I hope this has been helpful. I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comment section below. Until next time, wishing you safe and profitable trading.
Workin
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It wasn’t long ago that I last spoke about KuCoin. It was earlier this month in fact, in the post “ Shilling my Bags! ”. Well, here I am speaking about KuCoin again!
As my readers should know by now, KuCoin is my favourite exchange – not as big as Binance (which I also love), but just a little more friendly and nicer to use. KuCoin also continues to score extremely well compared to all other exchanges in terms of honesty and trustworthiness. So what has KuCoin been up to this time, that Bit Brain deems it necessary to write about KuCoin yet again?
Soft Staking
That’s what KuCoin has been up to.
No, it has nothing to do with serving steaks rare. (Unfortunately)
Leading the industry (once again), KuCoin. KuCoin has come up with a way for you to stake your coins/tokens; by doing nothing.
That’s right; you do absolutely nothing. All you have to do is hold your crypto on KuCoin exchange, and *Hey Pesto!*, it’s staked!
Soft-staking is a logical continuation of KuCoin development: Since 2017 KuCoin Shares (KCS) holders have been able to receive “dividends” based on the number of KCS they hold on KuCoin Exchange. Dividends are based on trading fees earned from all trading pairs on the platform (there are hundreds of them). At first those dividends were paid in all the different currencies traded, but then KuCoin simplified it and now dividends are all paid in KCS (which works better). So “soft staking” is not really new to KuCoin, but it’s never before been done with currencies other than KCS.
You see, the great thing about Soft Staking as opposed to normal staking is that your funds remain available to you even though they are staked! You can withdraw your tokens any time! To re-stake, you just deposit them again!
The following coins can now be Soft Staked merely by holding them in your wallet on KuCoin Exchange:
EOS (EOS)
Tron (TRX)
Cosmos (ATOM)
Neblio (NEBL)
TomoChain (TOMO)
DeepOnion (ONION)
NULS (NULS)
Energi (NRG)
Internet of Services (IOST)
Of course KCS will also continue to function as it always has. To my knowledge, this system is practically unique. I know that Poloniex recently started allowing Cosmos staking, but I can’t think of any other offhand examples by reputable exchanges. In his blog post “Soft Staking: High-yield and Anytime-withdrawal? Yes, You May.” (link below), Johnny Lyu – KuCoin Co-founder and VP, states that KuCoin ROI will exceed that offered by Poloniex:
…some projects in our Soft Staking Program are able to offer 6% to 12% of the annualized return rate, while Poloniex offers 3% to 10% return rate within a similar package.
Staking ROI varies depending on the coin and on the markets, so one can’t assign a fixed percentage to anticipated ROI. But from the information we have so far; NRG looks most profitable (with annual returns estimated at about 20%) and EOS least profitable (with annual returns of about 0.5%). I expect those figures to vary wildly over time. A table of available figures so far can be found in this post: https://www.kucoin.com/news/en-soft-staking-cash-back-investment-program
While I’m linking to KuCoin posts, here are some others you can use to find out more about KuCoin’s Soft Staking:
Within those links you can find more links to specific staking data about each coin (though they are all pretty much the same). Take note of some details, such as that you might not be able to withdraw all your EOS immediately. There is no detailed public explanation about how the staking system works from a technical point of view – at least not yet. Fortunately for you, you have me to guess the details for you:
I am guessing that KuCoin pool all of the deposits and then stake them as a pool, or as a series of small pools, probably of varying sizes. In addition to that, they probably keep an unstaked, liquid portion of tokens available, I’m guessing about 2% of the total deposits of each coin. To me this would make sense because it means that roughly 98% of the tokens would be staked at any one time. As additional tokens are required, they could be unstaked if required – without having to unstake the entire balance of those staked tokens. A fair amount of tokens would always be available for withdrawals in the form of the 2% reserve. Because tokens like EOS take several days to unstake, I am guessing that this is why they say that it is possible that you could sometimes have to wait a bit to withdraw all your tokens, though I doubt that this would ever even happen to the average user. Such a situation would occur if customers had made an unusually large number of withdrawals recently and had depleted the 2% currency reserve. In essence the stakes act as a cold wallets. Where exchanges normally keep about 98% of their crypto holdings offline in a cold wallet (at least the good ones do), now KuCoin is basically just staking their cold wallets. I repeat: this paragraph is entirely just my educated opinion (which is almost always 100% correct, because I am an ultra-genius).
From https://blog.kucoin.com/passive-income-with-cryptocurrency-proof-of-stake/
Depending on the sort of returns you will be getting, staking may or may not be a good idea for you. Like all centralised exchanges, KuCoin has withdrawal fees. Most cryptocurrencies also cost money to send from a wallet to an exchange (unlike NEO which is free – damn that coin is good! ). For these reasons, sending small amounts of tokens to KuCoin just to be able to stake them is probably a bad idea, you would lose more in fees than what you would gain from staking. Similarly, sending coins to KuCoin for a very short staking period is probably not economically feasible.
On the other hand, if you have a large balance of a coins such as TRX that you want staked, then KuCoin is worthy of consideration.
Of course there is a drawback: you’ll be keeping your coins on an exchange. You all know the saying: “Not your private keys, not your crypto”. As much as I trust KuCoin and I don’t see them running off with anybody’s money, exchanges do have “incidents” – much like the Binance hack in May of this year. I honestly do not know what sort of customer protection measures KuCoin has in place to defend against such events (I would be very interested to know! Perhaps I should write to them and ask…), so I can’t really comment on exactly how safe your coins are when they are staked through KuCoin.
Personally I need to go and look at my own coins to decide if this is worth doing or not. I hold EOS, TRX and NEBL, two of which are already kept on an exchange because I only hold relatively small amounts of them. My EOS is in a wallet, but I’m hardly an EOS whale either. Above a certain USD value I take my coins off an exchange and put them in a wallet, all three of my coins are well below that value (thanks in no small part to the terrible altcoin market we are in!) However, my KCS is over my USD limit, and I leave it all on KuCoin – just to earn the KCS rewards. Read into that what you will.
Conclusion
Well done to KuCoin for offering their customers another great service. This has been a fantastic month from KuCoin: Extra token burns, an OTC trading desk, a Derivatives Trading platform (KuMEX) and now Soft Staking! As I have been saying for years: KuCoin Shares is a damn good token to hold, this platform has a lot of growing to do!
I think that this is only the beginning. I foresee many other exchanges following suit – just as they copied KuCoin’s original dividend paying token idea (COSS doesn’t count because their token crashed and burned, I hate that exchange after the huge losses they cost me!). Bear in mind that if you reside in a country where “Liberty” is only a word and had no true meaning, then the tyrants who unilaterally rule your life may have deemed it illegal for you to earn such staking rewards. Fight them, flee them – or continue to suffer beneath them – your choice.
Yours in crypto
Bit Brain
“The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first”
~ Mark Twain
“Crypto does not require institutional investment to succeed; institutions require crypto investments to remain successful”
~ Bit Brain
In Elliott Wave terms, FOAM began a wave one advance on June 26. The red wave one (blue sub-waves i-ii-iii-iv-v) finished on July 7, and the red wave two (blue sub-waves a-b-c) correction ended on July 20. If this wave count is correct, FOAM should be heading next towards the July 7 peak in the red wave three.
… despite the amount of Liquid STEEM deposited at the exchanges keeps growing according to the last weekly post of @penguinpablo (you can read it here), STEEM is showing a strong resistance against sellers.
This is the weekly amount of STEEM withdrawn to the Exchanges:
This is the weekly averaged position of STEEM at The Total Market Cap:
…and this is the current 4h-Chart of STEEM:
The amount of STEEM deposited at the exchanges still is enormous but there is something that has changed since a few days ago.
Exactly 4 days ago the RSI showed us a well formed BULLISH DIVERGENCE when STEEM hit the Bottom of the year, forming as well a double bottom in the long correction.
Maybe Sellers have relaxed a little the tension but what is sure is that we have buyers here so there is a clear interest on STEEM.
And it is clearly sustaining the fall of STEEM at the Total Market Cap… of course, with the permission of BITCOIN. If BTC falls strongly STEEM will be affected as well
Hopefully we have reached an equilibrium at the market that will allow STEEM to recover not only the price but also the visibility.
If you take a look at the daily chart of litecoin things do not look great from a technical standpoint. I hold a long-term position and even added on the last bounce even though on the short term things don’t look bullish.
So I ask myself the question…
Why am I Long This Chart Right Now?
Head and shoulders patterns I feel have become less reliable than you would normally assume, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore them.
Look at the chart…..pretty clear head and shoulders top followed by a break down and then rally to the neckline around 100-105 which then failed and here we now have price floating in the middle of no man’s land.
We can easily go back down to text the recent low of 77 and possible lower if it were to fail. On the other hand bulls can step in a buy out of nowhere (as happens in crypto from time to time) and push price to test that neckline again and possible make the pattern moot.
The point is…
There is no real clear edge….and if there is one then it is biased to the downside.
The funny part it – I don’t have this trendline drawn on the chart but you can see there is an uptrend starting in April going into July that has been broken and then tested on that last little bounce only to fail.
Can you see the uptrend line I am talking about….try to draw it on the chart if not.
I hope this has been helpful. I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comment section below. Until next time, wishing you safe and profitable trading.
Workin
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CoinGecko released its cryptocurrency quarterly report a few days ago. If you don’t know what CoinGecko is yet, then head over to https://www.coingecko.com/en and take a look. CoinGecko is what I consider to be the best of the cryptocurrency tracking websites, and it is a site which I visit (too) many times every day.
The folks at CoinGecko publish a Quarterly Report on the crypto world. It’s a highly informative document: as the name suggests it focuses on the previous quarter, though it does go back further than that where necessary.
I like the reports as they provide a broad overview of the cryptospace. With so many coins, projects, stories and developments in the crypto world, we are forced to somewhat narrow our focus and we tend to suffer from tunnel-vision. I know this happens because I actively try to maintain a broad knowledge of crypto by researching it and reading the latest news each day; but even so I know that projects or events can slip by me unnoticed. The CoinGecko reports are a way to ensure that you haven’t missed out on the most important developments of the quarter.
But the reports are far more than just a news stream, in fact they aren’t a news stream at all. They consolidate the most important information, normally into a graphical format, and then publish it on charts or infographics. This makes everything simple to read and not too laborious.
Let me show you some of what you can find in their latest report. All screenshots below are taken from the “CoinGecko Quarterly Report for Q2 2019”, available at https://assets.coingecko.com/reports/2019-Q2-Report/CoinGecko-2019-Q2-Report.pdf. All rights to the contents of these screenshots belong to CoinGecko, and I share this information under authority expressly granted to be me by CoinGecko via Twitter.
Introduction to the Q2 2019 Crypto Report:
The hype and FOMO are real! Strap on and enjoy this journey; let’s see how far we can fly on this rocket ship. We hope this report brings you value and helps you stay updated on the constantly changing cryptocurrency industry.
~ Bobby Ong and TM Lee – Co-Founders of CoinGecko; “Founders’ Notes”; Pg 4
If you’re anything like me, then you like to take a look at long-term chart trends. You CAN work these out mathematically be means of insanely complex MS Excel formulas. I used to do that when I started in crypto, but honestly the effort of maintaining those spreadsheets is not worth the benefits. These days I eyeball trendlines, but confirmation like this from CoinGecko can be used to ensure that my eyeballs are not skew.
Note how the trendlines are not only upwards sloping, but are upwards curved; indicative not only of growth, but of logarithmic growth (and now you know why I normally use log charts for crypto analysis).
The top coins feature prominently in the report, here CoinGecko gives us their quarterly performance. (*Sarcastic voice* “Oh no, XRP is being left behind, how sad!”)
This is a nice one, it shows you how the top 30 coin rankings have changed since the last quarterly report. CoinGecko started publishing regular Quarterly Reports in 2018, prior to that they published two reports in 2017: a Q3 one and an annual one. All their reports are available here: https://reports.coingecko.com/all-reports. Depending on which report it is, some of the reports are available not only in English, but also in Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Chinese and Indonesian! Personally I think that’s pretty impressive!
As an analyst, I love this chart. To me this says one thing: Bitcoin is climbing back up WITHOUTeven experiencing any hype yet! CoinGecko obviously interpret it the same way I do, look at the two sections which they have circled…
Exchanges feature prominently in the report, just look at how their numbers are growing. There is far more to see in the report itself!
Binance in particular gets a lot of focus (unsurprisingly). This page is about its May 2019 hack. There is also a three page sub-section about Binance DEX – all nicely concise and well laid out in an easily readable fashion.
I’ve written about the CoinGecko Trust Score before, a feature which I consider to be very good. In case you missed my review of it, don’t fret, you can get it from the horse’s mouth.
Another topic which I have written about: (the dreaded) Libra. In addition to the page below, CoinGecko also summarise its whitepaper – great for those who are too lazy (I mean “too busy”) to read it! In all seriousness, I did read the Libra whitepaper and I found it to be nothing more than propaganda and marketing of a centralised pseudo-crypto, but let’s not talk about that now. CoinGecko also capture the various government responses to Libra (so far).
IEOs have been very popular this year. I don’t really like this fancy new buzzword (buzz-abbreviation?) for what are really nothing more than ICOs launched by an exchange, but I do like the CoinGecko analysis of them. In a five-page spread, they give a breakdown of the recent IEOs: splitting them by month, exchange (as seen below), amount raised, ROI by project and ROI by exchange. I’m sure you will agree that that is very useful information for a crypto investor to have!
There are also sections on the Lightning Network…
…and DApps
Conclusion
Note that I have not even shown you 20% of what this 45-page report has to offer. It’s long enough to be useful and complete, but short enough not to make you bored or to waste your time. I consider this report to be a job (very) well done and I congratulate CoinGecko on delivering another excellent product. I thoroughly recommend the report to the crypto community. Remember that Bit Brain is not affiliated with CoinGecko in any way, I get no direct benefit for writing this post. As usual, I’m just trying to bring you the best crypto information that I can, information which CoinGecko is good at supplying.
Don’t miss the final page of the report (unless you count “The End” as a page), it contains links to all of CoinGecko’s many social media channels. I follow them on STEEM and Twitter, and of course I use their website, but there are many other options available to those of you who prefer other social media channels or phone apps.
Yours in crypto (which you can find on CoinGecko)
Bit Brain
Cover image from https://assets.coingecko.com/reports/2019-Q2-Report/CoinGecko-2019-Q2-Report.pdf
“The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first”
~ Mark Twain
“Crypto does not require institutional investment to succeed; institutions require crypto investments to remain successful”
In Elliott Wave terms, Maecenas began a wave one advance on May 12. The red wave one (blue sub-waves i-ii-iii-iv-v) finished on May 18, and the red wave two (blue sub-waves a-b-c) correction ended on June 30. If this wave count is correct, Maecenas should be heading next towards the May 18 peak in the red wave three.
…since BITCOIN have not passed yet the lowest point of the correction marked as “C” in the chart.
BTC is reaching again a well-known support already around 9400 USD…
I am confidence on that this strong support would hold BITCOIN avoiding falling lower and hopefully make resume the uptrend of the market which everybody is expecting.
This is my main scenario, the alternative one is bearish and it is based on an “ugly” Head and Shoulders pattern that may be in formation. Something like the following:
The target drop in case this pattern would be triggered launches a price for BITCOIN below 5000 USD… but, as I said, this is not my main scenario for me as far as BITCOIN keeps moving above the 9000 USD.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal point of view, please, do your own assessment and act consequently. Neither this post nor myself is responsible of any of your profit/losses obtained as a result of this information.
I hope this has been helpful. I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comment section below. Until next time, wishing you safe and profitable trading.
Workin
If you found this post informative, please:
Get paid for viewing ads and Support the Crypto Ecosystem with Brave Browser. Free download here: https://brave.com/wor485
Shilling my Bags! 
). For these reasons, sending small amounts of tokens to KuCoin just to be able to stake them is probably a bad idea, you would lose more in fees than what you would gain from staking. Similarly, sending coins to KuCoin for a very short staking period is probably not economically feasible.
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