once the rideshare app is being incorporated into the blockchain, it would limit the amount of cash that a driver would have in hand, hence it would discourage criminals from trying to rob the car.

Last Words

The basic idea behind crypto payments for rideshare is that non-cash payments is less prone to theft. On the flipside, once ridesharing is decentralized, the regions of high crime rate may experience a reduction in crime rate. This basis for this optimism is that some criminal activities are caused by lack of adequate employment in the area.

With the decentralizing of rideshare, this would give employment opportunities to the people that stay in these regions. This is an especially important advantage of the global acceptation of ridesharing.

Must-Read: Why Supporting a Local Economy is a Boost For Entrepreneurial Efforts

The Rise and Rise of DeFi, And All You Need To Know About The 3 Leading Yield Farming Global Platforms

As the crypto market develops, the rise of yield farming seems to have taken many people by surprise. Here is all you need to know.

The cryptocurrency world is always buzzing with several options on how to make money, and yield farming is yet another that promises massive returns. If you’re a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) systems enthusiast, then you must have encountered “yield farming” a couple of times.

With the booming expectations in the DeFi space right now , let’s have a look at what you need to know about yield farming and some of its high-flying platforms to explore.

Yield Farming – What is it about?

Yield farming (or liquidity harvesting) is a creative and well-managed process that productively put crypto tokens to use in a DeFi market, and also offer investors (better known as liquidity providers) the freedom to switch in-between protocols to maximize ROI.

Simply put, consider yield farming as similar to depositing liquidity in traditional banks to facilitate loans with the aim of getting returns. However, in this case, cryptocurrency is the central entity.

Yield farming became popular after the breakout of Compound (COMP) governance token. It is facilitated by ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, and it offers a means to passively earn some income.

The returns on yield farming are only enticing for liquidity providers if the coin in question experiences rapid and significant appreciation.

So How Exactly Does Yield Farming Work

The basic approach here is lending cryptocurrency to speculative borrowers through decentralized applications (dapps) such as Compound, a leading player in the DeFi space.

The obtainable interest from lending is largely dependent on market demand, but for every time you engage the services of Compound, you’ll receive Comp coins together with interest and other charges. As already established, if the value of Comp token appreciates significantly, returns also skyrocket.

Apart from Compound, other platforms in the liquidity harvesting space are Curve, Uniswap, Synthetix, Ren, etc. At the moment, these entities hold billions of dollars in aggregate liquidity known as total value locked (TLV).

The higher the TLV, the more yield farming can occur. Additionally, yield farmers are allowed to actively participate in the development and governance of these platforms. Contrasted, these farmers are mostly speculators who just want to earn massive APR using the “move it here and there” strategy, as symptomatic of crypto trading.

Yield Farming Associated Risks – Are There Any?

Just like the farmlands of actual farmers can be ruined by pests, rodents and harsh climatic changes, yield farming is not risk-free. The headline risks in yield farming originate from price oracles, smart contracts, exchange rates, governance practices, etc.

The good and the bad is the permissionless and interdependent nature of DeFi protocols. This poses a problem when an entity goes sub-optimal or runs into operational crisis, and the entire ecosystem takes the impact.

You Must Read: 7 Funding Options You Can Explore To Make Your Business Dreams Come True

Top 3 Platforms to Explore

Yield farming strategies are not static, and each platform has its rules and associated risks. Here are the top three most popular platforms to explore:

Compound(Comp)

This platform is an algorithmic financial market that thrives on the exchange of assets between lenders and borrowers. An Ethereum wallet is all that’s required to become a liquidity provider (LP) on Compound and begin to earn amazing rewards. The reward rates are constantly adjusted by algorithmic protocols to reflect the realities of market demand and supply.

Compound is an integral entity of the yield farming network and its worth exploring.

Curve

Curve is a decentralized asset exchange pool on the Ethereum blockchain that’s specifically designed to enhance the trading of stablecoin. Unlike other DeFi platforms, Curve offers low slippage and high-value stablecoin exchange.

The yield farming stage has enjoyed an abundance of stablecoins, thereby making Curve an integral part of its architecture.

Uniswap

Uniswap is another popular – yield farming – platform to explore. It facilitates the trustless and rapid exchange of crypto assets through its decentralized protocol. Here, (liquidity pools)LPs create a marketplace by depositing the equivalent value of a market pair of any token.

The above creates a liquidity pool for traders to leverage on, and in return for LPs, they earn rewards for the trade volume they generate. The trustless and frictionless nature of the Uniswap platform can come in really handy for yield farmers.

What’s in the Future for Yield Farming?

Since the advent of the Compound token, the DeFi space has continued to experience a new wave of thinking. However, negative spikes cannot be ruled out in the future. The good news is, yield farming is still in its infancy, and as it becomes more robust, stakeholders will invent new projects and protocols to enhance liquidity incentives.

Although a risky place to invest your liquidity, yield farming is moving fast and offers huge interest rates, and this could continue.

2020 Has Been The Year of DeFi. Here’s How It Has Given Cryptocurrencies A New Lease of Life

DeFi has redefined how finance works in today’s world. With blockchain enjoying a world of its own, investors around the world have poured in hundreds of billions of USD to reap the rewards here.

How Decentralized Finance Works in Crypto

Decentralized Finance or DeFi for short, is an inclusive and remodelled open finance format that typifies the unification of decentralized technologies (like the blockchain) and traditional banking systems. Simply put, DeFi systems aim to provide substitutes for existing financial services in the aspects of loans, insurance, savings, asset trading and lots more.

DeFi is largely dependent on decentralized applications (Dapps) on the Ethereum blockchain, and to understand its capabilities, the concept of Dapps must be adequately understood.

How Important is DeFi?

The importance of DeFi in the evolution of financial systems as we know them, cannot be overemphasized. This open finance format offers huge prospects for the expansion of global economies, and since 2019, it has been considered one of the most significant and rapid advancements in the cryptosphere by analysts.

Recent reports have also revealed that DeFi tokens are, without cessation, outstripping their compeer, having surged by over 200% since the start of 2020.

DeFi Apps and Crypto

At the moment, DeFi apps have grown in popularity and are already securing businesses, money and time. The emergence of Decentralized Finance platforms has become evident in virtually all parts of the financial sector, inclusive of cryptocurrencies. All DeFi apps are transparent, open-source, interoperable, flexible, and permission-less, as seen in numerous Ethereum-based projects.

In the crypto sector, decentralized exchanges are perceived as the next big thing towards achieving the desired evolution. Decentralized exchanges (DEX) will eliminate the chances of theft and exchange hacks that have plagued centralized systems.

When crypto assets are traded on a decentralized exchange, the transactions are facilitated by smart contracts rather than traditional intermediary systems in centralized exchanges.

Smart contracts protect crypto transactions on the blockchain and ensure that the entirety of the system is not vulnerable to hackers. The DeFi ecosystem isn’t just flourishing, it is quickly changing the business approach of established institutions, while also facilitating the emergence of thousands of crypto projects.

Here are some of the most exciting and interesting projects, in no particular order, and of course, by no means exhaustive.

1inch

Before the emergence of tokens and smart contracts, cryptos were normally traded via exchanges. Due to this, exchanges have enjoyed massive growth and have become major players in the crypto world. The surge in the popularity of Ethereum, created Decentralized Exchanges (DEX), and ever since, more DEX projects have launched on the ETH blockchain.

1inch improves on the existing concept by taking it a little further. To be more explicit, 1inch is a DEX aggregator that scans through all the DEXs on the Ethereum blockchain to obtain the best prices for any asset as desired by the user. 1inch offers a powerful tool, especially for users who are in the market for the best price margins.

One way to get the best of crypto investments is to research and purchase yet to be launched token on major centralized EXs. Being on the ETH network, purchasing 1inch tokens before they debut in large crypto economies, would be an excellent choice.

Curve

Having kickstarted in 2019, Curve is another amazing DeFi application in the cryptosphere. It is an exchange pool built on the ETH blockchain, that utilizes bonding curves, and specifically designed to support and boost the trading of stablecoin (DAI, USDC, USDT and TUSD), while also providing low-risk income fees for liquidity merchants.

With Curve, users do not experience price fluctuations as they normally would on DEXs, when swapping one stablecoin for the another. In the case where assets on other DeFi platforms, especially Compound, are not being traded, Curve lends the assets and return interests to providers of liquidity.

Curve is accessible on mainnet via curve.fi and it supports DAI, USDC, USDT and TUSD. Trading and depositing are facilitated by MetaMask, a web3 wallet.

Compound

At the moment, Compound is a top-rated DeFi project, and it offers users the opportunity to borrow ETH tokens and payback with interests. Liquidity providers could also come into play by providing their token for loan purposes with the aim of receiving loan profit.

This platform offers huge profits, and at a time like this, where savings in traditional banks give little annual interest or lost to inflation, Compound becomes a lucrative option. Compound is intuitive and well-designed and can be accessed via mobile wallets or online channels.

Uniswap

This is an innovative automated market-making DeFi platform with a protocol that enables ultra-swift trade settlement between parties. The Uniswap protocol ensures that, as much as possible, the closing trade value of assets reflect their real market value. You can become a liquidity provider with amazing interest rates provided via a dedicated pooling feature.

Summary

As the major sectors of the global society tend towards decentralization, the demand for DeFi applications will no doubt skyrocket in the nearest future. At the moment, DeFi continues to remarkably disrupt and dictate the pace of today’s business systems, while also dictating new standards.

You Must Read: The 10 Leading Stablecoins of 2019 and What You Should Expect

Despite The Marketplace Twists,Thorns and Thistles, Here Is How USDT Has Weathered The Storm

USDT has weathered the storm these past two years to soar to the third place on the list of the most capitalised crypto. Here is the journey so far for Tether this year.

The meteoric rise of USDT in 2020 H1: Everything you need to know

Predictions for what will happen in the cryptocurrency world exist at any given time, and vary wildly depending on who you ask. Long gone are the days when Bitcoin was expected to reach $100,000 “by the end of the year,” although there’s still the odd enthusiast with overtly positive expectations to come up with such claims now and then.

Still, most movements in the crypto market are predicted by at least a few people, and in some cases these crypto gurus, when predicting such market changes, end up causing them in response.

However, 2020 has seen a market change nobody ever thought, among many other things the world has seen this year. Specifically, the rise of the USD Tether (USDT) and stablecoins in general has been higher than even the most optimistic of predictions.

You Should Read: Investing in 2020: what you need to know

What’s USDT? Why is it important?

The USD Tether is the name of a specific stablecoin, USDT for short, whose value is pegged to that of the US Dollar. 1 USDT thus equals 1USD at all times. It’s one of many coins with prices pegged to those of fiat currency, and thus it is categorized as a stablecoin – because the price always remains stable.

Is it a bad coin? Why people never thought it could rise?

Stablecoins can be divisive among the community, because they imply the creation and use of blockchain as a means to move fiat instead of independent digital currencies – something some crypto enthusiasts consider against the spirit of cryptocurrencies.

However, stablecoins aren’t considered bad in general. Over the years, many crypto analysts have actually predicted they could become an entry point into cryptocurrencies for many people, and the relative safety of their prices has led several crypto exchanges, Binance chiefly among them, to adopt their own stablecoins and offer instant exchanges into them to crypto holders.

Stablecoins are, thus, quick ways for holders to jump out of the market without necessarily going through the bothersome process of turning their crypto into fiat. Since this process doesn’t involve actually exchanging tokens for fiat, but for other tokens, many of the costs – such as a bank transaction and withdrawal fees – are skipped. It’s the preferred way for holders and traders to take a step away from the market if they plan on returning to trading soon.

But why would USDT grow so suddenly? Why would it get popular? Are new people joining the market?

The reason USDT has risen in the past few months has little to do with newcomers and a lot to do with existing crypto traders, current events, and how those shape the economy.

As had been long predicted, a worldwide recession is underway, and if you believe certain predictions, we’re yet to see the worst of it. The current pandemic, along with the gross mishandling of it by many world governments, is leading the worldwide economy towards a second shutdown within a year, one that’s expected to hit much worse than the first one.

And the thing about the first one is it proved many theories about cryptocurrencies’ place in the economy, well… wrong.

Wait, what was wrong?

One of the most commonly held beliefs among cryptocurrency enthusiasts was that crypto would rise if markets went down. Some people went as far as to call it the new gold, usually following the (not quite true) belief that gold always goes up when markets go down.

However, March and April 2020 told a much different story: As COVID-19 had markets close and stocks went down across the board… so did cryptocurrencies. Ether hit its year-long low in mid-March, having shed 50% of its value in a span of just two weeks. Bitcoin did likewise in April, hitting a year-low price of just under $5,000/BTC – less than 50% of the high reached back in September, which had the token valued at almost $12,000.

Being the main tokens in the market, they’re often used as a way to see the current trend in crypto prices. Both tokens severely underperformed when the recession first hit, and while both have also recovered since (Bitcoin partly helped by its May 2020 halving,) with a second, worse recession dip in our doors its only understandable people are trying to jump ahead of the market.

Will this rise last?

USDT isn’t much of an investment, being tied to the value of a clearly inflational currency, and therefore there’s little reason to hold it in a world where cryptocurrencies aren’t yet mainstream. But,the green light is in the fact that mnay hold it as a midpoint between investing and selling off their crypto holdings.

USDT is currently serving as a bellwether for crypto traders who fear the current economy might send token prices to the ebb. Once markets recover, however, many of them will jump back – and USDT might return to its regular trade values or yet, grow stronger.

You Can Improve The Profitability of Your Business With Accurate Records. Here Is How To Do So

You need a steady approach to build a business. Part of the mix will be accurate record keeping. Here is how this pans out.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

How Accurate Business Records Can Improve Your Profitability

Your business may be on the brink of collapse and you don’t even have an idea! In today’s competitive economies, any business that is not improving is surely on a steady decline. To stay afloat, stave off competition, and turn a decent profit, your business needs a strong record-keeping culture.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” Peter Drucker.

This quote by successful business mogul, Peter Drucker, should be framed and hung in every business owner’s office as it is a foundational principle. It is critical to keep detailed records of every aspect of your business for the following reasons:

Gauge the effectiveness of your expenditures

There are a thousand and one tools that are being advertised as “driving business growth”. Digital marketing, fancy productivity tools, content development services among others are the in-thing for businesses these days. Most businesses are pushing for a wider audience on social media.

These things work, however, there’s often a point of diminishing returns where the amount expended becomes way greater than the revenue generated. Without keeping accurate records, this becomes a cash drain for the business, slowly losing money despite the fact that the customer base is being expanded.

Action point: Measure everything! Most digital marketing tools have analytics such as interactions, click conversions, etc. They’re not there by mistake, run the numbers and be sure that every cent spent is justified by commensurate income.

For productivity tools and others, ensure that your staff give feedback on a regular basis, so you can know which subscriptions to pull the plug on as they’re no longer working.

Fraud Prevention

No matter how careful you are in the recruiting process, it’s inevitable that some of your employees or even partners will try to steal from the business.

Fraud is one of the biggest causes of business failure and it stays unnoticeable until things get really bad. It, therefore, becomes very important to keep detailed records and track the flow of cash through the business.

Action point: If you’re finding it difficult to keep financial records because of the size of your business, you may consider finding an external auditor.

Preferably, you should contact certified professionals such as auditors who will go through the existing records and fish out any previous fraud. Going forward, you can employ a chartered accountant to help track the flow of money through your business.

Legal Agreements, Receipts, etc.

Lots of businesses get into trouble and have to close down after losing huge sums in lawsuits. This often occurs due to inability to keep records of contracts and copies of agreements signed with counterparties. How can you ensure you don’t fall a victim to this? Find out in the action point below.

Action point: If you can afford it, employ a lawyer, possibly on a part-time basis. This legal staff will be responsible for keeping records of contract documents and going over contractual terms to ensure that they’re in your favour and you don’t lose out whenever litigation comes up.

Last Words

Not keeping detailed records can be detrimental to your business. However, by following the above action points, you can plug the leaks and build the profit-generating business you have always dreamed of.