Being around cryptos in a bear market is a humbling experience! As this bull market is a first for me, it is even more so humbling! It is taking me some time to get used to! But the whole experience is fascinating nonetheless! It's like throwing stones in a pond and the waves just keep getting bigger and bigger! All you have to do is ride it and get off at the right time! But in my case, that is an element of trading I am very poor at! One might even say I lack perspective and have poor judgements!
I have already written a post about IOST a few days back! How I scalped it and for the first time ever, my TA worked on its chart! Well it was more intuition and following the advice of veterans, yet it had worked! But it worked only for so long! Over the last week, IOST has dropped more than 120% from its ATH! And I have lost every last cent of the profit I made from IOST due to inexperienced mindless HODL! As dada had said, we have seen HIVE at its worst and survived. so it's nothing major! Yet one has to know when to get out! So I did a bit of digging of my own! To see how solid the project is! What its worth and if its a good idea to hodl in the future!
What I looked at first was the project itself! It is another blockchain based ecosystem in the list of many! While reading their whitepaper It felt like their inspiration at a certain point was Dan Larmer! The legend himself! In itr they say that PoW is too energy consuming and PoS/DPoS both are malleable to scammy and spammy aspects of the technology. So they have created a system called PoB, abbreviated as proof of believability which is based on reputation and behavior of a node/validator. Their consensus algorithm is split into smaller portions which runs in parallel which is massively scalable. The nodes,validators are kind of like Hives own witnesses. In IOST ecosystem they are elected by voting to run the system! And there are some more details like Micro Blocks and Efficiently Distributed Sharding etc which a developer might be able to speak more about!
Creating an account in their mainnet is similar to hives! There is a chrome extension just like ours which keeps the keys safe! It's called Jetstream chrome wallet extension! Frontend wise, they have developed a stable enough system! If you want yourself to open an account, here is a guide for you!
There are multiple ways to create an IOST mainnet account. Here are the popular ways:
Via TokenPocket Mobile Wallet (Costs Only 150 IOST) roughly 4.5 dollar as of now!
Via Sonata Website (New & Free)
Via Jetstream Chrome Extension Wallet (Free)
Via Citadel Wallet (New & Free)
Now the million dollar question the answer to which I was looking for was how far the whole project, not just the front ends, has developed! And to find that, we have to look at their dapps!
IOSt dapps listed as in Dapp.com
As of right now, there exists 44 Dapps in total on the chain! Among the top five, three are liquidity pools, swaps, finance and two are exchanges! Quite impressive to be honest! And the rest are mostly games in manadarin, gameplays i couldn't understand! and the rest are mostly open source projects!
From what I have found, i can conclude that the project seems stable as they have big league names like Huobi and Sequoia invested in it! And the dip right now was natural as the rally happened after the announcement of donnie finance airdrop! As the snapshot has been taken on 25th feb, previously to which it was massively overbought, a decline in price was only natural! even then, my intial buy in was at 3.5 and 3.8 cents respectively! in terms of pnl, it might seem big, but it is not! Which is why I will hold my position for the time being! This is not any financial advice, only my opinion!