What is BitShares Blockchain?
BitShares Blockchain is a decentralized “Blockchain as Organization” (BaO); an industrial-grade decentralized open source platform built to run high-performance financial technology operations. It represents the first decentralized autonomous decentralized community that enables its core utility token (BTS) holders to decide the Blockchain future direction in order to develop and maintain a wide range of decentralized financial technology products, features and functions. BitShares Blockchain is a Blockchain that permanently records financial technology operations between different Blockchain accounts and facilitates a wide range of access controls across BitShares Blockchain user financial means.
BitShares Blockchain is a technology that supports the digital generation entrepreneurs, investors, and developers with a common interest in building and participating in free market solutions by leveraging the power of globally decentralized consensus and decision making. Consensus technology has the power to do for economics what the internet did for information. It can harness the combined power of all humanity to coordinate the discovery and aggregation of real-time knowledge, previously unobtainable. This knowledge can be used to more effectively coordinate the allocation of resources toward their most productive and valuable use.
BitShares looks to extend the innovation of the Blockchain to all industries that rely upon the internet to provide their services. Whether its banking, stock exchanges, lotteries, voting, music, auctions or many others, a digital public ledger allows for the creation of distributed autonomous companies (or BaO) that provide better quality services at a fraction of the cost incurred by their more traditional, centralized counterparts. The advent of (BaO) ushers in a new paradigm in organizational structure in which companies can run without any human management and under the control of an incorruptible set of business rules. These rules are encoded in publicly auditable open source software distributed across the computers of the companies’ shareholders, who effortlessly secure the company from arbitrary control. BitShares does for business what bitcoin did for money by utilizing distributed consensus technology to create companies that are inherently global, transparent, trustworthy, efficient and most importantly profitable.
BitShares has went through many changes and has done its best to stay on top of Blockchain technology. BitShares is using Consensus as the mechanism by which organized people decide upon unitary rational action. While not considered technology in the traditional since, consensus “technology” is the basis of democratic governance and the coordination of free market activity first coined by Adam Smith as the “Invisible Hand.” The process of consensus decision-making allows for all participants to consent upon a resolution of action even if not the favored course of action for each individual participant. Bitcoin was the first system to integrate a fully decentralized consensus method with the modern technology of the internet and peer-to-peer networks in order to more efficiently facilitate the transfer of value through electronic communication. The proof-of-work structure that secures and maintains the Bitcoin network is one manner of organizing individuals who do not necessarily trust one another to act in the best interest of all participants of the network. The BitShares ecosystem employs Delegated Proof of Stake in order to find efficient solutions to distributed consensus decision making.
What is BitShares Blockchain core token (BTS)?
BitShares Blockchain core token (BTS) is the core operations utility which is used as the fee to submit transactions over BitShares Blockchain; it is also used for BitShares Blockchain development purposes; while (BTS) core token holders are in power to manage and develop BitShares Blockchain to influence its future through several Blockchain integrated built-in decentralized voting functions in order to issue utility to developers for their submitted and approved worker proposals, also to assign committee members for maintaining Blockchain dynamic parameters and vote witness nodes (Blockchain nodes) that will be validating live transactions.
Who are the founders of BitShares?
BitShares Blockchain was launched on 13th October 2015 with an agile community efforts since 2013 to build an industrial-grade decentralized Blockchain platform that is capable to process high-performance financial technologies that serves the individual financial freedom.
BitShares Blockchain was co-founded by some of the cryptocurrency industry's biggest names, these include:
Daniel Larimer, an accomplished software engineer and the co-founder of several other prominent blockchain ventures including EOS.IO, Block.one and Steemit. Larimer is an esteemed name in the cryptocurrency space and is widely regarded as one of its leading innovators.
Charles Hoskinson, an entrepreneur and mathematician who is one of the original eight co-founders of Ethereum — the second most successful blockchain platform (behind Bitcoin). Today, Hoskinson works as the CEO of Input Output HK (IOHK), the research and development company behind Cardano (ADA).
As of January 2021, the BitShares core team consists of 17 permanent workers, supported by more than 60 long-term contributors — covering a range of disciplines including economics and legal, to systems admins and highly skilled developers.
What are decentralized products supported by BitShares Blockchain?
- Decentralized Exchange (DEX).
- Decentralized User Issued Asset (UIA).
- Decentralized Market Pegged Asset (MPA) or Smart Assets (Smart Contracts).
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
- Decentralized Liquidity Pools (LP) and Automated Market Maker (AMM).
- Decentralized Prediction Market (PM).
- Decentralized Non-Fungible Token (NFT).
How many BitShares (BTS) utility tokens are there in circulation?
In the genesis block of BitShares Blockchain a total of 2,412,042,197.37963 BTS have been distributed to individual keys accordingly. These (BTS) can still be claimed by proving ownership of the corresponding private key. The (BTS) token comes with a limited supply that is different from circulating (liquid) supply.
A max supply of 3,600,570,502.10207 (BTS) has been put in place on the Blockchain. This can never change. The difference of initial roughly 1.1B was set aside for future project funding and rewarding block producers, and is only accessible with approval by the (BTS) holders through the worker system. This so called working budget is also often referred to as reserves. It is worth noting that revenues made from transactions fees are not shared with holders of (BTS) but instead go back into the working budget to further allow future development. There is no reward for holding the core (BTS) token in any way.
As of January 2021, there were just under 3 billion (BTS) in circulation. This is equivalent to 83% of the maximum (BTS) supply — making it highly diluted.
BitShares was initially funded by community investments totaling 5,904 BTC, as well as 415,000 ProtoShares (PTS) in 2014. At the time, this was worth around $3.6 million.
The full Core Token (BTS) tokenomics is publicly available and verifiable over Blockchain blocks.
How is BitShares Blockchain network secured?
This system reduces the need for multiple transaction confirmations, ensuring BitShares transactions can be finalized extremely quickly. Instead, delegates (known as witnesses) are responsible for producing and broadcasting blocks, with numerous safeguards in place to ensure these witnesses act in the best interests of the network.
The most essential part of Blockchain technologies is here referred to as Blockchain protocol. It defines the behavior of the entire system including consequences and side-effects when processing transactions. Users utilize particular features by crafting a transaction that contains a particular letter-of-interest (also referred to as operation).
Since the Blockchain, as a storage, only stores incremental changes (e.g. transfers), the final balance of each account together with other information needs to be tracked separately in the so called current state. It is important to note that the protocol is deterministic in the sense that the very same state is generated when applying the same sequence of operations (as provided by the Blockchain). This makes Blockchain technologies tamper proof and auditable.
In BitShares, over 50 operations are available (as of early 2018). Each of them hooks into the Blockchain protocol at least three times:
Validation: During validation, the raw instructions (sometimes referred to as payload) are checked for consistency. E.g., in case of a transfer, we ensure that the amount to transfer is positive. Evaluation: In the evaluation step, the operation-specific instruction is validated against the current state of the Blockchain. In case of a transfer, we here ensure that the amount to be transferred is available in the account of the sender. Application: This step takes action in the sense that it modifies the current state. In the case of a transfer, we here reduce the account balance of the sender and increase the account balance of the receiver according to the amount of tokens transferred. Example: Transfer operation
Consider a simple transfer operation that sends funds from one account to another. Here, the protocol defines the validation rules such that negative amounts are prevented. The evaluation ensures that the sender cannot transfer more than what is in his account balance. When applying a transfer from Alice to Bob, Alice is credited the transferred amount while Bob receives the amount. Here, transfer refers to the operation type, while the sender, receiver, and amount refers to the operation-specific instructions. Obviously, different operation types come with different instructions.