Introduction:
Over the past few months, the number of new cryptocurrency coins and tokens have been skyrocketed, due to the increasing number of projects around the globe, that have adopted the blockchain technology. Coinmarketcap currently has over 1600 different coins and tokens listed with many more to come as they are still waiting to be approved. As by 2020 it is predicted that the number of crypto-users will increase to around 200 million, which is about ten times compared to the number of today, one have to think about possible trading platforms or exchanges to buy and sell their tokens.
The Problem Of Centralized Exchanges:
Most of the current existing trading platforms/exchanges such as Binance, Bitfinex, HitBTC and many more are centralized. Centralized means that the funds are controlled by the exchange, it's not anonymous at all and there are several risks, such as hacks that needs to be considered when trading on these platforms. The following graphic shortly describes the differences between a centralized and a decentralized exchange:
Besides That Centralized Exchanges Have Further Problems:
- Transparency: Most of the centralized trading platforms are not transparent at all. Investors and users mostly do not know if the funds are really used for its purpose or for something else. For now it was only based on trust.
- Risk to lose it all: Recent incidents have shown that exchanges are getting targeted for hacks more often than before (first Mt. Gox than Bithumb, Binance and many more). Security leaks not only comes with the risk of losing all the funds to hackers, but also losing funds to the exchange (for example Bitconnect) can be possible. Furthermore provided user-data, such as through KYC can also be easily leaked and be abused by others.
- Slow transactions: Many exchanges take a few hours for initiating a withdrawal. Especially cross-platform trades are nowadays very time consuming.
- High fees: The initial goal of a decentralized platform is to earn money from trading fees. Some even take fees for deposits and withdrawals. The fee highly depends on the platform but are quite significant when you are an active daytrader with huge amounts of transactions.
- Forced to be closed: No Compliance with regulatory policies could force platforms and exchanges to be closed as it has happened already in the passed.
Epiphany Tries To Solve These Problems:
Epiphany tries to solve the above mentioned problems by building a decentralized trading platform for digital assets based on the NEO blockchain. The decentralization aspect will offer transparency such as that all transactions on the blockchain can be recorded and reviewed by everyone, making it possible to create a credit score for every user. With Epiphany, the aim is to create a fair, secure and transparent platform for both, clients and platform. The highest security will be provided not only through two-factor authentication but additionally to that also through either fingerprint or facial identification or voice recognition.
Epiphany currently has a license in seven different states in America (those are California, Texas, North Carolina, Illinois, Arizona, Montana and Washington with more to come), which allows them to legally operate as a money transmitter. Thanks to the license, Epiphany will also be able to introduce the possibility of using fiat-money ( for example USD), which is seen as more secure than the current USDT (USD-Tether).
Additionally to that Epiphany aims to offer new projects to offer their asset on the platform, which will be enabling multi-platform trading. Main functionalities of the Epiphany platform will be not only a Trading Center, but also a Brokerage System, C2C and a Live News Feed.
No Public Crowdsale (ICO):
What is special about Epiphany is that the project has decided to not do an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), where the public crowd could participate in to receive EPN tokens. Only a private sale to angel investors and institutions was done, which resulted in 70% of a total of 500,000,000 EPN tokens being sold. The rest of the tokens, which equal to 30% of the total token amount will be distributed to the community (such as through airdrops or contests), consultants, FA institutes as well as the team. Instead the project aims to gain revenues through costs when listing an asset, small withdrawal and trading fees, as well as a service charge for contract trading.
Below You Can See The Token Distribution As Described, Summarized In A Graphic:
So What Are The Incentives To Hold EPN-Tokens?
Well so after getting a short introduction to Epiphany, one might ask what the purpose of holding EPN-Tokens actually is. With the idea of being decentralized, holding EPN tokens will grant the opportunity not only to participate, but also to vote and contribute to the ecosystem of Epiphany. Furthermore holders will have preemptive rights on projects in Epiphany on the secondary market. Lastly EPN holders get the benefit of paying less fees when trading and using the platform.
My Opinion:
As cryptocurrencies face more and more adoption in the upcoming years, I think that it is especially important to quickly find solutions for currently existing problems of centralized exchanges. Once people are realizing the advantages of a decentralized trading platform, I personally think that people will slowly moving to them. Already today we are seeing that decentralized trading platforms such as IDEX are gaining more and more popularity than the year before. Therefore I'm very excited to see, how Epiphany will handle things in the future. Stay tuned for further updates regarding the Epiphany project!
Further Information:
Want to know more about the Epiphany project? Take a look at their official website and their whitepaper for more information. Also subscribe to their official communication channels to stay up to date. Any questions, feel free to comment below.
Website: https://epnex.io/
Whitepaper: http://epnex.io/static/Epiphany%20Whitepaper.pdf
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EPNex
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EPNex.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/epnex
My Bounty0x Nick: @bumshak
Very interesting project. Thanks for sharing!
It is, glad you like the project.
Very interesting project. I also agree with you, that exchanges and trading platforms need to be decentralized. After all this is the initial goal of the blockchain technology, to cut out intermediaries and controlling entities. I think centralized platforms will be mainly used in the upcoming years with the increased number of crypto users.
Hey @lenahunter,
thanks for your great input. Yeah decentralization comes with a lot of advantages, especially on the site of the users. I also agree that people will shifting once they realize the advantages. Btw Epiphany had an airdrop ongoing for the past few months. Did you participate in it? You once told me that you participate in many airdrops :)
Oh yeah I did participate in it. SInce there is no public ICO, hopefully the tokens will be worth a lot :)
wow. decentralizing and making it transparent. good thing. And am very surprised to read that there are more than 1600 coins... This is a very interesting article. thanks again.
Thanks for your comment. Yeah the number of coins is still growing. I remember back a few years ago when cryptocurrencies weren't a thing like today, there were only like a few famous ones besides Bitcoin. Ethereum, Litecoin, Neo if I remember right. With so many coins, we are needing to have a decentralized exchange platform like Epiphany.
Thank you very much for posting this article. Every day I learn more about this topic
Thanks for your feedback and great to hear that.
Really useful information ! I am following you ! I also recommend you to check and participate in my contest: https://steemit.com/ethereumclassic/@coinsquad/ethereum-classic-price-the-coinsquad-cryptoprediction-contest-round-4-or-win-all-sbd-from-this-post
Thanks, I'll check it out!
thank you for the review. only selling tokens to private investors and institutions might be bad as well right? I mean they have some real power about this project now with high stakes
That's actually a very good point @sebo58. Thanks for mentioning it. I agree that private investors and institutions will have the upper hand. But as they will sell their tokens on the beginning, when the project is still fresh, I think that most of the tokens will be distributed among others as well, as the airdrop will already create a high number of unique token holders. With further adoption, the demand for EPN tokens will also increase, which results in private investors to sell more of their tokens. So yes, in the beginning they will control the market somehow, but later on it will be more distributed in my opinion.
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We need more decentralized exchanges. Otherwise we get controlled by the centralized exchanges way too much.
Agree on that. Thanks for your comment.
Super project!
This is one of my favorite projects on the Neo Ecosystem right now. I hope they will have a great impact soon!
Yeah I am super excited also.
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