Since the inception of Bitcoin in 2008, we have seen a rapid rise in the use and trading of cryptocurrency. This becomes especially evident when analyzing the number of coins in circulation. In 2015, there were “only” 500 coins, whereas there are over 2000 coins trading today. Although skeptics said that crypto would never take off, the market did not plummet, and awareness is at an all-time high.
If in the beginning crypto was something that only tech-savvy people and certain investors cared about, now, regular people buy and sell crypto. Some businesses have even started accepting crypto as a valid payment method, so crypto and fiat currency are finally coexisting. Especially since the covid pandemic, we’ve seen a rise in the trading of coins and a shift of people to use the technology.
A cryptocurrency tracker can provide an overview of your holdings across coins and wallets, making it a strong technology to leverage.
What makes crypto an attractive asset?
While there are roughly 200 million users that own and trade digital assets today, the true value to be untapped is in the number of unbanked. With unbanked, we refer to a large group of people, mostly from disadvantaged territories, that do not have a bank account. For these unbanked people, things that we take for granted, such as sending and receiving money from their loved ones, or paying the bills, become tedious tasks.
As to the reasons why so many people don’t have access to banking services in poor countries, we can narrow it down to issues such as lack of liquidity and the lack of identification and birth certificates. This is the group that cryptocurrencies are indicating to provide the most value to. They can simply create a wallet and start to transact across platforms without the need for funds or identification.
For example, people who work in the West can easily make secure money transfers to their relatives at home without paying prohibitively high fees or worrying about security. Of course, the benefits of cryptocurrency go much further than that, and, from an investing standpoint, crypto has the potential for high returns, greater protection, immediate settlement, and greater liquidity.
Staking as part of the network
With the negative publicity around Bitcoin and the energy consumption in particular, networks are looking to shift away from the intensive Proof of Work consensus mechanism. This mechanism requires solving very complex calculations to solve a cryptographic problem, which is combined with a batch of transactions. The user in the network that solves the problem first can append the transactions to the blockchain and is rewarded with coins for maintaining the network.
The downside? Lots of users try to calculate the same thing! This is the reason why networks, such as Ethereum are now switching to Proof of Stake. This mechanism simply lets users with a stake in the network validate transactions. The probability that they are allowed to validate depends on how large their stake is. Similar to Proof of Work, the ones that validate the transactions are rewarded with coins.
The end of the bank and the rise of the tracker
Cryptocurrency wallets promise to bring significant changes to the way we transact. However, with many coins out there, you have multiple bank accounts (i.e., wallets) from different coins. To have a real-time holistic overview of your holdings, a cryptocurrency tracker can help. Here you can share your public key, and the tracker will integrate the holdings in real-time.
The upside is the level of security: you only share the public key, meaning the tracker only deals with publicly available information. This can be combined with other asset classes such as bonds and stocks of companies. If you care about diversifying your portfolio, having all your assets in one place will make it easier to manage them and have a clear overview. Since you keep the holdings inside your wallets, you can still participate in the staking of coins.
Delta.app as an exemplary tracker
One of the examples of a cryptocurrency tracker is the Delta.app. This is a tracker that integrates with both traditional assets such as stock as well as a majority of the cryptocurrency brokers and wallets.
