Why Bitshares is the most undervalued blockchain in the ecosystem
The Bitshares blockchain is often thought of as only constituting a decentralised exchange (DEX), but this does not do justice to it. In reality, Bitshares is a powerful blockchain with an immense ecosystem and array of projects built on top of it.
The DEX is just one of the many applications and as time goes on more software will be created that operates on and interacts with the blockchain.
Let’s take a look at the wider Bitshares ecosystem and what makes this system the perfect foundation for growing that ecosystem.
The Bitshares decentralised ecosystem
The three most prominent applications built by Bitshares are the DEX, DEXBot and Beet.
DEX
The decentralised exchange is practically synonymous with Bitshares in terms of public perception, and for good reasons too. The DEX is known for signing over 1 million transactions in a single day without even flexing a muscle. As a true DEX, each user is individually in charge of their own security which makes it a much safer option compared to anything a centralised exchange could offer. Whereas a hacked centralised exchange affects all users at once, DEX users can only be hacked one account at a time. It’s the same difference between an all-out bank heist and opportunistic pickpocketing.
DEXBot
The DEXBot is an open source trading bot created by the Bitshares community. It was created in a true decentralised fashion: in 2018, a worker proposal was made and the Bitshares community used their BTS to vote on the proposal so that the work could begin. Today, the DEXbot is live and it can auto trade any assets available on the blockchain and be used on any DEX built on the Bitshares blockchain including CryptoBridge, Rudex, SparkDEX and OpenLedger.
Anyone can install the bot and it is completely free to use. However, you’re advised to do thorough research into how the trading bot works before you give it free reign over your crypto funds.
Beet (still in BETA)
The way DEXBot was created shows the decentralised nature of the Bitshares ecosystem: a worker proposal is made and the wider community casts its votes. Beet is currently in BETA stage and is being developed to make that process a lot simpler and straightforward. The project aims to resolve the need to cast votes through the DEX which can be complicated for crypto beginners and as such limits the size of the voter base when new proposals are made.
The plan is to make Beet a stand-alone key/identity-manager and signing app for Bitshares that interacts with the blockchain. It can be locally installed on your computer and will also store encrypted private keys locally. With a much more straightforward process in mind, Beet opens up the possibility of a social media style voting procedure where users showcase projects and the whole community can easily pick their favourites. Follow the project’s progress on Github here.
Other projects based on Bitshares
Besides Bitspark, there are many projects that run on the Bitshares blockchain. Here is a list of some of those projects:
Stablecoins enabled by Bitshares
In 2017, Bitspark made the switch to the Bitshares blockchain for a variety of reasons, with one of the key decision makers being the ability to create stablecoins pegged to fiat currencies.
Bitshares allows users to create stablecoins pegged to the value of any type of asset such as Chinese Renminbi, the US Dollar or gold. BitAssets, as the stablecoins are called in the Bitshares ecosystem, are created using the native BTS cryptocurrency and collaterised at a minimum ratio of 1.75 to guarantee stable exchange rates. At any point in time, you can sell one BitUSD for at least 1 USD worth of BTS.
Bitshares blockchain performance
Lastly, underpinning the vast growing Bitshares ecosystem of exchanges, wallets, stablecoins and other projects, is a very capable blockchain. On the Bitshares website, the team states the blockchain handles 3300 transactions per second today, with the potential to scale to 100,000 transactions per second in the future (more than Visa and Mastercard combined). It can handle the volume of the NASDAQ, while transactions get written to the blockchain within 3 seconds, and on average in under 1.5 seconds.
A quick comparison between blockchains looking at Activity (number of operations on the blockchain during the last 24 hours) and Capacity Utilization Index (CUI: ratio of blockchain daily activity to total blockchain capacity) shows that the Bitshares blockchain is simply superior to most other blockchains.
The CUI of Bitshares is only at 0.08% with over a million operations, whereas Bitcoin is struggling at 100% CUI processing 900,000 operations and Ethereum at around 65% processing only 840,000 operations.
All in all, Bitshares is much more impressive than most people realise and the potential for future developments is practically limitless. It is certainly one of the most undervalued blockchains today.
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