While in traditional markets only big players can take advantage of arbitrage and market making opportunities, Defi allows for the average people to collectively pool capital and algorithmically become a unified and profitable market maker .

In a typical order book market, there is what we call a bid and ask. This means the highest one is willing to pay for an asset, and the least one is willing to sell for. The distance between these two is called the spread. There inherently must be a distance between these two numbers, otherwise both orders would find each other and be filled. When a new player comes into the market, they may place a limit order at any given price, or they can have their order fill instantly with a market order. For someone who wants to make money off the market, they must position themselves on both the buying and selling side of the order book. …

✨ NOTE ✨ We recently announced the $SHO incentivized community program, wherein early community members can earn up to $3,000 $SHO. Click here to participate.

✨ TL;DR: ✨ Our Goal with the $SHO utility is to create a system similar to Twitch subs inside Showcase, called OGs, based on the native token $SHO. Additional Utilities coming also.

Showcase is working with a world class team of experts to draft the final version of our Whitepaper, and we will publish updates on that shortly. In the meantime we have been asked by many community members to explain the utility of $SHO. …

TLDR; Earn up to $3,000 in SHO tokens with a guaranteed reward of $100 in SHO tokens to the first 3,000 participants in our incentivized community program. You can earn $40 in SHO by joining our Telegram group, $40 in SHO by joining our Discord community and $20 in SHO by tweeting this campaign. One randomly selected lucky winner will receive $3,000 in SHO, and a runner up will receive $1,500 in SHO.

We’re excited to introduce the Showcase Incentivized Community Program in anticipation of the launch of the Showcase Utility Token SHO.

Showcase is an NFT app allowing content creators to make and sell collectible NFT badges to their fans. During testing we have built a large community of creators from around the world. Showcase has built our NFT infrastructure on Matic network, an EVM compatible POS scalable blockchain platform. Matic network scalability allows Showcase to bring adoption to NFTs without worrying about exorbitant gas fees and slow transaction speeds. …

When we came to London we didn’t know what to expect in terms of Blockchain Community. Over the past few months, we’ve witnessed how dynamic this community is. With London Blockchain week around the corner, many of our international partners and colleagues have asked us about the community here, so we hope this post will be helpful to anyone looking to engage with these dynamic thought leaders.

Ethereum London is the home of the Ethereum community in London, and hosts many great community events. Jamie Anson is Co-organiser of the group, which is one of the oldest and biggest in the blockchain world. …

At Showcase, we are building the first blockchain-based platform for digital collectible merchandise — created by influencers and supporting social impact causes. In this post we will cover our longstanding relationship with the team at Matic Network, the scaling benefits of Matic Network technology and how it applies to our unique use case.

Partnering with Matic

Matic network is a blockchain platform using an adapted version of Plasma framework, originally created by Vitalik buterin and Joseph Poon. Showcase has been working intensively with Matic Network since July of 2019 to integrate with their blockchain and deploy our ERC1155 NFT’s (called “Badges”) on the network. …

Since the new year, many blockchain experts have been making lucid predictions about the future of cryptocurrency in 2020s. Usually this involves talk of scaling solutions and growing financial use cases. As NFTs are one of the fastest growing technologies in Blockchain, we thought it would be appropriate to write an article about their future in 2020.

In summary for those who are not fully absorbed in the world of NFTs, at the time of writing this blog there are main 3 uses of NFTs:

• NFTs that are virtual items (think gaming items)
• NFTs that have utility (think tickets)
• NFTs that represent or track ownership of physical property (think…

According to UN data, merchandise shipping generates well over a billion tonnes of carbon emission annually. At Showcase we are excited to be building a platform that can allow for certain merchandise to be digitized using NFT technology.

Shipping emissions are a growing concern for environmental regulators and scientists. Shipping could be responsible for 17% of global CO2 emissions in 2050 if left unregulated.

We sometimes refer to our badges on showcase as “Green Merch”, because they are fully digital and yet carry the most important properties of real merch — exclusivity, scarcity, social display, and branding.

Even better, many creators on Showcase are working with social impact and climate advocate groups to raise funds for environmental awareness and protection. By selling beautifully hand crafted digital badges, climate minded creators can raise money and support dozens of environmental causes.

Off-chain metadata vulnerability plagues current generation NFT platforms

The most common question we get when talking to people outside the crypto community about Showcase and other NFT platforms is “What is the NFT itself though?”

Basically it’s a smart contract that points to a series of metadata, usually including an artwork in the form of an image, and provides information about supply, authenticity, and provenance. It’s comparable to a digital certificate of authenticity that cannot be easily destroyed, because it is secured on the blockchain.

However, this is not actually the case for some NFT platforms. There is an implementation related security risk where the metadata that you think is stored on the blockchain may not actually be stored on the blockchain that the NFT contract is deployed on, and it may be relying on a centralized server to function. …