Learn about Bitshares! It's a blockchain financial layer :)

Sup everyone! How have you all been? Let's talk about Bitshares today!

Firstly, sry that I'm not blogging as much as I used to. I'm trying to take it easy for a month in Southern Thailand before heading back to the USA. Here's a view of my "office" for the next month.

Ok, back to work here.

So, one of the big reasons that I was able to comprehend the value of EOS very early (< $1) was b/c I understood the power of Bitshares). Remember, Bitshares was created in 2014 and @Dan envisioned it to be a serious competitor to Ethereum. The technology in Bitshares could support a much larger community and process multiple times more transactions per second (tps) than ETH. We, fellow Steemians, have benefited from the same DPoS technology.

Bitshares is a smart contract enabled blockchain, a decentralized exchange (DEX) and has a very mature financial layer (I'm not getting in to the governance side of things in this blog post).

Basically, you can create your own tokens, write smart contracts to manage the tokens, use the wallet as a decentralized exchange and take advantage of various other token instruments that track alongside the price of non-blockchain assets such as Gold, Silver, the USD and other global currencies.

Coming from an Engineering and Offshore Banking background, I was able to quickly appreciate the technical prowess and financial capabilities that Bitshares offered that no other chain was able to offer.

Here's a few screenshots of the Bitshares wallet and DEX.

Why did Bitshares not catch on and compete like Dan thought it would? I'm not entirely sure, but that's a topic for another post.

Now that I understood to capacity of Bitshares, I could envision a similar implementation inside of EOS. Basically acting as the "financial layer" to support the many, many tokens that will inevitably be created as the EOS ecosystem grows and attracts more developers, entrepreneurs and investment.

Another very cool aspect is that anyone can build their own wallet and decentralized exchange front-end for Bitshares, just like they can create a new website front-end for Steem. Currently, I'm writing this post on Busy.org, but I know that many of you will read it on Steemit.com. Two interfaces that interact with the same blockchain. You see this same thing in Bitshares. The "official" Bitshares wallet (the DEX) is one way you can store your tokens and use the exchange, but other wallets and exchanges can be built to interact with the same Bitshares blockchain. One example of this is "Cryptobridge".

Website: https://crypto-bridge.org/

From their FAQ: "What is the difference between CryptoBridge and Bitshares?"

CryptoBridge is not a fork of BitShares/Graphene, it runs on top of the BitShares blockchain, much like other BTS Exchanges do. However, there are two main differences to any other BitShares Exchange:

CryptoBridge provides more decentralisation when it comes to the gateways, normally a BTS Gateway is a central point of failure because the Gateway is just operated by the company owning the exchange. The user is dependant on the gateway to deposit/withdraw his funds. In CryptoBridge, a federated distributed network of gateways, operating world-wide, makes sure that there is no single point of failure whatsoever. In fact, this network will continue to operate if CryptoBridge (the development company) goes out of business.

The second USP is the introduction of the BridgeCoin Profit Staking coin which shares 50% of the DEX with holders. No other BitShares exchange offers a mineable token.

See there? Isn't that awesome?! We may get in to what bridges and gateways are later.