by Rick Mandge
As the world’s 3rd largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN) is always considering new digital asset listings. While the Securities Exchange Commission is tasked with protecting investors, Coinbase maintains its own internal framework to guard against questionable assets and fraud. The process of reviewing new listings at Coinbase is rigorous and includes making sure that the assets being considered are not securities or investment contracts. In fact, industry insiders refer to the so-called Howey Test — whether it is “an investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others” — to determine if an investment contract exists.
Here are three popular digital assets that may pass the Howey Test and could one day get listed on Coinbase.
For businesses that want to launch their own blockchains, they can turn to Constellation, a scalable framework with a user-friendly Hypercube interface. It uses directed acyclic graph technology to store data in a tree structure instead of a chain. Businesses can submit snapshots of their blockchains for validation every 5 seconds which means most users can transact and get their wallets updated for free. For businesses that need to process multiple transactions every second, they can use the native DAG tokens to incentivize reputation-based validators. Constellation started off as a fairly centralized layer-0 framework, but should become more decentralized over time with more participants.
Information stored on a blockchain is meant to be permanent, but what is the cost of keeping it there? Arweave is a decentralized storage solution that uses a clever protocol to store data permanently with a single upfront fee. It uses an incentive model called a blockweave that rewards a randomly selected miner with the next block based on how much data the miner is already storing. Miners can be users with extra space on their hard drives or businesses with a large array of servers. Arweave has become the de facto solution for other blockchains that need sustainable repositories of webpages and applications that live forever.
Peercoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies around and was the pioneer of proof-of-stake, a consensus mechanism that was recently adopted by another popular blockchain called Ethereum. Peercoin gives validators a chance to earn the right to add the next block of transactions to the chain instead of relying solely on miners to generate coins which can otherwise consume a lot of energy. Based on the Bitcoin code base, Peercoin is an eco-friendly alternative with solid fundamentals that checks off all the boxes as a reliable immutable public ledger. It has the support of a foundation and an active developer community that’s still going strong after 10 years.
For more information about these digital assets and to purchase them on Kucoin or Bittrex, you can visit these links: