On July 11, we held an AMA session in our Official IoTeX Telegram channel with the BitUniverse co-founder Phoebe, and Raullen, co-founder of IoTeX. The topic of this session was around the blockchain Finance Ecology & Technology Empowering Trading. We would like to thank for submitting your questions and present you with this recap.

About BitUniverse

BitUniverse is an app helping users to improve their trading abilities. BitUniverse independently develops and initiatively applies Grid trading bot in cryptocurrencies. Within six months after the bot coming online, it has helped users earn more than 10 million USD. BitUniverse App was released in the beginning of the year 2018, capable of helping users in managing all their digital assets. Only half a year after its release, it had over 300K downloads. Till the end of March 2019, the total number of downloads surpassed 1 million worldwide.

BitUniverse is defined as a provider of one-stop services including records of positions and profit-loss, market tracking, token encyclopedia, grid trading bot, and auto-portfolio. BitUniverse currently supports 6202 tokens, 248 exchanges, and 22 analysis indicators. Within 6 months after the availability of Grid Trading Bot function, the users have earned more than 10 million in USD by using their Trading Bot!

BitUniverse now gathers high net-value users with high trading frequency and large trading volume. Features for users also include high enthusiasm for trading, strong demands for high-quality trading bot/tool, belief in the long-term value of cryptocurrencies. Thanks to the love from the users, BitUniverse App maintains next-day Retention Ratio of over 90%. Geographical distribution of BitUniverse shows that BitUniverse services cover almost all countries and areas worldwide. To conclude all, BitUniverse dedicates itself in improving users’ ability to trade, promoting profit efficiency and lowering trading risks for users. In the future, through “AI strategy” and more strategies, BitUniverse will accelerate the process of “improving users’ trading ability”.

About IoTeX

IoTeX began the journey in 2017 to build the Internet of Trusted Things, where all physical and virtual “things” — humans, machines, businesses, and DApps — can efficiently exchange information and value at a global scale.

The IoTeX Network is designed to be scalable and privacy-centric, with in-house innovations such as Roll-DPoS consensus, multi-layer blockchain architecture, cross-network governance, extensible state transitions, and Layer 2 privacy-preserving computing. It provides end-to-end trust across the entire information life cycle, including collection, processing, ordering and storing, and utilization. By serving as the infrastructure to unify all “things”, the IoTeX Network will power the new decentralized economy.

Q1: IoTeX is privacy-centric blockchain platform to power the Internet of Trusted Things, and BitUniverse dedicates itself in empowering trading through technology. So, what is the common ground for this cooperation between the two sides?

Phoebe: First of all, both sides are technology-oriented. IoTeX applies RDPoS consensus mechanism to ensure fast consensus. BitUniverse commits itself in developing high-end trading tools including Grid trading bot, Trailer Take Profit, AI strategies etc. Second, as IOTX is a high-quality asset with good market potential, BitUniverse can work with IoTeX for promoting IOTX’s liquidity and market performances. Third, both sides will cooperate in developing mutual communities.

Raullen: and we are always looking out for cutting edge technologies, whether they are blockchain DApps, services/tools, or exchanges. BitUniverse caught our attention as they are at the cutting edge with grid trading and also make their platform friendly for all skill levels. Even though we operate in different industry verticals, this common ground of cutting edge tech and user-friendliness provides a good foundation for our collaboration.

Q2: Now, exchanges and projects keep introducing more trading products and solutions. Could you please brief on what new values has BitUniverse brought to cryptocurrency investors? How can it be differentiated with traditional cryptocurrency platforms?

Phoebe: I think that BitUniverse is complementary to the business of traditional cryptocurrency platforms — exchanges. When looking back at the history of financial investment, there are two schools, of which one is value investment and the other technical analysis.

For value investors, they trust in finding high-quality assets, represented by Graham and Warren Buffet. School of technical analysis trusts that all values of one company are sufficiently presented in the markets and they build projection models using higher mathematics and physics. From my investment experience over a decade in the past, my thought is that, a good investment ideal is a combination of the two schools, meaning that investors should find high-quality assets while keeping improving trading capabilities.

In the Blockchain business, the core functionality of exchange is to help users find high-quality assets. From Mt.Gox selling Bitcoins to the recent IEO projects by Binance and Huobi, exchanges’ job is to find and provide high-quality assets. When it comes to improving trading capabilities, there are two types of platforms in the market. One is a quantitative trading platform providing a programmed interface for users to realize independent trading models and automatic trading. This kind of product is too complicated for users. The second variety funds. As Blockchain is still in its preliminary stage of development, and, profit models of high-end funds are closed and hidden, making common users impossible to get knowledge of its functionalities. Based on all the facts, common users are exposed to market risks without any protection.

BitUniverse is mutually complementary with cryptocurrency exchanges. Exchanges help with selecting high-quality assets while BitUniverse helps improving traders’ capabilities. What BitUniverse does has never been done before and barely possible to be outdone by others in the near future. What BitUniverse does is to help users in realizing their value appreciation and improving their capabilities.

Q3: How will IoTeX achieve the goal/vision? How to differentiate IoTeX from other projects? What is your competitive advantage?

Raullen: First, we need to admit this is a long journey that will not be completed in one day, one year or two. We take steps to get there — 1. public blockchain as the foundation; 2. trusted computing to capture the trusted data from the physical world; 3. more L2 capabilities once the foundation is done, we will gradually import and innovate the applications. Along the way, we need people who trust us and believe in the future to join us!

In regard to the differentiation — IoTeX is working on similar problems/innovations as other blockchain platforms; however, all the design decisions (e.g., not sacrificing privacy for throughout) are made thoughtfully with the future in mind. The team’s main innovations include Roll-DPoS consensus, blockchain-in-blockchain architecture, cross-chain governance and Trusted Computing. Some of the published results can be found at https://www.iotex.io/research-paper

As Mainnet Alpha launched in April, we fully enabled the decentralized chain management which is completely operated by the community — we are the first company to achieve cross-chain governance, as well as one of the few PoS public chain projects which successfully and safely launched the mainnet with smart contracts and community nodes. Besides the innovation side, we see our key strength in team, vision, and execution. Our core team has more than a dozen top-tier engineers and researchers with super efficient communication and execution capabilities. Within only 18 months, we built everything from scratch and successfully launched the mainnet ahead of the schedule. Within 2 months after the launch, various tools, SDKs, and wallets on chain are relatively complete as well. All of us share the same vision and are very committed to bringing it to the real world with full trust of each other.

Q4: What is your opinion on the rise of PoS and the controversial topics between PoS and PoW?

Phoebe: About the popularity of PoS, there is some case for proof, that in early Feb this year stake US completed its seed fund-raising of 45 Billion USD, with well-known blockchain investor Pantera Capital leading and other investors like Coinbase following. This is a showcase of how popular PoS is. People are exposed to potential commercial opportunities and fortune possibilities. Its investors said that in the year 2019 projects applying PoS consensus mechanism will take up 25% of all blockchain projects and staking will produce 2.5 billion USD with huge potential of growth. The recent blockbuster projects like Cosmos, Cardano, and Polkadot all apply PoS mechanism. There is still few tokens applying this new mechanism PoS ranking at the top by market cap. If new tokens use PoS mechanism, the chance of leading in market cap is minimum. As for the ongoing controversy over PoS and PoW, my personal view is that it’s subject to applications. There is yet insufficient evidence to determine which one is better or support the notion of which one replacing the other. PoS is technically not technology as it depends on other technologies in duplicating lots of functions naturally enabled by PoW. Generally speaking, PoS is more involved with some sort of voting like PBFT or VRF mechanisms to enable procedure selecting via random committee, hard coding, voting or algorithm to limit the production of blocks. I do think that there is no “better” or “worse” between the two mechanisms as its subject to the needs of applications. PoW has much more long-lasting records regarding security as it’s very simple, making the attack surface fairly smaller. PoS is new and exposed to a larger attack surface. If applications see security as the biggest concern of all and are willing to pay the costs, then they can apply PoW mechanism. Otherwise, PoS might be a better solution. Of course, there are cases of two mechanisms intertwined.

Raullen: Everything has its pros and cons. Starting with PoW — the pros is that it could be decentralized with a simple underlying algorithm, and relatively secure, while the cons is that it is slow and hard to be bootstrapped from scratch (especially given a huge number of computing public blockchains), without which the pre-stated pros is null. In addition to that, it is non-environmental-friendly as everyone knows. PoS is different. It pros are environmental-friendly, fast, efficient and easy to bootstrap, while the cos is the complexity in design and implementation to actually mitigate long-range and nothing-at-stake attacks. I would think it is the right direction to build and bootstrap a chain based on PoS, especially this chain is used as the medium of exchanges, rather than the store-of-value. I have the latest blog post talking about PoS and cross-chain governance that will be published soon, you are welcomed to take a look.

💡Check Raullen’s new blog post ➡️ https://medium.com/iotex/cross-chain-governance-a-new-paradigm-244c81605ca9

Q5: Could you share your expectations on the investment opportunities in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in the year 2019?

Phoebe: To understand the magnitude of the opportunity in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, let’s add it all up: Bitcoin’s role as ‘digital gold’ — Digital gold: $30 — $70T, Deflating the monetary premial of real estate, equity, and debt: $5–25T, Replacement for offshore bank accounts: $1–10T, Securing the world’s assets: $1–10T, New economic activity facilitated by blockchains: $1–10T. Altogether, there’s a clear path to $50T, and a plausible path to $100T. It’s a long way to go, but we do believe the future will be there. The only remaining question then is: How do we get there? BitUniverse offers trading bot helping users make more profits in a swinging market and uprising market. We still consider that the most part of the cryptocurrency market in the year 2019 will still be a swinging market combined with a rising tendency. In a swinging market, our strategy is simple, that users can stock more tokens by using BitUniverse grid trading bot. Personally, I still believe that the real values are guaranteed by real technologies, for example, top projects such as IoTeX and projects with revolutionary technologies. You can see from this actual order, using BitUniverse app and running IOTX grid trading orders are really profitable.

Q6: Seems that Defi is becoming a new trend — do you have any strategic plan for related field?

Raullen: Defi is new term but not a new concept — the boardless payment, the collateralized loan (call option in fact), trading, insurance have all existed for about 3–4 years. This concept has been re-emphasized too much recently perhaps by Ethereum — because it is slow and fits in low-frequency finance applications really well. Personally, I do agree that the essence of blockchain may be finance which covers a much bigger scope than defi. For example, the trusted iot data and trusted computing marketplace we are focused on is also one instantiation of the finance aspects of blockchain. By the way, just saw the news — IoTeX is partnering with ChainLink to make the decentralized Oracle more secure and trusted! This trusted data will be the foundation of many finance applications! https://medium.com/@iotex/iotex-chainlink-delivering-real-world-data-to-the-blockchain-17abb11981a7

Phoebe: DeFi is really a hot topic now. As BitUniverse dedicates itself in trading strategies and helping users to improve their abilities to trade, we do have some financial studies and algorithm as support for the trading tools and strategies that we provide. The most well-know Dapps under Ethereum network, like MakerDAO/DAI, Compound and Ox are targeting at revolutionizing the traditional financial services, with the purpose of liberating people’s economy mode. BitUniverse provides not only trading tools but also financial services. So, in the future, we might apply DeFi in our trading platform. For example we could apply Lightening Network technology for higher scalability of our trading platform; we could provide portfolio products and services based on DeFi to help users earn more Passive Income; we could also develop a decentralized trading platform or Crypto Derivatives for users to choose. These are our preliminary plans and we will have further studies over these potential resolutions. Our idea is simple, we will adhere to the mission of BitUniverse “Improving Users’s Abilities to Trade”, based on which, we will do whatever we think would be beneficial for our users.

Q7: Lately BTC price hits 12000USD and even higher. As a trading platform providing trading tools for users, what plans does BitUniverse have?

Phoebe: Besides Grid trading bot suitable for profit making in a swinging market, BitUniverse also has trading strategies like Trailer Take Profit, which helps users secure profits as highest as possible when the market prices go up. Grid Trading Bot is suitable for three trading scenarios:1. Value coins hoarding when prices are low and take profits when prices go up; 2. Token pair trading, helping in taking double profits; 3. Stable coin profit taking, stable profits with annualized return ratio higher than 30%. For now, BitUniverse’s plans are like: we will keep on developing and improving more trading strategies and functions for users; we will update more versions to provide better user experience for our users; we will work with more exchanges to cover more groups of users and expand our market reach. About the Bitcoin price, I’m quite optimistic about it as I have faith in it. In the long run, I believe that Bitcoin values will keep rising. 1. Halving of Bitcoins, with an estimated time of 23rd, May. 2020. In the last time of halving, Bitcoin price hiked. 2. New applications keep being developed. Increasingly growing consensus: USA’s largest bank JP Morgan Chase publicized its Blockchain product in Feb this year. 3. Institutions entering the market: as CME (Chicago Merchandise Exchange) claims, in May of this year, the number of Bitcoin product users increases by 223, reaching an all-time high.

Q8: The blockchain industry is growing and changing fast. As a public chain, what is IoTeX’s future direction? What is the development plan for BitUniverse?

Raullen: Our Mainnet Alpha launched in April, and already processed ~1M txs in about two more months! three things we will focus down the road TEE-based Layer 2 trusted computing platform, which will be used to build trusted oracle (together with ChainLink potentially); Cross-chain assets — we will gradually bring a variety of quality assets on chain and work with professional teams to enable more ways to use the assets directly on the chain. Chain SDK — we will put more efforts to make our platform easier to use and interact with — start with the Chain SDK to allow developers easily build their own subchains.

Phoebe: Besides Grid trading bot suitable for profit making in a swinging market, BitUniverse also has trading strategies like Trailer Take Profit, which helps users secure profits as highest as possible when the market prices go up. BitUniverse’s plans are like: we will keep on developing and improving more trading strategies and functions for users; we will update more versions to provide better user experience for our users; we will work with more exchanges to cover more groups of users and expand our market reach.

Q9: From the start of the year until now, BTC price has risen by 120%. As a cryptocurrency trading platform, what investment ideas and suggestions can BitUniverse & IoTeX provide for the community?

Phoebe: Our ideas and suggestions are simple, that users can enjoy higher profitability using BitUniverse product. We came to the conclusion that 70% of the cryptocurrency markets maintain a swinging market. If users want to make profits through market fluctuations, normally they can’t overwatch and trade 7*24, which has to be practical with the help of trading tools. The best way to earn profits in a swinging market is “buy-low and sell-high”. The mechanism of Grid Trading is as follows: By using BitUniverse Grid Trading Bot, users need to set price range including the highest price and lowest price, number of grids and positions. Users’ assets will be divided by the number of grids to proceed continuous making and taking within the price range, enabling repetitive “buy-low and sell-high” operations to earn profits! Hereunder please find an example:

1. When running BTC/USDT trading pair, first we need to divide the price range USD6900–8300 into 5 grids, the bot place two sell orders in USD8300 and USD7950 and two buy orders in USD6900 and USD7250.

2. When Bitcoin price hits USD7950, Grid Trading Bot will sell 1BTC pricing USD7950, meanwhile, it places a buy order for USD7600.

3. When Bitcoin prices rises up to USD8150 and drop backs to USD7600, the Bot automatically buys 1BTC and places a sell order for USD7950. Users spend lot of time sleeping, commuting, dining, resting, etc, and the real trading time normally is under 5 hours or even less. In contrast, Grid Trading Bot enables continuous trading 7*24 with triple efficiency for profit making! Universe Grid Trading Bot amplifies the profit-making efficiency as it suits a swinging market, enables 7*24 trading, overcoming human nature weaknesses.

Raullen: The entire crypto market is highly speculative until now. I am not surprised if Bitcoin grows 10x this year. It is usually true that at the initial stage of a bull market bitcoin is dominant. People will shift their intention actually back to other coins/tokens once Bitcoin finishes its sprint. But what people will be looking at after bitcoin’s sprint is the “blue chip” — some real impact projects that have the intention and capability to change the world and make it better from a certain perspective. I have no doubt IoTeX is one of them!

Q10: How is IoTeX and BitUniverse related?

Phoebe: As I said, IOTX is a high-quality asset with technology accumulation and application, so BitUniverse can help IOTX holders and traders to make more profits using our app.

Q11: Is there a video or medium post how the set up the bot and use the app. Does the bot you developed differ from other ones and if so in what way?

Phoebe: Yes, and we do have other strategies besides Grid trading. Yes, we do have video and medium posts, join us in Telegram group: t.me/bituniverse as there is customer service in the group, ready to answer any questions.

Q12: Understand the complete vision of IoTeX isn’t realized in a day, but will the partnerships with other projects bring some opportunities in the short term (months) to implement some of the different use cases that IoTeX is offering to increase the value of the token and for investors to see a working product being implemented? If this is done already in any way by companies could you give some examples?

Raullen: I will be short on this one — Yes, as our mainnet is launched and it gets more matured day by day, we are working more on the partnership side. The one with ChainLink is just a start, we have actually worked together with NUSD, Hashquark, Staked.us, Harmony, Celer, … and many other traditional companies already for months that we just didn’t announce yet. Stay tuned for the good news.