United States Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang believes blockchain voting is needed in the current age of digital advancements. He believes that voters should still not be waiting at the polling stations to cast their votes.

 

Instead of waiting at voting units, he wants Americans to vote using their mobile phones with verification done via blockchain. This be sees will dramatically increase participation in all elections, whether local, state or federal.

 

 

The Aspirant speaking on the current voting arrangement said,

“ It’s ridiculous that in 2020 we are still standing in line for hours to vote in antiquated voting booths. It is 100% technically possible to have fraud-proof voting on our mobile phones today using the blockchain. This would revolutionize true democracy and increase participation to include all Americans – those without smartphones could use the legacy system and lines would be very short.”

 

According to his website, Yang pointed out that Voting is hard and time consuming, which is why there is barely 50% turnout even in presidential elections, this he says rewards extreme points of views instead of popular will.

 

He outlined this goals of making voting easier and more secure, reducing inconsistent processes between states and restoring confidence and engagement in the democratic process.

 

Once elected, he will work to modernize the voting infrastructure in the country to utilize technology to make it easier and more secure to vote, thereby increasing numbers of Americans participating in country’s democracy.

 

Andrew Yang is one of pro-cryptocurrency presidential aspirants. He recently called for a clear guideline on cryptocurrencies/digital assets markets regulation so that investment can proceed into the industry.

 

According to him,

” Investment in cryptocurrencies and digital assets has far outpaced our regulatory frameworks in the US. We should let investors, companies, and individuals know what the landscape and treatment will be moving forward to support innovation and development. The blockchain has vast potential.”

 

When elected, he will promote clarity in the industry by giving clear definition to what a token is and when it is a security, give clarification of tax implications of owning, selling and trading digital assets, define which federal agencies have regulatory power over the crypto/digital assets space etc.

The Stakeholders in Blockchain Association of Nigeria SIBAN has joined the list of partners sponsoring and promoting the blockchain and cryptocurrencies awareness in Nigeria tertiary institutions.

This partnership will see both organizations ‘pulling their weight’ to spreading awareness on cryptocurrencies and blockchain to the millions of students across Nigeria tertiary schools.

“Campus BCAT is a university-wide education program aiming to teach and expose tertiary education students on the facts and misconception of blockchain and cryptocurrency.”

Speaking on the motivation behind Campus BCAT 2019, CEO of CryptoTVPlus Tony Emeka “There are always meetups, conferences and others about blockchain which is good, but the enduring effects emanating from these events haven’t really been felt. This is exactly our motivation behind the Campus BCAT initiative as we are well aware of the strategic roles youths and millennials play in the adoption of any new technology, social media is an example“

With millions of students graduating from the tertiary institutions across the country yearly, Campus BCAT 2019 presents a good opportunity to educate the growing population of the varied possibilities in cryptocurrencies and the underlying technology, the Blockchain.

As countries of the world are getting exposed greatly to the growing possibilities the technologies brings, Nigeria been a nation that has most of its revenue from oil sales and plagued with various challenges, cryptocurrencies and the underlying technologies has been seen to be a good solution to some of the challenges.

The Campus BCAT 2019 Tour is expected to feature Talent hunts, Winning of exciting prices, Establishment of Campus BCAT Club, the opportunity for students to meet project founders building innovative products in the space, etc. This will start from the University of Ibadan (UI) on the 7th of September, 2019 and will continue from there to other schools across the Nation. Also sponsoring the Tour are Luno, BitFXT Technologies.

“SiBAN is a self regulatory body in Nigeria with the mission of growing the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry in Nigeria by providing regulating guides to projects and helping blockchain firms and projects in the Country to be able to function within the legal ambit of the law while also protecting the public from illegal practices.”

CryptoTVPlus the first of its kind blockchain and cryptocurrency focused media house providing quality and upto date news, report and information on the industry across Africa and the world.

CEO of Binance CZ had in a tweet put to rest the opinion of cryptocurrency and blockchain community of the intention of Binance to dominate the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry with the launch of Project Venus.

 

Pushing adoption, yes. Domination, no. Always happy to co-exist.

In fact, this should help Libra, if you think about it. Will leave it at that. https://t.co/HLSywLb2mi

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) August 19, 2019

 

Daily we are seeing cryptocurrency and blockchain solutions rising with the aim of trying to make life better, though there are those that are focused on destroying lives with their scams.

 

The week opened with top cryptocurrency exchange Binance announcing a new project – Venus. Venus is an initiative that seeks to utilize existing blockchain infrastructure to develop stablecoins pegged to local currencies. The new cryptocurrencies are expected to use the Binance Chain.

 

The decision to launch project Venus has been met with some opinions as a rival to the Facebook Libra.

 

Libra is a permissioned blockchain digital currency proposed by the Facebook and scheduled to be released in 2020. Libra has an association which is made up of Facebook and other global giants in various fields. According to its website, it’s a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people.

 

The opinion of those in the industry on the Project Venus does not come as a surprise as it resembles the Libra Project proposed by Facebook. This is because, according to the blog post announcing  project Venus, Binance revealed that the initiative will require alliances from governments, corporations, technology companies and projects/firms in the cryptocurrency industry.

It also revealed it will provide full technical support, compliance risk control system and multi-dimensional cooperation network that are needed to build Venus while leveraging existing infrastructure and regulatory establishments.

 

 

The difference is that Binance will use local currencies and as such, there will be hundreds of stablecoins on the market all pegged to their national fiat currencies while Libra is just one cryptocurrency that seeks to enable exchange of value across the planet.

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain industry continues to see increasing growth as differing players come unto the industry leveraging the technology to solve problems or to better existing solutions.

 

As the industry continues to grow with various projects coming up to provide ingenious products as solutions to society’s challenges, these projects are heavily invested by funds of investors and as such, keeping them on watchlist to see their progress is of great importance to investors and to other cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast who would need the solutions for various reasons.

This is why I have compiled the top 10 most active projects in the month of July taking data from State of the Dapp and Consensys.

There are various ways to monitor the activity of a project, this can be achieved by looking at their code repo, social media activity, market activities etc.

This list is compiled using the level of activities they had made in the month of July on github. It should be understood the level of activity on github is not definitive indicator of a project’s success since some projects that has completed their product do not need to be updating their github.

 

Top 10 Projects With Highest Github Activities

1. Status

According to data from State of the Dapp, Status tops the list with the highest developer activities on Github. In a space of 30 days in July, 2019, Status had made 6666 events. An impressive feat which may not come as a surprise to those familiar with what they are building. Status is a messenger, crypto wallet, and Web3 browser built with state of the art technology.

2. Storj

Storj is a decentralized cloud storage network. It is the second in this list haven made 5633 commits in the last month of July. Storj is working towards the launch of the final phase of its alpha named Beacon. Storj is an open-source platform that leverages the blockchain to provide end-to-end encrypted cloud storage services.

3. Aragon

Aragon makes number three on the list. In the month of July made 3779 commits on github. The project Aragon “empowers you to freely organize and collaborate without borders or intermediaries. Create global, bureaucracy-free organizations, companies, and communities”.

4. Cosmos

Reporting over 20% reduction in its commit in the previous month, Cosmos made 3492 commits on github in the month of July. This makes it the top 4 in that month.

 

5. Ox

With tens of projects using the Ox software, Ox boasts of high dapp activities. This must have made it increase its activity over 75% resulting in 3268 commits on Github.

 

6. Gnosis

Prediction platform based on the Ethereum blockchain, Gnosis has remain steady in its activity. In the month of July, it reported github repository commits of 3211, though a little less than the previous month of June.

7. IoTex

Iotex claims to be a privacy-centric blockchain platform to power the “Internet of Trusted Things”. The IoTex Mainnet is the origin of the internet of Trusted Things, where any physical and virtual things are able to exchange information and value at global scale.

In July, it was able to make 3199 github events thus putting it on the top 7 projects.

 

8. Origin Protocol

Origin Protocol is a platform for creating decentralized marketplaces on the blockchain. It was able to in the month of July make 2966 commits.

9. High Fidelity

Topping number 9 is the virtual reality platform High Fidelity. It reported a 2855 events last month.

10. Augur

Augur is a decentralized oracle and peer to peer protocol for prediction market that is free, public, open source software. It is a set of smart contract written in Solidity that can be deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.

In July, Augur made 2280 events on github making it the 10th project in the industry with highest activity on github for the month of July 2019.

 

Nothing remains the same in cryptocurrency industry. As someone once told me, a year in the traditional financial markets is like few minutes in crypto. These projects could have been displaced. However, what matters is that they are producing results and advancing daily.