“Decentralized Financial Assets”
Designed by Dan Larimer (now of Steem), the BitShares project was designed to give people a way to trade cryptocurrencies inasmuch the same way as the NYSE.
Designed and launched in 2014, the system has a number of features which basically facilitate the inter-currency trade of crypto tokens.
The system has a wallet (client-side software) which allows users to buy controlling stakes in a number of cryptocurrencies, essentially by trading them with others. Whilst the system has been designed to give users the ability to take more than one of the systems, it makes its focus on their exchange.
Unfortunately, the system doesn’t generate much profit and is no longer actively maintained. This makes it quite unattractive for profit, and thus many investors are only holding onto its tokens as they can be traded for Bitcoin.
Who created it?
It was created in July 2014 by Daniel Larimer. Larimer went on to then work on the EOS project.
- Born in Colorado, spent formative years in Florida and Virginia.
- Received Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Computer Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 2003.
- Talented software engineer and serial entrepreneur involved with blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, decentralized exchanges & economic systems.
- Co-founder of Steemit, Inc and was CTO until March 2017.
Dan Larimer has been involved with software development for a long time, transitioning into the crypto space with the advent of Bitcoin. His talents have yielded a large number of different projects, including BitShares… not many of which have actually been profitable (important to consider).
Why does it exist?
BitShares 2.0 is an industrial-grade decentralized platform built for high-performance financial smart contracts.
The decentralized exchange that allows for trading of arbitrary pairs without counterparty risk facilitates only one out of many available features. Market-pegged assets, such as the bitUSD, are crypto tokens that come with all the advantages of traditional cryptocurrencies like bitcoin but trade for at least the value of their underlying asset, e.g. $1.
Furthermore, BitShares represents the first decentralized autonomous company that lets its shareholders decide on its future direction and products. This paper gives a brief overview over the whole BitShares platform, recapitulates known blockchain technologies and redefines state-of-the-art.
You can read the full Whitepaper here.
Trajectory
Since the main developer behind the project went off to form another crypto system, this seems to have stagnated somewhat.
The most important thing to appreciate is that the system in itself is not actually worth very much – it doesn’t support any sort of underlying functionality and basically just facilitates trades between other crypto tokens.
The point here is that whilst buying into this system may seem attractive, the underlying reality is that its growth is pretty much false and will not be a profitable investment in the long run (even if it its price does fluctuate).
Each time its trading volume increases, it’s simply because someone transferred one cryptocurrency to another, giving the impression of growth – but it’s really just a case of the token being used for an exchanged and then being resigned.
Unfortunately, the way in which the system has been created means that anyone buying into it today will not benefit from any of the developments it had during its development – unlike many of the other altcoins, there is no team managing this and thus no business-case for its various tokens.
If you’re looking at this from the perspective of profit, you need to consider where any of the growth may come from with the token. If there is a problem, its value will be wiped out immediately.
