The Evolving Role of Social Media in Ecommerce

As social media and eCommerce become increasingly enmeshed in our lives, the opportunities for them to interact with and bolster each other are innumerable, considering that the average person spends around an hour and 40 minutes browsing social media every day, and the number of internet shoppers in the US will reach 217 million this year.

Back in the old days, a business’s presence would be signified by advertisements in the paper and a physical storefront. Now, in the digital age, business reputations live and die by their social media standing. Right now, social media is used by brands as a way to advertise, increase their online presence, and deliver high-quality customer service. In 2017, we can expect those trends to continue, as some new ones emerge. Let’s take a look at the growing role of social media in eCommerce.

Paid advertisements.

With the almost absurd level of customization you can put on a Facebook ad (age, geography, preferences and more) and the detail with which Facebook can report your results, it’s a no-brainer for brands to keep using Facebook and other social media advertising. It’s also a win for Facebook, which raked in more than $7 billion in advertising in 2016.

The most successful brands in 2017 will be those able to maximize their reach and effectiveness on paid social media advertising. William Harris, an eCommerce growth consultant for elumynt.com, says, “I see eCommerce brands investing a lot more in paid social, and I think that trend will continue into 2017…it’s not enough to simply pay for ads on Google Shopping. You’ve got to find a good audience on Facebook ads, Instagram ads and more and more, on Pinterest and other paid social media accounts. It’s getting easier to set these up and track the return on advertising, which means more brands will start doing it.”

Private messaging.

Over the past few years, analysts have noticed an interesting, unexpected trend. While the use of public social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter is starting to decline, private messaging services are exploding in popularity. WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger are all app juggernauts with colossal engagement numbers running into the billions. Where the people go, the businesses must follow, and brands are edging their way into private messaging through chatbots. Chatbots, AI personalities that can simulate real conversations, can answer questions on products, offer recommendations, and resolve customer complaints.

Consumers are slowly warming to the idea. According to Venturebeat.com, 49.4 percent of customers would rather contact a business through a 24/7 messaging service than through the phone. Brands would be prescient to start looking into catboat services as a supplementary channel to reach customers. Additionally, many private messaging services now offer financial integration. Opening up WeChat, chatting with a brand AI representative, and purchasing a product without closing the app once, is entirely within the realm of possibility in 2017.

In-app purchasing.

The harder it is to buy or access something, the less likely we are to follow through. This explains why eCommerce sites that take a long time to load have higher bounce rates, and online stores with clunky interfaces sell less. One can already buy products through Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. Once Apple Pay experiences widespread adoption, it’s almost scary to think about how easy impulse buys will be — if you see something you like on social media, one swipe will get it delivered to your door. Brands should immediately start evaluating how they can sell their products through social networks, coupling a strong advertising presence with an easy purchasing process.

What's coming.?

This year, social media will not only play a big part in eCommerce but also in all aspects of our social life, just as it has been, arguably, for the last several years. Moreover, several new social network technologies, including powerful advertising tools, chatbots, and in-app purchasing, as well as improved design, will make eCommerce easier, and bigger, than ever.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

The Elements of a Strong
Inbound Marketing Strategy

Are you a huge fan of cold calls? What about the marketing emails – that you never signed up for – invading your inbox? TV commercials in the middle of your favorite show? Unless it’s the Super Bowl, these marketing messages tend to be frowned upon or ignored rather than delightfully consumed.

 Most people that I know record TV programs solely so they can fast forward through the commercials. My TV capabilities are less sophisticated, but I typically use commercials to brush my teeth or clean the kitchen. I’m already on a “do not cold call list” with Verizon, and marketing emails are unsubscribed from more often than read. Non-remarketing display ads (i.e. the banner or sidebar ads we see when scanning websites) are clicked on an average of only 0.2%, according to Double Click. All of these methods fall under the family of “outbound marketing.” Shockingly enough, these disruptive outbound techniques convert at a much lower rate than inbound marketing strategies, where someone chooses to engage with your brand and actively seeks you out.

Inbound strategies are all about being found naturally rather than aggressively pursuing leads through in-your-face tactics. Which person do you think would be more likely to buy a house? A. The person who received a message saying “Buy this house!” or B. The person who searched for and found the perfect house on their own? We both know the clear winner, which is inbound. “Imagine a popup ad (outbound) vs. a funny infographic you chose to look at (inbound),” says Marketo’s Johnny Cheng. “Data clearly shows that people who choose to interact with your brand naturally convert higher.” Take a look at this conversion rate data by acquisition channel – inbound strategies have one of the highest rates, at almost 4%.

Inbound marketing strategy data proving the effectiveness of inbound on conversion rates

Convinced that inbound marketing strategies kick ass for driving targeted leads and sales? Here are the 5 elements of a strong inbound marketing strategy, which you should be using!

SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is a hard-to-control, waste-of-time tactic, right? Wrong: SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s content and structure for search in order to receive organic placements on the search engine results pages or SERPS. Having a quality website and content optimized for SEO ensures that Google’s web-crawling technology is able to identify and index your site’s content to have it appear for free to people searching. SEO is a critical part of your inbound strategy because if you can’t be found, then you’re not going to get business.

When SEO comes to mind I think keywords, code, website structure, link-building, and then my head starts spinning. SEO can actually get very complicated, quickly, so what should you be focusing on to get started? Start by identifying and utilizing the most important keywords to your leads. Of course you want to ensure these keywords have high enough search volume and user intent to attract the most relevant audience.  “There are many aspects of SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply the matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand,” explains Moz. I’m not an SEO guru by any means. Luckily, there’s a plethora of free resources online so I’d recommend hoping over to Moz and our own SEO basics guide to get started.

PPC

Now we’re speaking my language! You might be thinking, wait – PPC is a paid tactic and aren’t paid strategies against the inbound methodology? Wrong! Paid search is technically still part of the inbound marketing family since search ads appear when a user is actively searching for something, therefore PPC ads are not interrupting another activity. Not all aspects of PPC will quality as inbound (like display ads), but ads on the search network are certainly one of the strongest elements of a strong inbound strategy, because search queries show so much intent.

So, how is PPC different then SEO? With paid ads you’re paying for the placements on the SERPs rather than appearing organically. Why pay when you can appear organically? For multiple reasons… With SEO:

• You have far less control over when and how you appear on the search results page
• A tweak in the algorithms can ruin your organic visibility
• Seeing results often takes a long time (and isn’t guaranteed!)

With paid search you’re able to pay for the top placements where people are more likely to see your ads, and bid on specific keywords to attract qualified visitors. You have the control to adjust your budget, pause your ads during irrelevant times, target mobile searchers, easily measure your ROI, and the list goes on. Moral of the story is that you should be doing both SEO and PPC to get the highest volume and quality of leads.

Content Marketing

You wouldn’t have guests over and not serve a cocktail, right? The same goes for leads! Now that you’ve warmly welcomed them in the door through PPC and/or SEO you need to provide them something to drink, aka content. Oftentimes marketers think of content as the sole component to inbound marketing strategy, and while it’s certainly not the only aspect, it is a very critical one. Without fresh and useful content there is no chance of keeping and converting your leads. Your content should come in multiple forms with the goal of helping your audience answer a question or solve a problem.

The key to content marketing is that your content needs to stand out. “Your content must be remarkable enough to break through the clutter. It’s not enough to just produce content,” says Entrepreneur’s Murray Newlands. “Your content must educate, inspire or entertain your audience.”

So, where to start?

• Create a blog:
  You should already know this, but a quality blog is one of the most effective ways to market a business. Blogging will help you attract new visitors, gain returning visitors, and convince warmer leads. A blog is a hub to keep your audience informed and prove that you’re a thought-leader in your industry. Here at WordStream, our blog accounts for more than half our total traffic!
  Create guides, e-books, and other downloadable content:
  This will help your nurture your leads with longer-form content where you can sell how your products or services will help them.
  Gather customer testimonials and create case studies:
  Case studies and customer testimonials will help convince leads that are further down the funnel. Hearing from someone like them will instill trust and up the chances of conversion.
  Create a content calendar:
  To ensure you stay on top of publishing fresh content regularly.

Social Media

So you’ve created phenomenal content, published it on your site, and now you’re lounging on your beach chair enjoying a glass of wine? Well, you’re certainly not going to get profitable results with that attitude. You NEED to be attracting new and returning readers by sharing and promoting your content on social media. Creating the content is only a small piece of the puzzle. Ensuring the content reaches relevant people is where social comes in. This is inbound marketing because only people who want to see your content will follow your brand, and it's a great way to "subsidize" your organic traffic if you don't have great rankings yet.

Nowadays, anyone who’s anyone is on social media, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Vine, Instagram, or Periscope; your audience is likely on multiple of these channels. Determining which platforms are most relevant to your buyer personas in a task in itself, but I can guarantee that several of your leads are spending a significant chunk of their time-consuming content through their personal social channels.  Spend time creating a social media promotion plan to distribute your content to the right people, analyzing your top performing content, and paying to promote and gain even more traffic to the content that’s resonating with your audience.

Landing Pages

Your landing page is where your leads land after clicking on your call-to-action (another important element of your inbound marketing strategy). Whether it be a product page, a form fill-out to download a whitepaper, or a subscription service page, you need to ensure your landing page is top-notch unless you’d like to jeopardize potential conversions from coming in. Some important elements to keep in mind…

• Relevancy:
  You need to make sure that the landing page is relevant to the call-to-action. For example, if your visitor lands on your page from a paid search ad advertising birthday cakes, you wouldn’t send them to a landing page selling Christmas cookies, right?
• Focus:
  What is the goal of your landing page? Is it to “Sign Up for this E-Newsletter!” or “Download this Guide Today”? Make your landing page’s purpose singular. Ensure the CTA is big, prevalent, and above the fold. Also make sure to restrict the navigation to other pages and keep forms short.
• Design:
  This is a major component of keeping visitors engaged. Using videos or images, testimonials, and trust signals are all design elements that can help improve the conversion rates of your landing pages. Run A/B tests to decide on the best designs for your landing pages.

Bonus Inbound Marketing Tip: Remarketing

Once a lead has visited your site, expressed interest in your content, products or offerings, you need a strategy in place to keep them engaged. One of the most effective tactics? Remarketing. Tactic cookies your site visitors and follows them around the web with ads reminding them to come back. Remarketing can be set in a variety of ways. For instance, you can remarket to anyone who visited your site, show a specific ad to visitors who went to a certain page (or a set of pages), or even an ad to someone who has placed items in a shopping cart but hasn’t converted.

My older sister called me the other day blown away when she saw an ad on Facebook of the exact dress she was just looking at on Nordstrom’s website. Yes, she is a stay-at-home mom who’s a bit disconnected from the marketing world, but it just proves that this tactic resonates with shoppers. Remarketing says “Hey there, remember us? Are you still interested?,” which is why the tactic is considered a member of the inbound family since the shopper has already expressed interest. Covering these five elements will provide a solid infrastructure for a killer inbound marketing strategy.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Public meetings suggested on future business development

County Commissioners are asking the Industrial Development Board

to host public meetings to gather citizen input about the county’s industrial/business development future.Meeting Monday, the group postponed a vote on another motion setting a joint meeting on the same issue that would bring together Commission, IDB, the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce, Economic Development Alliance, and others.The search for a way forward comes in the wake of a failed attempt by the IDB to interest Commission in purchasing industrial land in White Pine.

The motion for public meetings came from Commissioner David Seal, who has been calling for a “bottom-up” approach to industrial/business development. His motion, seconded by Commissioner John McGraw, asks the IDB to hold public meetings to gather input before proposing any other projects. Since projects have an impact on local quality of life and could be paid for by taxpayer funds, citizens “deserve to have direct input,” his resolution states.Commissioner David Gaut told the group that Chamber representatives have indicated they can also help facilitate “town hall” style meetings. Chairman Jimmy Carmichael said he will work with the IDB, Chamber, and EDA to help set them up.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Cryptocurrency trading has become a way of life

In Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Cryptocurrency trading has become a way of life, but that is not the case in Nigeria and other African countries. In this interview, the Chief Executive and Principal Consultant, Crypto Plus Certified, Mr. Peter Ayoade Moradeyo tells Ndubuisi Francis that his company is poised to close the knowledge gap with the ultimate goal of enlisting Nigeria on the global cryptocurrency exchange.

What is a good way to concisely explain Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrencies?

The success story of Cryptocurrency dates back to 2009, during the financial breakout, when Bitcoin was formed on blockchain technology. Bitcoin was first introduced in Asian countries and gradually to Europe, US etc. It is needful to clarify however, that the blockchain technology is not the same thing as Bitcoin; the relationship between them is only that Bitcoin is deployed on the blockchain technology. Interestingly, Bitcoin seems to be more popular today than the platform on which it stands. Now, there are two things which distinguish Cryptocurrency from the normal currencies.

The first is that it is finite. It has a fixed number that can be taken off and immediately that happens, its value shoots up and we all know that anything that can finish naturally increases in value as it is being taken up. So, as the world gradually adopts cryptocurrency, the available number reduces and value automatically drives upwards, causing it to grow dynamically in value. That explains why Bitcoin has been able to grow like that since 2009.

The second thing is that cryptocurrency has intrinsic value or what some call store of value. Let me explain it this way: each copy of a coin is an address, a location on the blockchain. When one address belongs to a person, that address cannot belong to another person in any part of the world. This is unlike the fiat counterpart where any money reading on a person’s bank account means that the bank owes the account holder to the tune of the said amount, but not necessarily that money is the account holder’s to cash at any time. This is why sometimes the banks would tell an account holder that they do not have enough cash to complete a transaction. The case of the blockchain is different because the value is intrinsic and better preserved.

What is the function of CryptoPlus Certified?

Since 2009, Bitcoin and several other alt coins have been coming up. Alt coins are referred to as alternative coins to Bitcoin which is the first and most popular of them all. At a point, we realized there was an opportunity where Bitcoin and other coins can relate in value; there is value relativity between them. So, we started by trading Cryptocurrency. I can recall that sometime in 2015, there was an upsurge of certain Ponzis in Nigeria. Nigerians sustained the following of Ponzis until it became almost endemic. Unfortunately, very few Nigerians knew about the very essence of the medium of transfer which Bitcoin was during the transaction of these Ponzis. Bitcoin was only used because it did not need a third party like banks to facilitate a transaction between the Ponzis and their victims. So, the Ponzis took advantage of their patronage, cashing in on the anonymity of transaction which was part of the features of cryptocurrency. What was supposed to have been an advantage became a disadvantage because of the ignorance of Nigerians.

Someone needed to educate Nigerians appropriately as to what cryptocurrency really meant and what disruption it was meant to address. So, we now came up because before now, we had a deep background on its trading. We decided to reappraise the image of Cryptocurrency as it were in Nigeria.

Also, at several conferences we have been all over the world, we realised that Africans are non-existent on several cryptocurrency trading platforms. Just like we have the Nigerian Stock Exchange with several companies trading on its platform, there are also several participating bodies that trade value among us. The sad thing here is that Africans are non-existent on any Cryptocurrency exchange whether in US, Asia or Europe. This is also true when one considers Cryptocurrency graph. The Asians are up there; Europe and America are there too, but Africa is non- existent. Our function at Crypto Plus Certified is basically to close the knowledge gap so that people can take advantage available and then Nigeria can be enlisted on what we call the global Cryptocurrency exchange.

We trace the current state of Cryptocurrency trading to a slowness of adoption. The federal government is yet to adopt a framework for the implementation of blockchain that can give rise to participation. Several countries have done that but for some reasons it has not happened in Nigeria.

You have a dream to raise and establish 1,000 Nigerians on the Poloniex Exchange. What is the implementation plan put in place to achieve this and why the choice of Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt?

We need to make it clear that Nigeria is a country with many opportunities. We also need to state that Bitcoin came into Nigeria with a wrongly perceived image, and on the wrong platform. So, our first goal is to take the responsibility to repair that image, and then reappraise the benefits and enlist Nigeria as a participator in the normal trading of Cryptocurrency.
In order to achieve that, we launched what we called, ‘Dream 1000’. It is all about trading on Poloniex which is the largest Crypto exchange in America and we are currently working with them on releasing a mobile platform strictly for Nigerians and it will work as an arbitrage with our own exchange which will come from Germany. We want to work as an arbitrage so that they will trade on our own platform via the mobile interface. Nigerians can be taught on how to trade this currency easily, and our strategy is very unique because the mobile application is actually enhanced to be able to reduce all the variables of a trading system. Since we launched the ‘Dream 1000’ recently in Lagos, we have had some of our students who were able to distinguish themselves with the level of knowledge we passed to them and they are going to show Nigerians that we are serious about what we are here to do.

How has the response been like?

I grew up in Nigeria before I decided to relate with other countries for business reasons. One thing I know about Nigerians is that they respond to results. So, the first thing we want to identify is, we want to be able to have people who have had results and that is why all the events we have done, we have been showcasing people that distinguished themselves, those that we gave the knowledge and they applied it and got results. We want to be inspired by results and not just belief.

Can Bitcoin be regulated? What about Bitcoin and taxes?

Those conversant with information coming out of crypto plus certified would have noticed that Nigeria is currently on a discourse on how to regulate Cryptocurrency trading based on several frameworks. I have several write-ups regarding this. Cryptocurrency trading as it were is decentralized and this is why the banking system cannot operate it. It is decentralized because of its nature. For instance, Bitcoin as it were, does not have a management interface and that is why the regulation has not been somewhat forthcoming. But it is found to be very secured and has an ability to store values. That has been the reason for all the inquiries on how do we have a framework for a kind of currency that has thus kind of features? Sometimes, it takes time, but individuals are working and several people have stored values on it and exchanged it with another. The US is an example where Poloniex is operating. So looking at it more objectively, the regulatory framework and the operational climate go hand in hand but they can be mutually exclusive.

 Bringing it to a layman’s understanding, what are the advantages of Bitcoin and how does Bitcoin work?

In a layman’s way, I would like to use the similitude of changing one currency to another, for instance. If you have some Naira notes and you want to change to Dollar, knowing the exchange rate that relates one to the other will be very helpful. Now to a layman if I bring my Naira and want to buy a Dollar, I will change the Naira to a Dollar based on the foreign exchange rate agreed between the person selling the Dollar and myself. Now imagine where you have the Bureau de Change in the middle and you have the buyer, that is, the demand, on one side and the supplier on the other side; that is the way it works. The person at the middle collects commissions from two persons. The buyer sells at a price based on demand and supply. So, if the demand is higher than supply, the price is likely to go up. If I’m able to read that the demand and price for a thing I bought and own have gone up and I sell it, now the difference between what I bought and what I am selling now that the price has gone up is my own profit. That is the basic analysis of how it works.

Demand for Cryptocurrency…what are your training modules like? The fee, process, and duration?

Training is 30 days and we have a huge demand for it and because of this, we have set up world class training hubs in the three geopolitical zones Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. So, demand is already there. We have a structure that accommodates different levels of trading – the strategic portfolio building and robotics. Our modules cover; Introduction to Cryptocurrency Trading – CPC 101, Cryptocurrency Masterclass – Advanced Trading CPC 102, Trading Engaging Robotics – CPC 103. People are already aware of what Cryptocurrency is; it will be wrong for us to say that people are not aware of it. The only thing is that there is a knowledge gap on how to use it and take advantage of the value in it, and that is what we are trying to close up.

Is there any risk attached to Cryptocurrency… Is Bitcoin legal? And how secure is Bitcoin?

The idea of trading Cryptocurrency and the national legal framework is mutually exclusive. Trading on Cryptocurrency can be done when someone knows how to handle it. The reason for the legal framework is to protect the participators because when there is no third party that puts power in the hands of those that know the ‘Whats’ and ‘Hows’. Bitcoin is safe and this knowledge is out there. You are your own bank. Records are protected by mathematical laws and are irreversible. The Blockchain technology protects its addresses and have histories on an open ledger, and is always available and transparent for anyone to confirm.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

ETHBITS Gets Green Light for New Copy Trading Cryptocurrency Exchange

  

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Cryptocurrency explainer:
Everything you need to know

Everything you need to know CryptoCurrency Bitcoin Stack

If you’ve ever had a company or friend offer to pay you with Bitcoins or another type of digital money, you’ve encountered cryptocurrency, also called crypto-money or cryptoassets. Cryptocurrency is a digital currency that is created through the use of encryption software. This approach is a solution to security and control issues that prevented a purely digital currency from being successfully developed in the past. If you hear someone talking about one of these currencies, it’s almost certainly in a cryptocurrency format. This type of digitally created and secured money is currently in a period of very cool experimentation, so let’s take a look at how it work, why it’s popular, and where cryptocurrency is heading in the future.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Weekly Round-Up and
Cryptocurrency Markets Update

Last week saw Bitfury striking xxxxxx

a deal with the Ukranian government to put the latter’s data on a Blockchain platform. The deal will ensure blockchain recordings for areas like public health and services, state registers, energy and social security. In a twist, High Tech Private Equity Fund SICAV plc is reported to have acquired nChain, a Blockchain company associated with Wright Craig, the man who once claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. The company plans to make available their intellectual property assets to the blockchain community via royalty-free licensing and open sourcing.

An initial Coin Offer intended for mining activities to support the signaling of Bitcoin Unlimited has been halted as a result of not reaching its goal. The ICO was allegedly linked to Chinese Angel Investor in Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic, Chandler Guo. On the Bitcoin Network scaling front, the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool, F2Pool has declared its support for Segwit. Wang Chun, Owner of F2Pool revealed on Friday that 56 percent of his network members are in support of Segwit.

Eventually, the advent toward mainstream adoption of blockchain gets after Mark Carney, Bank of England’s Governor, claimed blockchain technology can save banks tens of billions of dollars a year. The governor was speaking International Fintech Conference last week in London, where he further revealed that the next generation of Britain’s interbank wire system will be blockchain-compatible.

Market Updates (as of Monday)

Bitcoin’s current price recovery

is outstanding despite the fact that the scaling debate is still raging on. Some experts believe it is being driven by mainstream adoption in Japan. As at 22:00 GMT, Bitcoin has appreciated by 0.22 percentage point and its market value was $1180.73 maintaining the number one position on CoinMarketCap. Ethereum is still holding on to the 2nd spot and has kept the velocity from the current altcoin rally although it lost 0.82 percent today. Its market price was $48.49.

After a stratospheric rise that resulted in Ripple ousting Dash from number three, it has slow down to some degree. The cross-border transfer crypto with KYC was selling at $0.033308 with a 1.33 percent downward adjustment. The battle for number four is so titanic. For three days now, Litecoin and Dash has been dislodging each other to take over momentarily. However, at the time of filing this report, Dash was reigning with a 0.21 percent depreciation, posting an exchange rate of $75.23. Litecoin also took a fall of 1.02% and was being sold for $10.71. It must be stated that the decision to implement Segwit has boosted its price and market cap.

Even though Monero was recently indicted in a finding that found out that some of its transactions are traceable, it doesn’t seem to be affected much and is still at the 6th position. It scored a negative 1.76 percentage point and the exchanges listed it for $20.38. Moreso Ethereum didn’t have a good time either. At number seven, it could be bought for $2.65 and dip 0.42 percent. With a market price of $0.024212 and 0.48 percent upward gain, NEM kept its 8th position intact. The consistency for the Smart Contract platform is impressive.

Angur with the selling rate of $11.52 and a 2.55 percent upward adjustment maintained number 9 as well as the biggest gain on top 10. In a surprising move, PIVX has pushed Maidsafecoin to the 11th position and it is now counted among the top 10 Cryptos on CoinMarketCap. This anon digital currency in a few months has established itself among the elites. It bagged a 0.93 percent growth and its price was $2.01.

Gainers And Losers

On the top 20,

Factom rose by a significant 14.37 percent. It is one of the Cryptos below top 10 that must be watched keenly. Sadly Bitconnect which was at top 10 briefly on Wednesday fell negative 26.63 percent to be the biggest loser.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

  

The iEx.ec project

is all about connecting Blockchain technology and cloud computing business. It aims to create a decentralized cloud and set up a marketplace for computing resources. Its founders conducted numerous scientific research over the years at prominent research institutions, such as the French INRIA and CNRS. The team has a step-by-step plan for the four years ahead. iEx.ec will rely on a set of its own technological solutions. However, the team has not done a lot of dissemination work till recently. Its track record on Github is quite modest. So the question remains open, whether the iEx.ec technological base is as good as they claim it to be.

Konstantin Lomashuk, CEO of Satoshi.Fund:

“The market of cloud computing is huge and we will see more and more new companies aiming at it. It’s really good for the decentralized ecosystem.”

iEx.ec

iEx.ec stands for “I Execute”. Headquartered in Lyon, France, the project was created in October 2016. It is a spin-off company from INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science. iEx.ec aims at starting off as a fully distributed Blockchain-based cloud platform. It is designed for distributed Blockchain-based applications (DApps) with plans to evolving into a market network for decentralized computing products and services. In total, their five editions of the project planned within four years from the launch date. The last outlined edition will represent a fully distributed platform for Blockchain computing.

Potential market

The iEx.ec market network will be designed for various participants of the distributed computing ecosystem. It will enable them to do business with each other to better monetize their products and services. Each new version of the network will be updated to host new types of participants:

• DApps providers (version 1)
• application and server providers (version 2)
• data providers (version 3)
• mining farms, miners, GPU apps providers (version 4)
• emerging classes of applications (version 5)
• at this stage, iEx.ec also plans to partner with telecom companies, attracting the latter, among other, with the possibility to halve their infrastructure costs, distributing small data centers along their network point-of-presence

The market network is to provide its users with

• full traceability and trust
• a wide range of customers and, consequently, new markets
• an innovative Blockchain-based environment, tailored for its users’ features and needs

Competitors

The project’s closest challenger is the Golem Network. It is a decentralized economy of computing power, where one can rent it out or develop and sell software. As pointed out in iEx.ec whitepaper, the key difference between the two is that Golem, with its supercomputer, focuses mainly on High-Performance Computing (HPC) users, while iEx.ec, with its decentralized cloud, will first attract DApps and expect Cloud and HPC users to join later when the Network will evolve becoming more competitive. The economy of DApps is on the rise now, and iEx.ec seems to fit perfectly in it.

Main features

• Desktop Grid Software XtremWeb-HEP, to enable use of any computing resources to execute compute- or data-intensive applications
• Blockchain, to coordinate the access of computing resources to distributed apps
• Claim of Proof-of-Contribution consensus protocol, to certify off chain contributions directly on the Blockchain
• Matchmaking smart contracts, to pair a resource request with a resource offer according to their description
• Simplified version of a multicriteria scheduler [MulticritSched], to enable customers to define their own preferences based on specific criteria
• Market management framework, including API to register bids, a set of template contracts, a web user interface and JavaScript code
• Result checking algorithm, including escrow mechanisms and a reputation system, to choose business partners from the market based on their provable reputation and on the established budget
• Native RLC token, to pay for Application, Server and Data providers on the market network

Team

The core team members, including Gilles Fedak, Haiwu He, Oleg Lodygensky, and Mircea Moca, have an impressive research and development background in big data, grid and cloud computing. Gilles Fedak alone co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers. The core features underlying the iEx.ec are their own developments. They were produced in the scope of their work at INRIA and CNRS. The team is also linked with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Blockchain part is done by two experts from La Javaness, a French digital innovation accelerator. There are also a data management expert, the Energy Positive Server developer, two PR specialists and a new media expert based in the company’s China office. In the future, the team considers collaborating with several well-known European and Chinese universities in research. It also intends to obtain complementary funding through national and European research agencies.

ICO Details

• Launch: 19 April, 2017 at 13:00 UTC
• End: as soon as the max cap of 60.000.000 RLC is reached (otherwise – in 30 days)
• Max RLC total supply: 87,000,000 RLC
• Max RLC sold by crowdsale: 60,000,000 RLC
• RLC minimum objective: 10,000,000 RLC
• Both BTC and ETH are accepted
• 1 BTC = 5000 RLC
• USD/ETH – to be defined at the start of ICO, according to the ETHBTC rate
• 20% bonus – April 19 to April 29
• 10% bonus – April 29 to May 9
• Crowdsale terms and funding URL: http://crowdsale.iex.ec

Token distribution

• Maximum of 60,000,000 RLC – crowdsale
• 12,000,000 RLC to 15,000,000 RLC – founders, team and early investors
• 1,700,000 RLC to 6,000,000 RLC – a fund for developers, to be distributed in the form of bounty grants, marketing actions, and research grants
• 1,700,000 RLC to 6,000,000 RLC – special contingency reserve (not sold on markets)

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Meet Bitcoin Plus –
The Next Great Cryptocurrency

  

Let’s face it,

Bitcoin is currently dominating the market, but altcoins cannot be just brushed off, they are maturing as well and are ready to provide a keen and tough competition. There is one coin, however, which, as claimed by its founders, cannot even be called an “altcoin.” Meet Bitcoin Plus – the next great cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin, but “reincarnated”

The history of Bitcoin Plus goes back to early 2014 when the coin was launched through an ICO held on the Poloniex Exchange. However, it turned out that the ICO was carried to fund not the cryptocurrency but holidays of the original developer who escaped with collected funds somewhere in the south direction. Later on, Bitcoin Plus went into rehab as a few truly dedicated community members formed a team, hired a coder to fix the wallet and introduced the sustainability plan.

Yule Mills, one of the team leaders at Bitcoin Plus, explains to Cointelegraph:

“The original developers created a great coin but it appeared they had ulterior motives, therefore they soon abandoned the coin. I was the original investor and have loved it since I first found out about it in May 2014. I think it is Bitcoin but reincarnated with many improvements and rarities, hence the added Plus in the name of the coin.”

How it will drive the market wild

The cryptocurrency has evolved greatly, especially during the last year. Originally, XBC was purely a Proof-of-Stake coin, however, a bunch of recent updates included the ability to secure the network using Proof-of-Work, therefore Bitcoin Plus is what is now known as a hybrid POS/POW. This means that if the network ever faces a serious issue, things can be moved along manually by switching on Proof-of-Work for a short period.

Bitcoin Plus has one mln coins to respond to 21 mln Bitcoins, it is characterized by a much faster block processing time and can handle eight times more transactions than Bitcoin. Mills points out that the best feature of Bitcoin Plus is the 20 percent annual staking until all one mln coins have been staked. In his opinion, this feature alone is currently driving the market wild.

Mills comments:

“Bitcoin Plus went from $.08 in January 2016 to a high of $131 just last month. That's serious.”

Bitcoin Plus, scalability issues minus

There is an opinion that what is good for Bitcoin has a positive impact on other cryptocurrencies. But what about the problems currently faced by Bitcoin, are they any relevant in the rest of the cryptocurrency space? Scalability has always been an issue for Bitcoin but recently the network has been running out of capacity, transaction fees have been getting higher, while the speed of processing was significantly decreasing. The SegWit vs. BU debate has been going on and on for months and it doesn’t look like we are going to see a conclusion any time soon. How do these block games affect Bitcoin Plus?

Well, XBC has a much shorter average block processing time – 60 seconds compared to that of Bitcoin, therefore the Bitcoin Plus network is able to handle 10 times more transactions every 10 minutes. Besides, the block size limit of Bitcoin Plus is much larger standing at 1.5 MB. The average transaction size of Bitcoin Plus is very similar to its predecessor, therefore every block is able to fit as many as 3,030 transactions or 50.5 transactions per second. The Bitcoin Plus team assures that it will take a long time before users have to start worrying about any scalability issues.

Mills says to Cointelegraph:

“Regarding scaling issues, the original Bitcoin can handle, as fact, less than seven transactions per second compared to Bitcoin Plus which can handle 50+ transactions per second. We are keeping a close eye on SegWit vs. Unlimited and, truthfully, I don't think either idea is a good one. The thing about Bitcoin Plus that works is we have a team that agrees on things. If Bitcoin Plus needs to scale we will scale to Visa level if needed.”

Engaging community into development of the coin

The current team of Bitcoin Plus consists of several community members who run the website, BitcoinTalk Forum Thread, Block Explorers, 24/7 nodes and ensure the sustainability of the coin. The team is open, accessible and their intentions are transparent. It also seems that they are trying to engage the community in the development of the coin, offering ideas for updating of the network for voting and extensively reporting on the completion of upvoted ideas. Isn’t it what the cryptocurrency space is all about? Absolute freedom, flexibility and the ability to reach consensus? With all this packaged in Bitcoin Plus, it is expected that the project will attain great success.

Mills concludes:

“Bitcoin would be an altcoin if it wasn't so successful. I don't consider Bitcoin Plus an altcoin. It's a force to be reckoned with, and you are going to see Bitcoin Plus on a mass scale soon.”

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member