What is Einsteinium? A Beginner’s Guide

You may have noticed a new coin, Einsteinium, has crept its way into the market top 50 out of the depths of CoinMarketCap’s lower rankings. Actually, it more accurately lept up to its new spot, jumping from a ~$0.80 support to over $2.00 in a matter of days.

Taking its cue from the synthetic element of the same name, Einsteinium is a cryptocurrency designed to fund scientific, technological, and philanthropic projects. The Einsteinium coin, fittingly abbreviated EMC2, is the source of this funding and circulates using a proof of work algorithm similar to Bitcoin’s own. So in practice, EMC2 functions as if someone took Bitcoin and combined it with a charitable fund.

So how does Einsteinium accomplishes its philanthropic mission and what makes it so attractive to investors? Let’s get to it.

Einsteinium: What it is, How it Works

Einsteinium began back in 2014, but it didn’t see much action until Spring of 2017. On March 1st, the Einsteinium Foundation officially launched, and by April, it officially registered as a Non-Profit Organization in Montreal, Canada, becoming the first research-focused NPO in the cryptosphere.

The Einsteinium Foundation is the Einsteinium coin’s organizational counterpart, a hub for the project’s charitable and research funds. Under its proof of work mining system, the foundation receives 2.5% of every block reward. Of this yield, 0.5% goes towards faucets, marketing, and donations, while the other 2% goes towards funding scientific research.

You might be wondering how the Einsteinium Foundation chooses which projects get funded and how much funding they receive. Well, to understand this, you’ll need to know how epochs work within EMC2’s proof of work consensus.

So What’s an Epoch?

An epoch is the time it takes miners to build 36,000 blocks onto Einsteinium’s public ledger, or approximately 25 days.

After an epoch is completed, the proceeds from the Einsteinium Foundation’s block rewards from that epoch goes on to fund research or projects in scientific, technological, or blockchain industries. Members of the Einsteinium community are asked to vote on which project they believe demonstrates the most potential and is most worthy of funding.

There will be a total of 730 epochs within which miners can receive block rewards. Under Einsteinium’s model, the yield of block rewards scales downward as the network graduates to each new epoch, so as time goes on, the number of coins that each reward offers will decrease. In the first two epochs, for example, block rewards were 1,024 EMC2. By the final epoch, the block reward will only be a single Einsteinium token.

You may ask, why would anyone mine something that offers fewer rewards as the blockchain expands?

Two Words: Wormhole Events

The Wormhole Event is Einsteinium’s unique contribution to the proof of work model. The phenomenon occurs at random within each epoch and lasts for 180 blocks, during which time a block reward of 2,973 EMC2 replaces that epoch’s standard reward. This lottery system is supposed to keep mining attractive to the blockchain’s mining community, and it’s also meant to compensate for the decrease in block rewards with each successive epoch.

In fact, the Einsteinium team believes it will make mining even more profitable in the future. The more the EMC2 coin increases in value, the more lucrative Wormhole Events will become. Seeing as block rewards for these events are constant, miners will be incentivized to mine for Wormhole occurrences alone, as they will appreciate in value alongside the currency itself.

Einsteinium Trading History

Until things really got underway with the Einsteinium Foundation in early 2017, trading volume was basically flat for EMC2. From 2014-2017, for instance, it traded statically for less than a 10th of a cent until steadily climbing to $0.08.

Recently, however, EMC2 has gone parabolic. It spent most of November and December climbing to a healthy $0.80, and in the past two days, it broke through $2.00 to an all-time high of $2.77.

Einsteinium was asleep for quite some time and, given the project’s promise, it was due for a sliver of the limelight. However, it’s most likely that EMC2 ‘s upcoming hard fork and anticipated December 19th news have driven this surge in investor confidence.

Where to Buy Einsteinium

If you want to buy EMC2, it’d be best to get some Bitcoin and head over to either Bittrex, Poloniex, or Cryptopia. It also trades for Litecoin on Cryptopia, but the volume for this trading pairs has only been 0.01% in the last 24 hours. Over the last 24 hours, the majority of its Bitcoin volume has run through Bittrex at 82.98%, while Poloniex comes in second at 16.52%.

Einsteinium’s website also lists Upbit as a possible exchange, but as of this writing, CoinMarketCap has no record of this exchange.

Where to Store Einsteinium

Einsteinium’s website offers downloads for a newly released wallet meant to accommodate an upcoming fork.

The coin has a core wallet for Windows and Mac, and a mobile wallet is available through Coinomi for Android devices. As detailed in their project’s roadmap, the EMC2 team is working on a web and mobile wallet.

Barring Conomi, there are no third party wallets that support EMC2.

Roadmap and What’s to Come

Einsteinium primary use will be as a fundraising platform for charity and scientific research, but the Einsteinium roadmap reveals a bright future for the expansion of the coin and its services.

These include a number of platforms that are tied to the EMC2 coin, including a social media app and an online marketplace. The social media app would include a private messaging function, a public posting feed, and a payment option for users to send EMC2 to their friends, and the marketplace would be just that, a marketplace to buy and sell goods online for EMC2.

In the realm of enterprise applications, the development team is working on Einsteinium SDK, an API that will allow businesses to implement the EMC2 model.

And like many other cryptoassets, they’re also working on a debit card that holds EMC2 for offline payments.

Final Thoughts

No other cryptocurrency is doing what Einsteinium is doing. Their mission is unique, respectable, and full of conviction, and the Einsteinium Foundation has the potential to really make an impact in the field of research fundraising.

If you believe in what EMC2 stands for, it would be at least worth buying to contribute to its philanthropic vision. If you’re looking to make some money, investing will likely pay off as the company grows and draws attention to the projects it funds. The coin’s Wormhole Events will also make it an attractive mining prospect as time goes on.

Overall, you really can’t say too much against Einsteinium. We think using crypto to fund scientific pursuits is pretty rad, and we’re excited to see the kinds of research Einsteinium will make possible in the future