STEAMRole aims to provide an ecosystem where students, professionals, corporate bodies, and organisations looking to invest in the education of the students meet. Rolecoin is the digital currency that powers this ecosystem.

Key Stats

ICO Platform   Stellar Lumens
Rating   4.32/5
Grade   A
Industry   Education Technology
Price   1 ROLECOIN = $0.1
Bonus   _______
Soft Cap   $10 million
Hard Cap   $35 million
Supply (for sale)   1 billion (350 million)

Let's decrypt RoleCoin Use Case

What Problem is RoleCoin Addressing?
Every year, billions of dollars are spent on developing STEM/STEAM-related (science, technology, engineering, art design, and mathematics) educational programs in a bid to improve the quality of the future workforce. While there has been some progress, a report released by Randstad in 2016 highlights how much more effort is needed. According to the report, the United States alone had over 3 million STEM job openings with no skilled workers to fill them.

Despite the huge amounts of money spent, this scarcity of STEM professionals points to a flaw/inadequacy in the system. Rolecoin offers a way to optimize the EdTech ecosystem, making sure amounts invested translate into tangible advancement.

RoleCoin Value Proposition
In order to provide young and fledgling students with easy access to professionals in their fields, STEAMRole launched a skill- and career-development mobile app, a platform where students can receive educational guidance, and career advice from professionals- role models-that walked the career path that they plan to. For example, a high school student that plans to become a Software engineer can receive advice and guidance from an engineer that already works at SpaceX. Additionally, STEAMRole offers individuals and organizations the opportunity to make donations and afterwards, track the effectiveness of their investments.

Rolecoin will be used on STEAMRole's platform to track proof-of-progress and the project's whitepaper describes it as "a digital currency that tracks, measures, and rewards the skill and career development progress of its recipient." Steamers (aspiring students) and Role Models are rewarded in Rolecoin for contributing to the ecosystem. Corporate partners pay in Rolecoin for access to the platform and an opportunity to contact emerging talents in their fields. Conversely, non-profit organisations, foundations, and impact investors get a platform that allows them to track the progress of the students that receive their donations.

RoleCoin Leadership Team
Founder and CEO, Clarence Wooten, founded VentureFund.io, a company that uses data to connect startups that need funding with investors using data. He was also a co-founder at Progressly, a company that helps projects find and execute business processes. He is joined on the team by Advisors: Roberto J. Rodriguez, Deputy Assistant for Education under President Barack Obama's administration, Yoli Chisholm, former Director of Digital Marketing at Microsoft, and Keith Teare, Founding Shareholder at TechCrunch among many others.

RoleCoin Target Market
Annual investments in STEAM-related educational programs exceed $100 billion according to Rolecoin's whitepaper. Given how flawed the current system is, if STEAMRole and Rolecoin succeed in providing a functional ecosystem that is beneficial to all participants, they stand to carve out a significant portion of a multi-billion-dollar market.

The more the platform is adopted, the higher the value of their token, providing early investors with an incentive to invest in Rolecoin.

RoleCoin Roadmap
The project plans to release a public beta version of the STEAMRole app by Q2 2018 and Rolecoin crowdsale is set to start on the 15th of June, 2018.

Their proof-of-progress dashboard is to be released in Q3 2018 and by Q4 2018, STEAMRole's aim is that Rolecoin will be accepted by online course providers as a viable payment option.

RoleCoin SWOT Analysis
Strengths

Rolecoin is powered by the Stellar Lumens blockchain, meaning instantaneous transactions, guaranteed security, and near-zero transaction fees.
Strong team.
Partnership agreement with Hewlett Packard.
Weaknesses

The project's hype and publicity could be better.
Opportunities

In a sector worth $100 billion, there is ample room for STEAMRole and Rolecoin to grow.
The inefficiency of the current system makes the sector ripe for the taking.
There are 5 prospective participants in the STEAMRole ecosystem, this may help the ecosystem grow faster.
Threats

They plan to raise $35 million during their crowdsale, a lofty ambition.
In conclusion, STEAMRole seems to have come up with a use case that addresses a pressing need in a lucrative sector. If in the future, their ecosystem turns out to be the steady source of professional talent that they expect it to be, Rolecoin will be the cryptocurrency at the heart of a million-dollar platform. It is an exciting thought. As always, however, prospective investors must exercise caution and remain informed on developments concerning the project.

If you enjoyed this article, please share it and follow us to get notified when we publish new articles like this.

Join our Telegram https://t.me/digitalassetdb_chat
Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/digitalassetdb
Read our 10 tips on picking the best ICO
Don’t miss the Most promising ICOs for 2018

This article was originally published on DigitalAssetDB

yes, let's see how QuarkChain can pull it off

QuarkChain aims at solving blockchain’s scalability issue without compromising security and decentralization. Its blockchain is scalable, permission-less, and decentralized.



Let's Decrypt QuarkChain ICO Use Case

What Problem QuarkChain is Addressing?
Although blockchain has been praised as the technology that will change the world as we know it, it has its limitations. Limitations that stand in the way of implementing and adopting this new technology. Three of the biggest obstacles the technology has to overcome before achieving widespread adoption by businesses bother around scalability, security, and decentralization.

Scalability: If you were in the crypto space around December 2017, when the price of Bitcoin spiked, as well as when the notorious Cryptokitties came onboard on the Ethereum platform, you’d agree that the network was highly congested. Transactions went unconfirmed for hours and days, and transaction fees also hit the roofs.

Now think about the number of transactions payment processors like Visa and Alipay handle every day in order to meet the demand of their customers. While Visa can handle about 45,000 transactions per second (TPS), and Alipay over 250,000 TPS, Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, which are legacy projects, can handle only 7 TPS, and 15 TPS, respectively. Shocking, right?

Blockchains currently does not have the infrastructure to un-sit these companies. Blockchains like Bitcoin are struggling to scale. And as we see increased adoption and increased transactions, there will be a need for larger storage, bandwidth, and computing power.
And while the Lightning Network has been hailed as the solution to the scalability problem, it introduces a centralized payment processing for a supposedly decentralized blockchain, thus threatening the future of blockchains that utilize it. In trying to scale the network, security and decentralization challenges arise.

Security: There is a notable security flaw in blockchains. Because of the ways blockchains have been built, if more than half of the computers working as nodes to validate the network decide to tell a lie, then that lie becomes the truth. This is known as the 51% attack, where a particular person or group of persons have the ability to manipulate the network. Although this is currently very unlikely because of the associated costs of setting up a mining pool with such computing power, breakthroughs in quantum computing can see this happen.
Decentralization: Blockchain transactions have been hyped as decentralized, and rightly so – meaning they are not controlled by any central government. However, in reality, we have seen the formation of mining pools, and organizing several nodes into voting blocks. This is a threat to the decentralized nature of blockchain because an uneven distribution of power (hashrate) creates a centralized system. In 2013 for example, the top 6 mining pools of Bitcoin had 75% of the coin’s overall hashing power. Now think about what happens if they secretly come together.

QuarkChain Value Proposition
QuarkChain aims to solve blockchain’s scalability problem. Their target is 1 million on-chain transactions per second. To achieve this, the project takes a two-layer structure. The first layer consists of “elastic sharded” blockchains, while the second is known as the root blockchain.
Elastic sharding will allow large databases to be partitioned into smaller, faster, and more manageable components known as data shards. Legacy blockchain projects currently have to deal with large databases as the network grows.
Shards from the first layer are then pushed to the root blockchain which confirms transactions (blocks). Interestingly, the second layer can be further sharded, without changing the root layer.

In addition to a two-layer structure, another unique feature of QuarkChain is market-driven collaborative mining which will add an extra layer of security. Put differently, 50% of the network’s hash power will be devoted to its root blockchain in order to prevent double spending attacks. Additionally, multiple, smaller, and cheaper nodes can come together to create a super node.
The bottom line of all these technologies is that QuarkChain will have 8 minor blockchains with a target block time of 10 seconds, as well as a root blockchain with a target block time of 150 seconds.

Other noteworthy features of QuarkChain is its efficient cross-shard transactions which comprises of in-shard and cross-shard options. For in-shard transactions the input and output addresses of the transaction are in the same shard. Cross-shard transactions on the other hand have their input and output addresses in different shard. Ideally, as the number of shards increase, the speed of cross-shard transactions will increase.

Developers can also deploy their smart contracts to QuarkChain because the network supports smart contracts running within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

The QuarkChain's Leadership Team
QuarkChain is made up of a team of 10 members and 6 advisors. The team boasts of individuals with adequate academic and working credentials. Some members of the team do not work full time and appear not to have an extremely blockchain-rich experience. However, we can cut them some slack on this, the technology is still new.

QuarkChain was founded by Qi Zhou who has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science. He is a software engineer and an expert in high performance systems, and carries over 15 years of development experience. He has experience working as a software engineer in Google, DELL, and Facebook (all notable companies).

Some other members of the team include:
ZhaoGuang Wang (Senior Software Engineer)
Ting Du (CMO for China)
Anthurine Xiang (CMO)
Kyle Wang (COO)
Highlighted below are some members of the advisory board working with QuarkChain
Leo Wang – Head of Pre-Angel VC and ardent crypto investor
Mike Miller – Liquid2 Ventures, Founder and Chief Scientist at IBM Cloudant
Bill More – Founder/CEO of DSSD
Arun Phadke – Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Virginia Tech

QuarkChain Target Market
For a start, QuarkChain is trying to solve blockchain’s scalability issues by significantly increasing the number of transactions per second. This will provide a congestion-free network that will facilitate the adoption of blockchain by big industries and businesses. This is not limited to social media, IoT, high frequency trading, gaming, and financial payments.
Top contenders in this space include Zilliqa, Kaadena, Ethereum, Thunder Token, Bitcoin, and several others.

QuarkChain Roadmap
QuarkChain already has an MVP. Their closed Testnet demonstrated a capacity of 2,000 transactions per second, which puts it ahead of most blockchain 3.0 projects with higher valuation. A public Testnet is expected in May, 2018.
Other milestones on their roadmap include Testnet 0.2 which will support features like smart contract, and reshard as well as 10,000 TPS. This is scheduled for the second quarter of 2018.

By Q4, they are expected to release QuarkChain Core 1.0, Mainnet 1.0, and Smart Wallet, with a target of 100,000 TPS. Achieving 1,000,000 TPS is expected to happen in Q2 of 2019.

QuarkChain SWOT Analysis
Strengths
- Working Testnet ahead of schedule
- Strong team and advisory board
- Positive MVP feedback
- Seamless integration with Solidity, which provides low barrier of entry to use the platform

Weaknesses
-No official partnerships
-Large number of tokens
-A promise of 1 million transactions per second seems far fetched
-Lack of very technical whitepaper

Opportunities
-Stiff competition trying to solve blockchain’s scalability issues. QuarkChain can become pace setters if they succeed first.

Threats
-Highly competitive landscape

In conclusion, QuarkChain has a novel idea because scalability is one of the key issues which stays in the way of mass adoption of blockchain technology. Finding a project that doesn’t compromise on security and decentralization while trying to solve scalability issues is a hard one. However, if QuarkChain is able to pull this off then they’ll be on their way to the moon.

If you enjoyed this ICO review, please share it and follow us to get notified when we publish new ICO reviews.

Join our Telegram https://t.me/digitalassetdb_chat
Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/digitalassetdb
Read our 10 tips on picking the best ICO
Don’t miss the Most promising ICOs for 2018


This article was originally published on https://www.digitalassetdb.com/quarkchain-ico-review-solving-blockchains-scalability-issue/

I found this on reddit and decided to share it here for those like me who struggle to screen through cryptos and their metrics. this we site offer the most advanced filtering on cryptos that i have seen yet.

https://beta.digitalassetdb.com/screener

I think volume movement is one of the most important if not the most important metric to watch out for...a sudden change in volume is sign of something happening...either a pump or coin getting more interest. the best way i found to watch volume increase rate is https://beta.digitalassetdb.com this tool monitor volume movement off all the coins and allow you to filter for coins that have moved for "X" percent in the last hour...very good to identify possible uptrends and get in early...

and to comeback to your question, it's a mixture of things...when you notice significant increase in sell volume that might be a trigger point

i use this site https://beta.digitalassetdb.com to find trade opportunities...this site is good at spotting early change in volume that usually end up in price spikes...

Thanks really insightful...

while doing my research i stumbled across this website...https://beta.digitalassetdb.com it looks quite good. the way their data is presented is very different from say coinmarketcap...am wondering tho how they get their data. what i dont like is sometimes the website load slow for me but i guess they state its in beta so that will be fix when they go live...

The crypto market is extremely volatile and knowing when something is going to the moon can be a maker or breaker for lot of new traders...you wanna buy something that is starting to climb and sell when it's high enough for your liking...the difficult part is avoiding to buy into something that is already overbought or 50% up and people looking to take profit. unfortunately with all the news and hype of X or Z coins up 100% around, most of us fall for FOMO including myself the only way avoid this is to get educated and doing more research i think...

how do you guys find early movers? would love to get your comments on this subjet