MasterCoin: Building a Brand for Your Blockfolio

Everyday I receive messages on Discord from spammers and invitation competitors, sending me links to their new coins. It is generally the same message over and over: it is the greatest, most revolutionary, cannot miss opportunity to earn some big money. Most of the claims are baseless and are a waste of your time. With so many projects out there claiming to be amazing, it is getting harder to tell which projects you should invest in and which are just smoke screens for a coming exit scam.

In order to separate your project from the crowd, you need to elevate your project above the rest. The easiest way to do this is to make a legitimate project, an experience, and a hub of services. There are projects out there that when you look at them, you just get the sense that this is too much work to be a scam. There are easier ways to steal people’s money. Scammers almost always take the path of least resistance, that you can be sure of.

MasterCoin

That cannot be said about MasterCoin. A new platform that plans to disrupt a number of niches within cryptocurrency. An ambitious plan that feels achievable once you dig further into the project and the work that has already been done. In my last piece about Trittium, I spoke about how the next 18 months of crypto are going to be all about utility. MasterCoin is a continuation of that coming wave of projects.

The most important thing to know about MasterCoin is that it is not just a coin. Yes, the cryptocurrency itself will attract investors initially, but they will stay for everything else MasterCoin has to offer. MasterCoin, MasterSafe, MasterPool, MasterDEX; and that is just what has been announced thus far. With so much to entice investors to stay, MasterCoin needs to do only one thing to be successful: execute.

We will start with the coin, aptly named MasterCoin. A Proof-of-Work(PoW)/Proof-of-Stake(PoS), tiered masternode hybrid based on the NeoScrypt algorithm. A block time of 100 seconds and a maximum coin supply of 80 million. Hyperinflation is a non-issue with this maximum supply and the 100 second block time ensures a slow, steady release of newly minted coins into circulation. Block size and premine amount are also attractive; 4 MBs in size and a 5% premine for operational costs including listings, bounties, and marketing.

If you have read my previous writing about masternodes, you will know that I am not a big believer in tiers. It is an enticing prospect for investors, but most of the teams who use them do not calculate the reward amounts and emission rates properly. This leads to hyperinflation and greedy investors incessantly asking for a new, higher tier for bigger rewards. MasterCoin plans on a simple 3-tier masternode structure. It will be vital that the team spends a significant amount of time running simulations about how each tier will be rewarded and how often. Any vulnerability will be recognized and exploited by investors.

I am not as concerned with the tiered nature of this coin’s masternodes because it has so many use cases already planned and in development. Most of the tiered masternodes that I have seen are either weak or purely speculative with a very short expiration date before the project crumbles due to hyperinflation. MasterCoin aims to finally do tiers right.

Use Cases

Utility is the name of the game, and MasterCoin has three planned already. MasterPool, MasterSafe, and MasterDEX. The last one is the most ambitious but all three are poised to keep MasterCoin relevant for potentially years to come.

MasterPool

With the explosion of Masternode and PoS coins, there are more and more platforms offering pooling and shared masternode services. As more enter the market, name recognition will be increasingly more important when investors try to choose who will hold their crypto assets. Having an entire brand to back the service, investors should gravitate towards MasterPool as a preferred choice for trusted, consistent pool services.

MasterSafe

Currently there is not a lot of information listed on the website about the Safe product. A bit more information can be found in the White Paper. What is proposed is a cloud-based secure wallet platform that allows users to pay a small fee in return for storing their crypto assets instead of running their wallets on their home computers. The MasterSafe includes both hot and cold storage wallets to increase security. Also mentioned is the ability to earn interest on the holdings, but the means in which that interest is earned has not been expanded on with the current information. Something to keep an eye on as it presents another, small revenue stream for investors.

MasterDEX

The future of cryptocurrency exchanges are decentralized exchanges, or DEXs. These exchanges make it much hard for hackers to gain access to the wallets and drain them. Another important feature in DEXs are the ability to see the order book and usernames for those orders, like on Crypto-Bridge. This reveals nefarious activities like volume or price manipulation by users, even team members of certain coins. All things that need to be thwarted in order for a project to be taken seriously.

The exchange proposed for MasterDEX will be a centralized/decentralized hybrid. The goal here is to provide a fast and stable exchange that is also much more secure than purely centralized exchanged. Like the MaterSafe, the DEX will also include both hot wallets for transacting and cold wallets for inactive users to increase security.

Also stated on the website is that the team will forego all the bells and whistles for the basic exchange, most of which just muddy and slow down the transactions. A straight-forward, clean approach that emphasizes easy to execute trades; nothing more is needed for a strong exchange. In addition to this streamlined user interface, MasterDEX will offer a more advanced, in depth user interface for more experienced traders as well as the planned launch of a margin trading feature to continue the exchange’s growth.

The Wrap Up

MasterCoin is still deep within its development. As you can see from the Roadmap, the plan is very ambitious over the next six months. Progress bars are filling up though and the six months ends with the planned development and launch of the three main use cases discussed earlier. Having explored the website, the information written about the project, and its Discord Community, I can say with confidence that this Roadmap is just a small snapshot of the bigger plan that the team has for MasterCoin.

On July 26th, MasterCoin team completed a Team Identification Review through Know Your Developer (KYD). This new project is the next step in safeguarding investors from development teams who exit scam. I will cover the KYD platform more in the coming weeks. MasterCoin was the second project to complete their review process and should be a buoy for investor confidence.

If you would like, dive deeper into the White Paper to read more about MasterCoin and its planned features. It is well written and expands on the details of the project, its planned features, and a breakdown of how the 5% premine will be allocated. These are important details for smart investors to consider before investing into any project.

At the end of the day, cryptocurrency remains a precarious venture. Projects come and go, but a brand will last. Branding is hard for any industry, but the one that can achieve that level of recognition is well on their way to success. And that is what MasterCoin aims to achieve. Not only will this platform offer multiple use cases within a year of its launch, including an exchange that could attract millions of dollars in daily volume, but its ambition lies in its plan to introduce a new brand to cryptocurrency. The MasterCoin brand.

Website: https://mastercoin.one/

Github: https://github.com/mastercoinone/mastercoin

Discord: https://discord.gg/YAhdSKb

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MasterCoin_one

BitcoinTalk ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4567811.0