BitShares is a public, permissionless and blockchain based financial platform that is built upon the Graphene blockchain and has smart contract functionality. BitShares main feature is a decentralized exchange (DEX) where you can issue and trade your own tokens or create so-called “smart coins,” these are assets that are pegged to real-world assets, for example, the dollar.
These assets are called Bitassets, for example, BitUSD and are pegged to the nominal value of their counterpart; this creates price-stable assets. Also, more advanced options like margin-trading are available at BitShares DEX. Additionally, constructs like BitGold or BitOil are possible.
What differs BitShares from other Cryptocurrencies?
How much is BitShares worth today??
Where can you buy BTS?
Can BTS be sold for cash?
The ecosystem is managed by a Decentralized Autonomous Company (DAC), this allows BTS holders to decide on the future development of the BitShares platform. The underlying asset of the BitsShares ecosystem is called BTS, and BitShares has proven that it can handle more than 3400 tx/s.
BitShares uses delegates Proof-of-Stake as consensus mechanism, this is a mechanism where users “delegate” their stake to elected “Witnesses” who then bundle transactions and attach a block to the blockchain. The block time is between 1.5 and 3 seconds, and the block reward is 1 BTS. The source code of BitShares is completely open-source.
BitShares was created by Dan Larimer (co-founder of EOS and Steem) and Charles Hoskinson (co-founder of Ethereum and Cardano). Dan Larimer had the idea in 2013, and Charles Hoskinson helped him by vetting, and he developed a business plan.
Hoskinson presented the concept to Chinese tycoon Li Xiaolai, who agreed to fund the development. On 04. July 2013 they founded the company Invictus Innovation.
Soon later, Hoskinson and Larimer parted ways.
Larimer realized that the development would take some time, so he created BitShares PTS (ProtoShares), a Bitcoin-clone whose tokens could later be swapped to BitShares when the development would be finished.
In 2014 BitShares collected 3 600 000 USD in BTC and Protoshares to further fund development. On 13 October 2015 BitShares has evolved to BitShares 2.0.
No, it uses dPoS as consensus mechanism. Therefore it cannot be mined but staked.
BitShares aims not be a normal cryptocurrency. Instead, it provides a whole decentralized financial ecosystem. It was the first to implement dPoS, which was invented by the BitShares founder Dan Larimer.
One of the unique features of BitShares is that your wallet address is your username, this is a great improvement in usability.
The maximum supply of BTS is 3 600 570 502 and the circulating supply at the time of writing is 2 623 360 000 BTS.
You can buy BTS on several cryptocurrency exchanges, most notably Bittrex, Huobi and Bitshares Asset Exchange.
BTS cannot be sold for cash at the moment. You can exchange BTS for BTC or ETH and sell them for cash.
Development is active, although Dan Larimer is now devoting his time to EOS.
Dan Larimer seems to have abandoned the project and moved on the EOS. Not good from an investors perspective. Apart from that, it is a very innovative project that paved the way for many that came later. It introduced delegated Proof-of-Stake and was one of the first decentralized exchanges, and it provided the functionality to create digital assets that are pegged to the value of real-world assets through a collateral system. It was valuable to the whole space, and it was a real innovation.