Questions
Why hasn’t Giant used the popular initial coin offering (ICO) mechanism? Why does Giant think creating its own blockchain is a better idea than using the Ethereum network? We’ve been receiving these questions regularly and most believe using an ICO or the Ethereum blockchain would’ve optimized the creation of the Giant.Exchange platform. In this document we would like to clarify Giant’s decision towards making for better security, scalability and stability.
Security
It is no secret that Ethereum, while being one of the cryptocurrency market locomotives, still suffers from security issues. With Solidity - the programming language of Ethereum smart contracts, crippling problems like Immutability, reentrancy attacks, pilfering are now common knowledge. Millions of dollars lost from Ethereum’s second most popular wallet Parity, a stark reminder of these issues. With Giant, it made sense to design a financial system without inheriting the mistakes of the past.
DApps first
Additionally, Ethereum smart contracts do not fully respond to the needs of the upcoming binary options exchange - the most notable of them is the deletion restriction. Our system will clear itself of any old binary options which were closed long ago and did not raise any questions from the community since then. This measure will provide a great help in the ongoing process of the system scalability improvement - as the time will go on, we are not going to see database overloads caused by the obsolete information.
Typical Giant smart contracts will be easier to reprogram for various trading purposes - you can read more on our special ‘Binary option’ and ‘Oracle’ smart contracts in Doing Business on Giant.Exchange.
The Giant products - Giant.Exchange, Giant.Bet and Giant.ColdStake - are aimed at the new markets, and two of them are focused on bets. Giant Coin was never considered a magic ‘Bitcoin killer’ or ‘Ethereum killer’ - its economic environment is made in such a way that GIC will become a good payment tool in these applications (DApps). Our own digital currency will make the current smart contract infrastructure possible to appear. The experienced senior Devs at Giant recognize how to achieve this with minimum efforts, highest standards and maximum value. As a result, Giant development is moving faster than most realise aiming to complete milestones ahead of schedule, like the recent move to PoS.
Less crypto hype, more actual business
The current market of digital currency is far from ideal - the news based on the rumors are capable to serve as a catalyst for coin price motion. Social engineering schemes such as ‘pump-and-dump’ are increasing the uncertainty among all crypto investors - potential and active alike. The Giant economy must not be harmed by this unhealthy situation. In order to become a good means of payment, the cryptocurrency used in Giant.Exchange must not be volatile - and this cannot be said about Ethereum with its yearly price motion...
Source: Coinmarketcap.com
This graph visibly illustrates that Ethereum, while having the system of smart contracts, cannot ensure the safe future of Giant.Exchange and other projects.All ICO projects which use the Ethereum platform depend on the coin price news. In addition, ICOs may or may not release their projects after raising the money. The whole ‘first money, then product’ principle leaves a great room for various fraud schemes.
Even Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin himself criticized the current mechanism of initial coin offerings, warning that 90% of them would eventually collapse. Not even the fact that most ICOs are based on Ethereum has stopped his correct remarks.
Giant has been launched with the direct founders’ investments. Afterwards, the mastenode portfolio has been covering the current expenses. Our team wants the project to succeed no less than all other network participants.
The stable price of Giant Coin (GIC) will depend on several factors. First of them is the high level of project management, the second long-term aspect is competition with similar projects in the field of binary options and betting. Both these fields are still very new for blockchain developers, but it’s only a matter of time before someone else decides to create platforms similar to Giant.Exchange and Giant.Bet. In fact, there are already some Ethereum-based binary options projects and they were thoroughly analyzed by the Giant team. This is why we should be ready to implement new upgrades and increase usability to stay relevant.
More decentralization equals more benefits
When we are imagining decentralization, hardly anyone of us thinks of hundreds of projects based on only one blockchain structure such as Ethereum. Another argument for the Giant independence would be interesting for those who actively follow the market evolution: we can state with certainty that the Giant blockchain had summarized the best from the current leaders. Previously, these innovations were used separately in different projects.
One of such inventions is the wide system of masternodes. The modified legacy structure from Dash solves one of the most pressing issues - investors are becoming separable from the project creators and this prevents the conflict of interests. The distributed emission does not allow anyone to have a monopoly over the coin emission and thus potentially dictate the economic will to network newcomers. The development team doesn’t have the network majority, this is why it has a solid reason not to fail the expectations of other community members. As a result of this measure, the Giant blockchain and all projects based on it will get a community with a natural interest to keep the whole decentralized enterprise in a healthy state. Many of the readers might have already deduced where this is going: Ethereum doesn’t have masternodes, and choosing its blockchain would have erased everything we just described.
We have already described the benefits of decentralization: voting and proposals system will make sure that the democratic majority has approved every new change. This greatly varies with what we are seeing on traditional Web platforms for content creators and social media: their owners with an undisputable authority can change the interface and other key features at will.
Considering all the aforementioned, the principle of masternode self-governance from Dash and the concept of smart contracts already shown in Ethereum make Giant one of the few production-ready fintech projects where both these two technologies are practically applied.
Conclusion
Yes, we did not open our own ICO and yes, we did not use the Ethereum blockchain structure for the reasons you have just read: ICOs are unreliable both as an investment process and as a technological invention, while Ethereum lacks a good masternode system and its smart contracts environment is known for security issues. The system of masternodes, on the other hand, can solve trust issues between the project founders and investors. For many years, these issues are haunting the sphere of corporate finance. Thanks to the masternode technology, we can state with certainty that the project team is on equal terms with other participants and nothing will change this in the future.
Excellent article, I think it's great that they create their own chain of blocks. Although it is a risky bet, it seems to me better than to depend on the chain of blocks of Ethereum. With this they give themselves the opportunity to mark their own path.
Keep in that way!