VooGlue was asked to present its white paper, and speak about the journey. Hundreds of people attended the three day forum which covered a huge swathe of content. What a great event, well Ben & Team.
If you want to buy VGC using Ethereum (ETH) or Bitcoin (BTC) and you don’t already own either of those, here’s a detailed article explaining how to buy them and best practices for storing them:
Entering the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
The next step is make your own personal Ethereum wallet. This wallet is separate from a centralized exchange where you may have purchased Bitcoin or Ethereum. You’ll need to send your ETH from that centralized exchange to this wallet once you’ve set it up.
There are many ways to make an Ethereum wallet, but a currently popular and user-friendly one is made through a service called MetaMask, which runs as an extension to your web browser.
Here are step-by-step instructions for setting up and using an Ethereum wallet with MetaMask.
When you make the wallet through MetaMask, remember to follow the best practices for storing your passwords / private keys described in Entering the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem.
When you have setup your personal Ethereum wallet and funded it with ETH (sent from the centralized exchange you purchased it, from your friend, from a cryptocurrency ATM, etc.), you are ready to buy VGC.
To buy VGC follow these instructions:
After making an account at https://vooglue.io/register , you will be prompted to input your valid Ethereum public address for which you control the private key. This is the address at which you will receive your VGC tokens. (See above for how to make this address if you don’t already have one.)
***DO NOT use an address from an exchange (like coinbase, binance, bittrex, kraken, etc). If you use an address from an exchange, you will not receive your VGC tokens because the exchange holds the private key to your address***
NOTE: Even if you intend to purchase VGC using Bitcoin rather than Ethereum, you still need to input a valid Ethereum address. VGC tokens are an ERC-20 standard token and as such are held and managed on the Ethereum public blockchain.
**If you have purchased Ether on an exchange (like coinbase, binance, bittrex, kraken, etc.) you must first send that Ether to the address for which you control the private key.**
Once you have accessed your ether wallet, you can send tokens to the VooGlue ICO contract address. Again, here are step-by-step instructions for setting up and using an Ethereum wallet with MetaMask if you don’t already know how.
Make sure to:
You can also purchase VGC tokens using Bitcoin. To do this you can send your BTC from any wallet. The address you send to will be displayed in the VooGlue investor dashboard at https://vooglue.io/token-sale/. Your VGC tokens will automatically be sent to the Ethereum address you setup when you registered in the dashboard.
At first you may be able to view your VGC in the dashboard at https://vooglue.io/token-sale/: If you cannot see your tokens follow the instructions here
Thats, when the VooGlue token sale has been completed, your VGC tokens will be visible on the Ethereum public blockchain. At that time an easy way to view the VGC in your wallet is to simply visit https://etherscan.io/ and enter your public Ethereum address into the box at the top-right.
In the “Token Tracker” drop-down box, you can see all of the ERC-20 Tokens that have been sent to your address.
***NOTE: Depending on the stage of congestion of the Ethereum network, it may take several minutes from the time you send Ether to the VooGlue ICO contract address until you receive VGC in your wallet.
Interest in the VooGlue token sale has been gaining steam since the launch of the pre-sale on January 19th. Over 1,000 buyers are now registered at http://vooglue.io/ico/ to be eligible to purchase VGC tokens, with the first million tokens offered at the highest bonus rate steadily selling out.
To celebrate this milestone, VooGlue is giving away 200 VGC tokens (valued at over $350 at today’s ETH price!) to three lucky winners! To be entered into the draw you must either:
Doing all three of these triples your chances of winning! The deadline to enter the competition is February 23rd and the winner will be randomly selected using http://www.randomresult.com/. Full terms and conditions can be found here.
The public sale of VGC tokens will run from March 21st for three months, with tokens being offered at a rate of 500 VGC per 1 ETH.
For the pre-sale, however, which runs until March 20th, significant bonuses are offered at a descending rate as tokens are sold. In the first stage of the pre-sale, 1 million VGC tokens are being offered at 80% bonus. This means that by purchasing 1000 VGC (for 2 ETH) you will actually receive 1800 VGC. An additional 10% bonus is applied to any purchase of 5000 VGC or greater. In this case, by purchasing 5000 VGC you will actually receive 9500 VGC. For the second million VGC tokens, the bonus rate is reduced to 70%, the third million to 60%, and so on. Full details of the token sale structure can be found here. You can register to purchase tokens here.
The VooGlue Token is listed as VGC and adheres to so-called “ERC-20” token standards. The ERC-20 standard establishes a common set of rules for tokens issued via Ethereum smart contracts. It currently serves as the basis for the majority of tokens that have been released through token generation events, often called initial coin offerings (ICOs).
By defining a common set of rules for ethereum-based tokens to adhere to, the ERC-20 standard allows developers of wallets, exchanges and other smart contracts, to know in advance how any new token will behave. This is the main reason VooGlue has chosen the ERC-20 standard.
VGC acts as the fuel for the VooGlue art ecosystem, facilitating the efficient buying and selling of art and granting access to the other features of the platform such as the “glued” digital multimedia counterparts, and affiliate marketing opportunities.
This is explained in detail in the VooGlue whitepaper.
Once you get cryptocurrency into the crypto-ecosystem, you can quickly and easily use it to buy VooGlue’s token.
Please visit our token sale page and follow the instructions. You can purchase with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cash using PayPal, credit card, and by bank transfer.
The pre-sale is behind held from January 19th to March 20th.
The public sale of VGC tokens is set to begin on March 21st and run for three months.
Volume Bonus
Timing Bonus – “first come best dressed”
There were 235 Initial Coin Offerings in 2017, raising a total of $3.7 billion. In the still largely unregulated world of ICOs, and with that much relatively “easy money” up for grabs, it’s not surprising that some of the 235 turned out to be scams.
Notable in its brazenness was a project called DeClouds, whose founder went so far as to photoshop a picture of himself seemingly giving a talk at UBS Bank after claiming to have a partnership with said bank.
Several projects were accused of running Ponzi Schemes. PlexCoin, which promised investors a more than 13x return within a month, had the dubious distinction of being the first target of the newly formed Cyber Unit of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December.
While the new funding mechanism enabled by the “Token Generating Event” has certainly attracted some bad apples, the vast majority of ICOs in 2017 were legitimate projects seeking to raise funds to kick-start valuable businesses. People who invested money in the best ICOs were handsomely rewarded, in some cases with much higher returns than even traditional first round venture capitalists have ever been able to achieve.
So moving forward into 2018, here are some tips to help not just avoid the scams, but also to choose a good overall ICO investment:
With so much euphoria for anything having to do with “blockchain,” scammers are simply throwing around buzzwords like “token economics” and “smart contract architecture.”
But with so many new concepts associated with this emerging technology, the only way to really know if the buzzwords make sense or not, is to put in the time and do the research. A serious investor will read whitepapers and Google everything they don’t understand.
If a project claims to be able to fix a huge problem practically overnight, consider that a red flag. Additionally, no serious team will ever make a price prediction about their token or claim it can bring world peace. The best teams clearly and soberly present their project, leaving it up to the investors to decide how valuable it is.
Check the project’s roadmap. Is it realistic? What needs to be done in order to achieve the goals on the roadmap?
Many token offerings give significant bonuses to early investors to kick-start investment. While this is often warranted due to the fact that earlier investors are considered to be taking on higher risk, if the bonus is too large, the project risks becoming a Ponzi scheme. If early investors receive huge bonuses, as soon as the tokens hit the market, they can simple dump their tokens at a profit and move on to the next project.
So in general, the lower the bonus given in the token “pre-sale,” the better for people who buy in at the “public sale.”
When you buy into an ICO, you should check that there’s a clause in the fine print stipulating that any funds raised are first held in escrow. The best projects lock up funds meant for development into escrow accounts with strict stipulations on how and when those funds can be released. This is often tied to reaching (or not) specific targets laid out in the roadmap.
One way to get a better idea of what a project is capable of, is to actually test out their working product. Many projects already have these; some are in beta stage, while some have been working outside of the blockchain environment for years and are in the process of being adapted to blockchain. Putting in the time to try them out will give you a much better idea of how far along the project is and, judging by things like the design and functionality of the product, how professional the developers are.
Many, if not most, blockchain projects are open-source. This means you can go to their github and actually look at the code. You don’t have to be an expert, or even really understand anything about coding at all. Just have a look at how much activity there has been recently. Is it an active community? How many people have been contributing?
The developer community lives on forums like reddit and bitcointalk. Many projects will open a channel on these platforms, giving anyone interested a chance to “Ask Me Anything.” Checking these forums is always a good way to gauge not only the legitimacy of the project, but also the level of community involvement. Additionally, many projects open a public Telegram channel (usually linked to from their website) where you can again ask questions to team members and see what other people are saying about the project.
This is a major consideration. Take the time to dig into the team member’s backgrounds. Check their Linkedin profiles, see how active they have been in the blockchain space and what other projects they have worked on. Are there any superstar team members?
Most new blockchain projects will also have a list of advisors. These people can be instrumental in the success or failure of a project, especially in its early stages. Some useful advisors that a project should have are:
ICO Advisor
This is someone who has already gone through the ICO process and can use their recently gained connections to help the project succeed at things like getting the token listed on top exchanges.
If the project is a decentralized casino that runs on the blockchain, having top players in the online casino industry as advisors is a huge plus.
Many blockchain projects open up a mountain of legal questions, so it’s crucial have a good legal team.
Ultimately there’s no substitute for putting in the time to do your due diligence before investing. That being said, there is a growing list of third-party resources that may advise you along the way.
The following website seek to advise on the quality of upcoming ICOs:
While these sites certainly contain valuable information, it can be hard to determine how independent the information presented is. It’s entirely possible for a project to pay such a site to be featured as a good investment opportunity.
In an attempt to solve this problem, platforms like Wings are being developed. In this blockchain platform, projects are scrutinized by a decentralized community of WINGS token holders. The goal is t crowd-source decentralized wisdom to give investors an unbiased prediction of how successful a project can be without having to research it themselves and without having to trust a single centralized entity.
This list of questions was published by the SEC in December in a long-awaited public statement about the legality of ICOs:
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be purchased in many ways but the majority of purchases and trades today occur on centralized exchanges. Entering the cryptocurrency ecosystem can be a little confusing. Once you have changed (fiat) cash into cryptocurrency, however, it becomes much easier to transfer from one currency to another. Most people enter the ecosystem by purchasing Bitcoin, as it has the most widely available options for purchase.
The following is a summary of ways to buy Bitcoin:
In most major cities there now exist a growing network of Bitcoin ATMs. To buy from an ATM you first need to create a “wallet” (see below), then insert cash into the machine. The machine then sends the purchased Bitcoin to your wallet.
It’s possible to actually physically meet a person, hand over cash, and receive the “keys” to purchased bitcoin, although this is rarely done in nowadays in developed countries. To purchase bitcoin in person you would confirm that the bitcoin has actually been deposited in your personal “wallet” before leaving/handing over the cash.
The next way is to find a seller online and purchase directly from that seller. The most popular site for this is localbitcoins. This site allows you to find people who are willing to accept cash transfers in exchange for bitcoin. In this case trust is established through reputation, so if you see that the seller has a high rating on the site, you can expect to actually receive the bitcoin once your money has been transferred to their account.
Using localbitcoins is more popular in countries that don’t have legal Bitcoin exchanges.
In order to improve convenience and reliability over the above two options, centralized Bitcoin exchanges have been established. In this case you must trust the reputation of the exchange. After the Mount Gox scandal of 2014, and in response to investigations relating to money laundering and the use of bitcoin in criminal activity, exchanges became more regulated starting in 2014. Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) policies were established so that before you can deposit dollars or any other fiat currency to one of these centralized exchanges, you now must submit personal documents to verify your identity. This process usually takes between a day and two weeks, and for some exchanges may involve extra security measures such as the receipt of a confirmation code to your home address.
Once you are approved with an exchange, you can transfer your fiat currency directly from your bank. When the currency has been accepted by the exchange, you can purchase bitcoin at the rates listed on your exchange. Bitcoin purchased on an exchange is held in a wallet created for you by the exchange. It’s worth noting that in this situation, the exchange technically has access to your Bitcoin in addition to you.
A growing list of exchanges now allow small purchases of bitcoin with the use of an approved credit card. This process can be slightly faster and more convenient than the above cash transfer process but still requires some form of verification and generally results in higher fees. If you plan on purchasing a small amount of bitcoin, this is probably the fastest, easiest, and most familiar way (if you already have a credit card).
Once you have moved fiat cash into the cryptocurrency ecosystem, it becomes significantly easier to exchange between currencies. This can be done instantly within centralized trading exchanges like Coinbase, Bittrex, Kraken and Binance.
Trading can also be done through decentralized exchanges like Shapeshift, which is built into the user interface of popular wallet applications like Jaxx, allowing you to instantly switch between supported cryptocurrencies within your own wallet. Completely decentralized exchanges that look like traditional trading platforms (with order books and price history) like Etherdelta have already begun, with many other exchanges planning to build or switch to the decentralized model. In the decentralized model, tokens are held in smart contracts until orders are matched. This means there is no chance of the exchange suddenly “going bankrupt” or otherwise disappearing with your tokens.
A bitcoin or cryptocurrency wallet is, as the name suggests, a place to store your bitcoin or cryptocurrency.
It’s easy (and free) to make a wallet, but the security of wallet you need to employ really depends on how much money you have in it and how comfortable you are with that amount of money.
Storing cryptocurrency securely can be a tricky endeavor for non-tech savvy investors. Therefore, most investors leave their coins in the digital wallets controlled by the online exchange where they purchased the cryptocurrency. This is akin to letting a company store your gold for you instead of storing your gold yourself. However, this is even more precarious because over a third of cryptocurrency exchanges have been hacked, and none of them offer deposit insurance.
It’s important to understand two key terms related to cryptocurrency wallets:
This is like your bank account number. If you want people to send you money, this is the address you’ll give them. It looks something like this:
1CC3X2gu58d6wXUWMffpuzN9JAfTUWu4Kj3k8Dbpv
This is your secret code – or key – for accessing the funds in your wallet. You need this key in combination with your public key / public address if you want to move your bitcoins or a portion of them to another wallet. This key must be kept secret, safe, and secure – and this is one of the bigger challenges that newcomers to cryptocurrencies face. Your options for saving your private key range from writing it down on a piece of paper to storing it in a vault. Typical private key looks like this:
5HpHagT65TZzG1PH3CSu63k8DbpvD8s5ip4nEB3kEsreAnchuDf
A convenient online wallet is probably the best option for small amounts of money. These include Electrum, Mycelium, BreadWallet, and Bitcoin Wallet.
Once set up, many of these wallets don’t require you to enter your private key in order to make transactions. They are apps that trust that the holder of the device is the one with permission to use the wallet and so work conveniently like other apps on your phone or in your desktop browser.
For Larger Amounts of Money, Security Is More Important:
In this case, you’ll want to follow some best practices related to the handling of your private key.
What Not to Do with Your Private Key:
The Safest Way to Store Your Private Key:
In an ideal world, you would never write your private key, not even on paper. If you trust yourself to memorize a string of characters like the one above, you are an impressive human being. If not, continue reading for your other options.
The Next Best Way to Store Your Private Key:
Write it down on paper. Put one copy in a safe in your house and the other copy in a vault in a bank. This way you’re protected unless your house burns down and the bank gets robbed at the same time.
An Additional Safety Measure:
You also have the option of dividing your key into two or more parts. This is called a multi-signature wallet. Doing this would mean that the only way access the funds would be to have both keys at the same time, thus allowing you to further diversify your risk.
If your wallet contains millions of dollars, it’s definitely worth it for you to take these steps.
Use a “hard wallet.”
A hard wallet like the Ledger Nano S or the Trezor is a piece of hardware about the size of a USB Thumb drive that you plug into your computer’s USB port.
This is a good option because it makes accessing not only your bitcoin, but also most other cryptocurrency wallets you may have, both safe and convenient. It does this by reducing all of your passwords to a single PIN that is, in fact, possible for a normal human like to remember. This means that you’ll be able to securely access your cryptocurrency accounts without opening your safe, getting that out that paper, and typing in the complex password you’ve created.
The PIN is used to access your accounts on a daily basis but it is still backed up by a longer and more complex password. If you lose or break your hard wallet, therefore, you will still be able to access your accounts. You do this by unlocking them with a pneumonic phrase that is generated when you first turn on your hard wallet (the pneumonic phrase should be saved in the same way as your private key as described in the steps above).
It is estimated that at least 10% of bitcoins currently in existence are simply “lost.” This means that the owners have misplaced their private keys in some way. The internet is rife with stories of people desperately searching for lost keys, including one man who is scouring an entire landfill to find a USB containing 7,500 bitcoins.
There are have also been numerous cases of people losing their bitcoin through phishing scams and possibly malware.
Holding cryptocurrencies is akin to carrying around not just a Swiss Bank Account in your wallet, but a whole Swiss Bank. But with this great power comes great responsibility. If you handle your private keys according to the best practices outlined above, you will never lose your tokens. If you’re not careful, however, you might lose everything, and there’s no help desk to call.
With over half a trillion dollars now invested in more than a thousand cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects, everyone should have a least a basic understanding of the mechanics of what many are calling the web 3.0.
One of the first big applications of blockchain technology is the ICO or “Token Sale,” which is a new way to raise capital that is disrupting traditional fundraising methods. With ICOs suddenly outpacing traditional venture capital funding by raising almost $4 billion in 2017, startups and investors around the world are taking note.
An ICO is often compared to an Initial Public Offering (IPO). The main feature that gives the ICO both greater potential for raising money and higher risk/reward for investors is that it allows a wider range of investors to gain earlier access to the investment opportunity. In the traditional model, by the time a company has made it to the IPO stage, it has already been heavily invested in by a small pool of connected venture capitalists and “angel investors.” Additionally, when the public offering is finally made, it is typically only available to retail investors who have access to the specific market it is available on (such as the NASDAQ). ICOs, however, can be made available to anyone anywhere, and contributions could theoretically be less than $1 each. With this kind of ease of access to investment, ICOs with little more than a website and a whitepaper have raised millions of dollars.
The first ICO was in 2014 but it wasn’t until 2017 that ICOs exploded in popularity. 2017 saw more than 10 times as much raised through ICOs as 2016. Out of the 25 highest crowd-funded projects of all time, 18 of them are blockchain companies.
The secure transaction of information across a distributed network of computers is possible because of “asymmetric encryption” a concept developed in the 1970s. This, along with peer-to-peer networking and distributed computing, combines to enable blockchain functionality.
The development of blockchain technology effectively solved the “double-spending problem” thereby enabling a safe peer-to-peer payment system. Double-spending is the digital version of counterfeiting currency. Blockchain transactions are logged sequentially in an immutable and slowly growing chain that is recorded on all of the “nodes” in the network (nodes are essentially computers that store and process transactions).
With counterfeiting eliminated in a peer-to-peer transaction, it is now possible to record transactions without the need for a “trusted” centralized authority to confirm that they are correct. This means that tokens issued in an ICO can be safely purchased by anyone with access to the rapidly growing cryptocurrency ecosystem.
A typical ICO offers tokens in return for currency invested. The token can represent some sort of value or be of value itself. Tokens that represent value are typically called cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin being the biggest example.The other way tokens are used is to power some form of functionality in the network. In the case of Ethereum, the Ether token is used to pay for the execution of smart contracts.
The power of blockchain technology lies in its decentralized and distributed “trustless” network which provides not only security, but also allows “perfect” economic behavior. Many blockchain projects are essentially designing new socio-economic systems that are built to incentivize positive behavior and unlock potential growth.
Imagine, for example, a decentralized version of Youtube:
Instead of the uploaded content being stored and indexed on centralized servers which act as gatekeepers, it would be stored on a decentralized network of computers operated by anyone, anywhere in the world. These people would be incentivized to use their computing power and storage space by offering them an economic reward, or token, which would become the currency of the network. People who watch content on the network would pay for it either by purchasing tokens or exposing themselves to advertising (advertisers would then be buying the tokens). Anyone who uploaded content to the network would be the owner of that content, and would receive all royalties minus the costs to run the network.
In this system, there is no owner of the network so there is no middleman taking a share of the profits. There is also no chance of censorship. Once the information is uploaded and agreed upon as correct by the consensus rules of the protocol, it becomes immutable because it is spread across computers all over the world. Making any changes would require agreement by everyone involved. Decentralized applications, therefore, eliminate the need for profit-taking middlemen while increasing users’ freedom, rights, and security.
Decentralized applications allow the true power of economic incentive to be unleashed. Instead of a centralized authority taking a significant portion of the value, individuals get a bigger share based on the value they bring. Individuals are therefore more incentivized to bring value to the platform than through an equivalent centralized platform. The result should be an overall increase in value.
What Kinds of Decentralized Applications Can Exist?
People are working on applications to decentralize everything from ride-sharing apps to home mortgages. There are decentralized projects that enable content sharing, cloud computing, real estate transactions, and of course value exchange.
Most of the proposed use-cases for blockchain projects will disrupt centralized industries. The point is to generate value, but not necessarily for the people who created the network. Most projects, therefore, reserve for themselves a significant portion of the tokens produced. These tokens are sometimes locked up until certain objectives in the development roadmap have been reached. If all goes well, the builders of the project should be able to profit by holding tokens that grow in value as the value of the network grows. Project builders are of course also well positioned to profit from the economics of the system they create. They can, for example, “mine” tokens themselves or otherwise participate in the network they have created.
Have questions about the Token sale? Post them in the comments, we are here for you.
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