If you’ve ever been interested in cryptocurrency markets (and since you’re reading this you’re probably are), you probably already know that everything that happens there can be described with only one word: chaotic. We’re not talking about the developments in the blockchain space, as those seem to be pretty orderly. No, we’re talking about the market itself and its violent price fluctuations. Why do you always see countless experts forecasting the future price movements, most of the time outright failing with their predictions, and then making other forecasts like it was nothing?

The explanation is simple: nobody knows anything for sure in this market. It moves in all directions, and for a trader any information about what’s happening could help him or her get a better picture. That’s why all these gurus can be wrong all the time yet still be listened to, because they give information. Information is very valuable in conditions of uncertainty, and uncertainty is the ordinary state of the crypto market. Let’s find out why this is happening.

You got the power!

Every large financial market is supervised by various regulators in every country and protected by them from manipulation. For example, in the US, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 prohibits any security price manipulation. Singapore has similar laws, Europe also has them, just like Australia has them; the list can go on for very long. At the same time, all these laws are applied only to the stocks and commodities markets, not crypto.

The crypto market is a speculative one. It has no fundamentals, unlike the stock market. All stocks are backed by real companies, some of them don’t generate profit, like Uber or Netflix, but the majority of them make money and pay dividends to their investors, which is the main reason to buy their stocks.

Source: xkcd.com

Crypto companies hardly make any money, if we don’t count some exchanges, and the majority of the futuristic projects don’t even have a finished product at all. It’s perfectly understandable, as it’s still a new technology, and the companies developing new products right now are the pioneers who learn by trial and error. But we have to face the harsh reality: everything about crypto right now is pure speculation; it’s about who has the potential to become the next Amazon or Apple of the crypto world, winning their share of the market not only among the other crypto projects but also among their non-blockchain competitors.

The price of crypto tokens can change by vast percentages per day on some minor news, such as Tron founder Justin Sun’s lunch with Warren Buffet and its cancellation. To understand all of the price movements, we have to be equipped with the best tools for market analysis and news delivery. The best option is to use something that could aggregate everything necessary to make trading decisions. Luckily, we can easily find such tools on the market.

If you want to use separate tools for each task, there are plenty of them. For staying up to date on the current news, you can use CoinLib news — a news aggregator, which compiles many sources into one feed. For watching charts, there is TradingView — the oldest and the most powerful tool for charting and checking prices. If you want to see large transactions between wallets, then you should definitely subscribe to Whale Alert account on Twitter. However, there’s an alternative if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution: the STIPS Oculus platform. You can find more on your own, but we’ll take their platform as the primary example for our review.

Everything you need in one place

The most important information that you require in making decisions is the news. STIPS Oculus serves as a news aggregator, gathering crypto news from all over the world and forming a live feed from them. You can choose which sources you want to include, and which ones you want to exclude.

Also, you can compare the time of news publications with the price actions of the assets, which could show the influence of news on your trades. Aside from these, here are the most important metrics you should follow:

• The flow of tokens between the wallets of whales — Sometimes crypto whales can move their stacks to exchanges to dump them, and getting out of all positions before them can save you from a loss. STIPS Oculus has its own blockchain nodes to collect fresh data about all transfers and sync it with their database for analysis in the Screener service. All activities can be monitored and compared with the charts at once.
• GitHub activity — It can track the uploading activity and build a development activity index based on software update periods.
• Community activity and marketing activity — STIPS Oculus measures the buzz around the project and the marketing efforts of project teams, checking numerous sources: Reddit, Bitcointalk forums, Telegram chats, Slack, Discord. The partnership with IBM Ventures allows STIPS to use IBM resources, such as the Watson supercomputer, for such tasks as large data gathering and analysis. After analysis, it defines the sentiment of users on various projects, and it can be used for making decisions on buying and selling tokens.
• The legal status of projects — Legal information is crucial in crypto. If you know that your favorite project has no open actions in courts, you’ll be more certain of your decisions. STIPS Oculus builds a database of legal entities for crypto projects, with the information about their offices, countries of registrations, licenses, bank accounts, legal problems — everything that can be found about them.

Overall, STIPS Oculus is an essential trading tool, even if it’s targeted mostly for a small audience of professional traders. Not all the metrics are affecting the price of an asset directly. As we stated above, this is only aggregated information that helps you get an overview of a project’s activity. Regardless of the tools you’re using, you should always follow your own feelings when trading. These are only the helpers, not the instruction for action.

Conclusion

Being in a Wild West environment, it’s important to hold your hand on the gun. As a trader, chaos is your enemy, not your ally, and by being informed more than the other traders will net you a serious advantage over them. If a whale moves his/her funds, it can catch many traders unprepared. But not you, if you knew it was coming all along.

Source: xkcd.com

When a project promising to build a worldwide blockchain network with instant settlements and revolutionary smart-contracts commits to its GitHub once a month changes their Readme file, you’ll know that something isn’t right. Some people may think that charts speak for themselves, but they understand their language only after they have spoken. Using complex market analysis tools, you will be able to deeply understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, without guessing like the “always-wrong” market gurus do.

Source: https://hackernoon.com/in-the-crypto-wild-west-information-is-power-d91813002

In the Crypto Wild West, Information is Power! was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Together, let us consider how it works the function of search large wallets Blockchain Screener.

Blockchain Screener User Guide:

1. Choose time period to search for transactions. Leave the fields blank, if you don’t wish to limit the period.

2. Choose direction: IN, OUT, or both.

3. Choose transaction volume, leave the fields blank, if you don’t wish to limit the volume.

4. If you wish to filter transactions only by a given (famous) wallet, type in its address in the Wallet field. If you wish to see all wallets, leave the field blank.. We always add analyzed wallets to make it easier for you to work with the system.

Press SEARCH

There will be shown a list of transactions in accordance with the chosen parameters.

The list includes Transaction Date, Wallet Address, Transaction Volume and Direction (received/sent).

You can sort transactions by Date, Volume by clicking Date and Volume accordingly. When clicking a wallet address, you will get a list of transactions of this wallet. By pressing ‘+’ in each transaction you will be able to see its TXID and switch to Blockchain Explorer.

To the right of the list there is a price graph with transactions from the list. It enables easy visual analysis of asset moves and helps to find wallets active at peak price.Trading View allows changing Lines to Bars, Candles, Heikin Ashi, etc.You can also make screenshots of interesting transactions and share them.

History of price changes after transactions.

You will find this tool below the price chart and it will show how the wallet, that you have indicated, historically affects the BTC price in the context of 1h, 2h, 6h, 24h in percent. This greatly facilitates the process of finding “whales” that really have an impact on the market.

Add to Favorites allows you adding transactions for the quick search in accordance with the saved parameters.

In order not to miss repeated transactions with the saved parameters tick the box in Alerts. In Alerts you may leave either your email or your telegram channel for instant alerts on transactions. Alerts will help you to stay informed on all the largest transactions added to Favorites.

How to use Blockchain Screener in STIPS|Oculus platform? was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Warren Buffett once said, “Never invest in a business you cannot understand.” That’s one of his main life lessons and one of the rules that allowed him to become the infamous investor that he is today. It means that before investing in something it doesn’t matter if it’s blockchain-related or not, you must fully understand what’s going on beyond the asset’s price.

Information plays a vital role in making investment decisions; no wonder Bloomberg LP, the financial information giant and the provider of professional Bloomberg Terminals, hit $10 billion in annual revenue last year. Investors and traders need information like we need to breathe air.

But let’s not forget that insider trading, based on publicly undisclosed information, is considered a crime in most countries. The SEC in the US sets the maximum prison sentence for an insider trading violation as high as 20 years, and the maximum criminal fine for individuals can go up to $5,000,000.

This just goes to show how valuable information is for investors, and this begs the question: how should we gather info about crypto assets?

Crypto is a fairly new market that is heavily dependent on news, because most assets have speculative value. Why did the altcoin market drop 90% from its all-time high? Because it climbed so high only on speculation. That doesn’t stop you from making a profit on its swings. Actually, this is what makes it so profitable for early investors and traders. So, to make money in crypto you should follow the rules and be informed more than anyone else. But how can you do that? Don’t worry, we’ll arm you with the most advanced tools.

The best information tools that you can find

First, you’ll definitely need a news aggregator that can deliver to you all of hot news in one feed. There’re a lot of aggregators out there, and you should find the one that best suits your needs. But your search may be over right now, because STIPS Oculus has everything anyone would need to get started. It allows users to compare news with the price actions of assets, and that’s something that we don’t see on other news portals.

You will need a reliable charting tool — TradingView could be the one you need. Its engine is used by many crypto exchanges, such as Bitfinex, to internally display their charts, and it has a light mobile version where you can choose all of the crypto assets you want to track. In addition to crypto, it tracks the price of almost any asset on the global market, from US indexes to Russian stocks.

If you’re interested in buying new tokens at ICOs/IEOs/STOs, you may find this Coingecko’s calendaruseful. It has all dates of upcoming tokensales, their short descriptions, and some metrics of projects, such as the number of social media followers and the links to their social media pages.

Out of all of them, STIPS Oculus is practically the Bloomberg service of crypto, and they partnered with IBM Ventures to bring you the most valuable data in one place. The platform comes with many features, so it will be appropriate to make a short review of them to understand how they can be used.

Market metrics you should look at

When it comes to crypto, it’s essential to check blockchain data. But to do that we have to define what we consider useful data. The most important metric: the asset flow on the wallets of whales (addresses with a substantial amount of the circulating supply). Whales often act as market makers in crypto. Due to low liquidity, their orders can pump or dump the market, and it’s wise to look at their behavior before opening a trade. STIPS Oculusdeploys its own blockchain nodes to collect data from a blockchain and then transfers it to its own database. After transferring, the data is available for analysis through the Blockchain Screener service. It’s possible to check the largest wallets or the biggest transactions for a certain period as well as filter them and compare these activities with the charts for the same period, but having everything in front of your eyes can help you make faster decisions.

Another important metric to consider when we are talking about technology is Github activity. Most blockchain projects are open source, meaning they’re sharing their source code with the community and uploading it to the GitHub platform. STIPS Oculus generates a development activity index based on software update periods. There’s a simple logic behind it: if the project is active, and it pushes new commits (updates), then it’s clear that service is not abandoned. If there are no commits, then its existence is questionable, and it shouldn’t be considered for investments yet. Of course, there could be various kinds of commits, because even the smallest change in the about.txt file will be counted, but overall, all active projects, such as Ethereum or Lisk, deliver actual updates on a daily basis. Also, for a more simplistic overview, you can check the activity on CryptoMiso to get an idea of what it’s all about.

Community activity and marketing activity are important marketing-related metrics. The more people talk about the project, the better it looks for the general crypto community. Just look at Tron, which climbed to the top after the constant buzz generated by Justin Sun, its creator (yes, it works). STIPS Oculus uses IBM resources, such as the IBM Watsonsupercomputer, to gather data from Reddit, Bitcointalk forums, Telegram chats, Slack, Discord, and it defines the sentiment of users, which can be used then to make your own investment decisions.

Another very important detail about every project trading on the market is its legal status. STIPS Oculus builds a database of legal entities for each crypto project and gathers information about its bank accounts, offices, and registrations. The legal liabilities can have a significant impact on a project’s performance; we can remember how many hurdles Tezos had or why the GEMS project didn’t achieveits goals after getting involved in a lengthy lawsuit.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, information and analysis are extremely important when it comes to real money. It’s better to refrain from trading rather than going all in after being driven by FOMO. The blockchain market has made many people rich, but at the same time it has made other people poor. Many altcoins haven’t recovered since the bear market of 2018. How many “holders” are still out there?

Of course, even using such tools as STIPS Oculus doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get any outstanding results or even make a profit — there’s too much going on, and you always have to do research on every asset. There’s no magic money-making tool. A black swan event can always happen, such as the hack of a major exchange, or a new ban of crypto in China — you can’t predict that. But at least you can prepare yourself with as much knowledge as you can.

Remember: every winning trade is someone’s losing trade. That’s why it’s crucial to come prepared when coming into such a speculative market as crypto, where the majority of projects are called straight-up scams. To find the true gems, you have to analyze every purchase and remember that even if you win 10 times over doubling your account’s balance every time, you only have to lose 100% once to be left with an empty balance. Trade safely!

All materials on this site are for informational purposes only. None of the material should be interpreted as investment advice.

By HowToToken Team

How to make Informed Decisions for High-Performance Investing with STIPS|Oculus? was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As you know, soon we will finally move on BINANCE CHAIN. In order to complete the whole procedure, we need to swap your EOS stips tokens for STIPS BEP-2.

To do this, follow the instructions: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZqREltMtuy7pvIWMEy105WxvgmKT5Ugdj5TyeA6JIWtiozw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Swap your EOS stips tokens for STIPS BEP-2 was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

STIPS Token Migrate to Binance Chain

We have a huge update to share with our community today!

STIPS is pleased to announce that we have committed to a strategic partnership with Binance for the migration and token swap of STIPS’s EOS Token to Binance’s BEP-2 Token.

Link to the asset page on Binance Chain.
Here is official proposal for listing token on Binance Dex.

Our teams have worked together to make this partnership a reality, we have found that Binance’s mission to build decentralized tools for everyone is keenly aligned with our mission to make a great fundamental researches for everyone!

We believe that by working together, we will be able to continuously build and deliver a unique and ambitious ecosystem of users, partners, and traders!

To facilitate this partnership, we will migrate EOS STIPS Tokens to the BEP-2 protocol, which will be native to the Binance Chain ecosystem. These tokens will then be tradable on Binance DEX, the new decentralised exchange feature which developed on top of the Binance Chain blockchain.

We believe that our strategic partnership with Binance is the start of a great journey together to build the strength and scale of our ecosystem for our community.

☝ We will inform you soon in all details how to SWAP token STIPS (EOS) on STIPS-B. After this you can trade it in BINANCE.ORG. Wait for further notifications about the start of your token exchange campaign.

☝ We also invite you to test our MVP in exchange for STIPS tokens!

What you have to do:

1. Visit app.stipsoculus.com

2. Try its features

3. Press GET STIPS

4. Fill out our feedback form

The users who leave the most constructive feedbacks will receive 1000 STIPS (about $10) to their wallets at the current exchange rate.

Join us on Telegram to participate in discussions on how we can make STIPS a movement we can be proud of.

Dear STIPSers, we have a huge update to share with our community today! was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

BINANCE GAMES or FEAR OF WHALES?

STIPS|Oculus BTC Blockchain Screener has revealed that in the night of June 18, 24 large outgoing transactions (over 40,000 BTC) were made using the mixing system (that is, dilution of a large amount into smaller ones and their gradual accumulation on a single wallet).

We have found out that starting from the 3DnGFVi6S6kXASDzGYxXsibiseiN9TGc9f wallet and the amount of 56,893 BTC from 02:09 UTC a part of small amounts up to 500 BTC was transferred to the BINANCE hot wallet (1NDyJtNTjmwk5xPNhjgAMu4HDHigtobu1s), and large amounts, minus these 500, were sent to the next wallet and the operation repeated there. Over 5,000 BTC were sent to the BINANCE hot wallet over a night using this system.

Interestingly, last time when such transactions were revealed (on May 30, 2019) the BTC price dropped by $1,000 and remained flat for 2 weeks.
From all that has been said above, it can be assumed that at the current price whales chose the best time for fixing a certain amount of BTC. We recommend to monitor the price and be ready to the price flash crash.

According to another version, transfers to BINANCE are associated with the creation of a new token by the exchange — Bitcoin-pegged token BTCB (on the BEP-2 Protocol). For these purposes, the exchange needs to accumulate a large number of BTC, this is what it does.

Whales Get Moving 2 was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whales Get Moving

The specialists of the STIPS|Oculus platform have found out that from January 1, 2019 to June 07, 2019, 38 large transactions (over 50,000 BTC) were made, 29 of them were conducted during the last 3 weeks (from May 16).

In the graph above you can see that over the course of 5.5 months the bursts of large sums have been very small. During the period of active growth that began on April 1, small transactions were made on the BITTREX cold wallet.

The most interesting thing started on May 30, when the first major transfers were recorded using the mixing system (that is, dilution of a large amount into smaller ones and their gradual accumulation on a single wallet). The specialists managed to find out that starting from the 3AweAnU1qYSUCJ5Hvy9DFEB7dVqUebZw5i wallet and the amount of 107,432 BTC over the past week, some small amounts up to 500 BTC were transferred to a hot BINANCE wallet, and large amounts, minus these 500, went to the next wallet, where the operation repeated again and again. In just one week, over 7,000 BTC were sent to the hot BINANCE wallet using such system. Remarkably, the steep fall of BTC from $ 9,000 to $ 8,000 in just a few minutes also occurred on May 30, and since then, traders state a downward trend of the number one currency.

From all that has been said above, it can be assumed that at the current price, whales chose the best time for fixing a certain amount of BTC and the fact that they started selling does not allow the price to get back to the latest maximum values. We recommend to monitor the slowdown in transfer of funds to the wallets of exchanges. As soon as this happens, we can say that everyone who wanted to sell, sold out, and pressure on the price grows weak.

Whales get moving was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now the platform includes 3 active features:

• Blockchain Screener — to search for any transactions and wallets in the BTC network by sum in BTC. Found wallets can be used to develop your own trading strategy, including tracking strategy.
• GitHub Analysis — to analyze all crypto currencies available on GitHub by number of commits, forks, and stargazes. This is one of the most important fundamental indicators for many cryptocurrencies. The number of commits is indicative of a high activity of a coin and of developer interest in it.
• Community Analysis — In addition to the huge database of publications we will pay special attention to user communication on different platforms: forums, chats in Telegram, Slack, Discord, etc. All this information will be accumulated in our database for further analysis.
Later on, we will quarterly publish information about one new function and continue working on the old ones.

☝ We would also like to point out that we have launched an open testing of the platform in exchange for STIPS tokens!

To get tokens:
1. Visit app.stipsoculus.com
2. Try its features
3. Press GET STIPS
4. Fill out our feedback form

The users who leave the most constructive feedbacks will receive 1000 STIPS (about $10) to their wallets at the current exchange rate.

☝ We have also started collecting all types of information from the market and process it with the help of special analytics tool. We share the first results on our official channels! Below you will find an example of reports prepared by our team!

Stay tuned, visit our platform, and make informed investment decisions! Good luck!

We have made great progress! was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By filling out feedback form you have the opportunity to earn STIPS tokens. In the future, STIPS tokens can be used to pay for subscription or to gain profit by selling them on an exchange. In order to receive STIPS tokens, you need to answer all the questions of the form carefully and constructively, offer valuable recommendations, and therefore help us to develop STIPS Oculus. After we receive your feedback and find the information useful, our specialists will contact you for further clarification and instructions for obtaining tokens.

The reward for a valuable feedback that will be used to improve the platform is 500 STIPS.
The most detailed user reviews with comments will be paid in the amount of 1000 STIPS.

Get STIPS was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are happy to tell you that we have started a test run of our MVP stipsoculus.com, developed with the support of IBM.

It’s a unique unrivaled platform on the market.

What can you do with our MVP?
1. Blockchain Screener: to search for any transactions and wallets in the BTC network by sum in BTC. Found wallets can be used to build your own trading strategy, including the strategy of following.
2. GitHub Analytics: to analyze all cryptocurrencies available on GitHub by number of commits (changes made), forks, and adding to favorites (stargaze). This is one of the most important fundamental indicators for many cryptocurrencies. The number of commits indicates a level of activity in development of a coin and interest in it on the part of developers.

STIPS|Oculus is kicked off now! was originally published in Stips|FinTech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.