Social encounters

Passive income is often the name of the game when it comes to traditional investing. However, the opportunities in the cryptocurrency market are still fairly new for most people and somewhat intimidating if you fall down the wrong rabbit hole like trying to build your own mining operation.

Thankfully, more accessible options exist, like DeFi and proof-of-stake (PoS) altcoins, which often only requiring holding a certain amount of the coin to begin earning income. In fact, several major cryptocurrency exchanges, including KuCoin, are now offering to automatically stake your holdings directly on the platform.

The combination of falling prices leading to higher yields and a trend towards ease of staking has made PoS altcoins a solid investment idea moving into the final quarter of the year.

Here are five altcoins with staking yields over 5% that might be worth picking up in September: IOStoken (IOST), Decred (DCR), Cosmos (ATOM), KuCoin Shares (KCS) and Komodo (KMD).

IOST’s rating grade on @TokenInsight is upgraded to BB with a positive outlook, based on IOST strong ecosystem development & significant innovations in consensus mechanism and virtual machines.

ICAC is the core governance community of IOST, which is initiated by Node Pacific (IOST Pacific). In order to make the majority of the community better understand the IOST nodes, the ICAC community formally launched the IOST node partners interview.

On Sep 23, 2019, the ICAC community invited BlockDevs Asia- token Engineer, Project Lead & Developer Amadeo Brands to share their story.

Team Introduction

The four core members are:

Caspar Oostendorp is our Blockchain/Software Architect. He is the CTO of Oost & Voort Inc and Co-Founder of Lifemesh

Chris Verceles is our Full Stack/Blockchain Developer. He is the CTO of Lifemesh and Developer at Consensys

Amadeo Brands is our Token Engineer, Project Lead & Developer. He is a co-Founder & CTO of EOI Digital

Tracy Li is our Software Engineer. She is the Co-Founder of Bitchikka.

ICAC Interview

What does BlockDevs Asia mainly do? Can you introduce it to community users?

BlockDevs Asia is a non-profit community group by and for software developers, technology enthusiasts and business people looking to learn more about developing (actual) blockchain apps or systems. By organizing free educational meetups about complex & technical topics, we dive together with a large group of passionate developers into advance blockchain technology. To date, we organized more than 20 events, 2 large hackathons, and 20 meetups.

The third quarter is going to be covered. Can you briefly tell us what have you done this quarter?

As previously said, we have organized tons of meetups in the past.

For Q3, we held an event called ‘Blockchain Gamble — How Blockchain Predicts and Shapes the Future of Online Gambling’ where we talked about the concept, current state, and future of online gambling and blockchain and IOST.

We also held an expert talk at University of Makati introducing blockchain and IOST to Univeristy of Makati students.

Lastly, we have another meetup planned called ‘The Importance of Communities in Blockchain’ with BlockchainSPACE Philippines.

Our website updates our activities from time to time. Check out our blogs here and our Meetup page here.

Any news of BlockDevs Asia to share with the community?

In the months to come, BlockDevs Asia will hold more meetups and events regarding blockchain and IOST. Everyone is encouraged to join and participate. For a quick list for the upcoming events, we listed them here below:

More Dedicated IOST events — We want to prioritize IOST on everything we build and in our meetups

IOST node token for increased voter rewards

Building out the IOST IDE and dev tooling — Basically, we plan to make it easier for developers to develop on IOST

Onboarding of new IOST developers

Setup dedicated IOST Hackaton

Initial launch for a dedicated IOST incubator program

IOST Casino game development — Setting up IOST Casino games and start competing with https://www.iostvegas.io/. We see an opportunity here to put our dev community at work and make a better functioning and operating casino.

IOST Game development courses for Blockchain enthusiasts

How did you get involved with IOST? Why do you choose to be an IOST node?

BlockDevs Asia’s involvement with IOST began with a collaborative event with Terrence Wang back in Q1 January 29, 2019 called ‘Platform Hands-On’. Our event held a technology demo from Wang himself and showcased how IOST works in a blockchain system and how to use it for developing blockchain programs and dApps.

During the demonstration, Wang showed how IOST differs from other blockchain bases. IOST emphasizes community participation and incentives than other blockchain. This is quite interesting because gives people more opportunities.

What contribution will be made to the whole IOST ecology? If you have a preliminary plan or idea, could you share it with the IOST fans?

Our main goal is to empower the developer IOST Community with education and tooling so that more applications will be built on top of the IOST network. The more applications or network layers/traffic are created the more value will drip down into the base protocol which will, in the long run, increase the intrinsic value of IOST and will create a strong economic foundation.

For the IOST partnership we are focusing on educating our community about the IOST technology and exploring together what the possibilities of the Internet of Services are. BlockDevs Asia contributes by promoting & educating IOST to the community of the Philippines and even across multiple South-east Asian countries.

As of now, we are setting up IOST Champ which will be a tool to train developers and have them earn badges and points. Then, the developers can also complete tasks like create and deploy applications to main net where they then be rewarded for out off our main IOST reward pool.

What expectations or suggestions do you have for IOST?

I hope we will keep our ecosystem strong and based on creating long term value instead of going for short term gains. Price is just a ticker and I believe that if we harden the network and stick with IOST for the long run we can make a change and outperform and compete against our competition.

What platforms can we get the latest development and situation of BlockDevs Asia?

You can always go to the BlockDevs Asia website for updates or go to our Github and see what we are working on. We are looking forward to seeing you at one of our events we also do live streaming so you can always attend an event digitally.

Why should the community members vote for you, and what will they get if they vote for you?

BlockDevs Asia is a non-profit organization that helps grow a blockchain community to help represent and propagate new technology in the Asian market.

IOST is one of the top global staking projects as reported by Coin Telegraph.

IOST is working with IMDA Singapore on a seamless data bridge to easily transfer information, transactions & asset values between IOST & ETH. Can you solve interoperability for IOST? Attractive prizes of SGD35k & more.

‘Stache: Tell me a little about your background Terrence. What did you do before helping to start IOST?

Terrence: I am an ex-Uber, ex-Microsoft software engineer. I used to study computer science at Princeton University, and after college, I worked in the Bay Area for several years before I went back to China started my crypto journey with IOST.

‘S: What problem did you create IOST to solve?

T: We created IOST to make it the underlying architecture for online services that meet the security and scalability needs of a decentralized economy.

‘S: How do you plan on solving the issue of sharding & scalability on IOST versus what has been done on other major competitors like Ethereum, TRON, and EOS?

T: Our focus is on PoB, instead of sharding at the moment. IOST has reached the similar level of scalaility as EOS, with a better decentralization realization. Our Servi system enabled even the Servi node with the least number of votes among our 60+ block producers to have the opportunity to produce blocks, comparing to the 21 biggest nodes holding up the block-production spots rather unshakably in EOS and 27 super representatives in TRON.

‘S: Since mainnet launch we have seen a lot of dapps built on top of the IOST network. Have you used any or played any games on IOST? If so, what was your favorite one?

T: Have been trying Eternal Fafnir since its beta test. It is a blockchain role-playing game where players can summon four dauntless warriors to challenge evil monsters and collect fallen items.

One of the most impressive parts of Eternal Fafnir is its high-quality graphics. The graphics have a western magic style that outruns most blcockchain games. Besides, each character in the game has separate growing path and different skills. Players can decide which path they would like to pursue. The game is easy to get on board with. Simple operations and auto mode make it fun and smooth to play with. I had a pretty good gaming experience with them.

‘S: Do you plan on opening up a development bounty to help increase usage of IOST as a dapp platform? I believe there is a fund already established for this?

T: Yes, we have Featured DApps Support Program for our DApp developers, which was launched by IOST and Pioneer Fund, an exclusive fund focused on DApps under the BlueHill Foundation. It is open for submission to all DApp teams who have released DApp(s) on IOST mainnet. Applicants are required to specify their operation objectives such as account number, traffic and DAU in their application. Once approved by IOST, the operation plan will gain 70% of operation budget from IOST first and the remaining 30% later if the actual outcome matches the one stated in the application. For more information: Bluehill Announcement + IOST Launchpad Announcement

‘S: How do projects like OnBlock and Emogi Netowrk fit into the overall future plans for the IOST network and how closely do you work with these types of projects?

T: As an important investor and supporter of both OnBlock and Emogi projects, IOST is working closely with the two and has great confidence and faith in them. As a growing exchange, OB helps promote IOST and attracts a great number of new users to the ecosystem. It is an irreplaceable player in the diversified IOST ecosystem, providing IOST users with a secure and stable trading and Dapp exploration platform. At the same time, it offers great networking opportunities in the blockchain industry to IOST.

Emogi’s contributions to the ecosystem are demonstrated in two areas: real world mass adoption and user acquisition. As the first IOST’s major effort in real world application, the short video platform Bermi and its innovative token economy gained great traction and success. It is another strong booster in the IOST ecosystem and has successfully increased IOST’s brand awareness with its 6 million user base worldwide, especially in Latin America.

‘S: IOST recently launched a new website, but it seems the roadmap has been removed. Was there a reason for that and what major milestones can we expect in 2020?

T: We released our Back To Da Moon Plan in early August. And the plan for 2020 is still under discussion. We will keep our community members posted once it is out.

‘S: IOST keeps brining on some amazing partnerships, which one are you most excited about and why?

T: The partnership that excites us the most is the long running collaboration that we have with the Singapore government to mutually grow the blockchain ecosystem value and develop progressive blockchain technology. Back in May, IOST partnered up with Enterprise Singapore to support enterprise blockchain projects and give grants to promising startup founders. In July, IOST attended the National Blockchain Challenge as a corporate partner. It is a 3-day blockchain hackathon supported by SkillsFuture Singapore, a government agency dedicated to workforce upskilling. We were glad to notice that in the challenge, most of the developers chose to code on either IOST or Ethereum for their choice of platform. Most recently, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) supports IOST by holding a challenge to solve for interoperability between IOST and Ethereum. We are grateful to receive such comprehensive support from a world class government, and this will play a key role in the growth and international expansion of IOST going forward.

‘S: Cross-chain interoperability is a major milestone for IOST, what progress has been made on this front?

T: A couple of days ago, together with Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) , IOST initiated a challenge and offered 35,000 SGD to the problem solver. Later in the Q4, we also plan to run hackathons that include interoperability as part of the development theme to collect all as many solutions as possible to solve this question.

‘S: Being a developer myself, I always have a few projects going on. Are you working on any other interesting projects right now?

T: Nope, I am focused on IOST and simply have no time for other projects.

Past events: