While half a million may not seem like much for traditional exchanges, it is much greater than the traditional trading volumes Openledger sees.
Openledger is simply an interface for individuals to interact with the Bitshares interface, and very rarely experiences the trading volumes that Peerplays has seen over the past several days. Peerplays is a project that has been live since June, and is expecting its first wagering DApp to be released over the following month. Peerplays utilizes the same underlying Graphene blockchain structure as Steemit and Bitshares, and has had many individuals involved with Bitshares and Steemit involved in many capacities of the project. The total supply of Peerplays is vastly lower than Steem or Bitshares, with a current total supply of under 6 million coins. The volume that the BTS to PPY has experienced over the past several weeks have driven the price to over $10, but the volume and interest that the market has received so far are even more exciting. Many very sizable orders worth over 10,000 USD have been executed over the past several weeks, and the market appears to remain extremely bullish. While these prices are higher than they were several weeks ago, they are nothing compared to their value after the Peerplays platform launches various wagering applications.
Peerplays remains one of the best investments for return in 3-6 months in my opinion, but I will be holding my stake for much longer than that. The really exciting thing about the massive volume and activity that the PPY market has seen is that Peerplays likely drove a lot of investors to the Openledger platform, because that is where the order books are large enough to support large investments and trades. While PPY will likely be listed on more centralized and popular exchanges in the upcoming months, it still has had a beneficial effect on the Bitshares network as well. Both Bitshares And Peerplays receive benefits from the other, and also allow the two communities to have an easier time being involved with the other. Long time holders of Bitshares likely paid significantly less than the current price for their Bitshares, which would enable them to acquire Peerplays at a lower price compared to someone buying Bitshares at the current trading price. As more networks and platform begin to come to life utilizing the underlying Graphene blockchain technology, existing projects such as Steemit, Bitshres, Peerplays, ect. all have a chance to benefit.
Due to the fact that PPY tokens haven't been picked up by any 'mainstream' exchanges, Bitshares has proven to be an excellent solution for the meantime.
While Bitshares sought out to solve the issues associated with centralized exchanges at the time, things have become much more 'professional' since then and individuals have much more faith in the security of their funds with registered exchanges. While these exchanges dominate the trading volume on the 'major' cryptocurrencies, many smaller or newer projects have a very hard time getting listed on big exchanges. Peerplays also utilized the Bitshares network for their initial funding and ICO rounds, and will likely only become more beneficial to the Bitshares network as a whole. Both projects are able to receive benefits from utilizing and allowing utilization by the other, and will also likely serve to increase the awareness and presence of the other to its own users. As we have seen with both Bitshares and Peerplays, Steemit serves as an excellent portal to communicate directly with users as well as traditional social media platforms.
While the overlap of users likely helps both the projects and the users, other blockchain networks having a presence on the Steemit platform can be incredibly beneficial for adding more valuable users to the Steemit platform. Very few blockchain platforms have chosen to utilize Steemit as a communications platform, and the ones that have are all 'connected' to Steemit through utilizing the same underlying Graphene technology. Peerplays has been able to attract the interest of many individuals from its use case rather than its aspects of blockchain technology, which could serve as a great introduction for many individuals to blockchain technology.
Graphene networks often have an over-lapping community, which benefits all projects involved.
The use of the same underlying Graphene blockchain technology also allows for witnesses and network producers to be a part of numerous projects, because the differences between operating nodes on the different networks differ only slightly. Due to the fact that network producers utilize the same name on all platforms, they are able to bring their 'reputation' with them from one platform to another. This has led to many individuals who are very skilled in creating and testing Graphene blockchain solutions throughout the community, as well as the core development team of the project. This type of community development is incentive through witness pay and other reward systems built into the system, and has led to Graphene networks being able to develop a much stronger community compared to other networks.
The DPOS structure of electing network producers on Graphene networks has also been a major factor in Graphene networks being able to develop strong communities, because network producers have incentive to 'prove themselves' to the community and maintain communication in order to remain as an active witness. Instead of POW networks like Bitcoin where block producers require no prerequisites other than having a sufficient level of computational power, block producers under DPOS networks need to have a necessary level of support from network stakeholders in order to remain an active witness. If witness are found to be acting in interests other than the networks, the stakeholders ultimately hold the power to remove the witness from their active position.
Stakeholders often have stake in numerous different projects, and are able to make determinations around block producers based on their research into the witness from all networks they are involved with. The ability to often have the same individuals as block producers on numerous networks actually is very beneficial, because it provides new projects with producers who are well versed in the technology and how to operate their respective nodes efficiently. So far the 2 big Graphene networks to have seen success have been Steem and Bitshares, but as more application specific Graphene networks like Peerplays continues to gain support the Graphene networks will likely be able to achieve even more attention and interest. While the release of the EOS platform may change or modify how the existing networks operate, the application specific Graphene blockchains will likely only continue to gain more and more attention. While each Graphene network has its own distinct and unique qualities, I believe that they can not only co-exist, but also benefit one another during the process.
I really hope that you enjoyed this post, and I urge you to leave any comments, questions, input, ect. in the comments below! Thanks for all of the support and for reading!
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