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The Coinlist crowdsales are starting to pick up momentum again. During the best market, we were lucky to have a handful thorough the whole year. Although, I have to say that there were some pretty high quality gems in those rare offerings! A sort of little reward for those who stuck it out!

Now, we are already into the third sale in about two months. This time we are in a serious bull market and do everyone is now a crypto expert and master trader.

The previous Casper and Rally crowdsales (and discount sales) were an experience that was better left forgotten. Terrible hours for Europe and a well intentioned queue system that ended up rewarding those who played the game. Not sour grapes, I managed to get into both events, but it was politely best described as a shit show!

This time we have a login enforced queue system which will hopefully reduce the number of people coming to the game with multiple browsers.

Mina is the project that is up for crowd support this Tuesday. It's been an interesting project that I've been following for quite some time which uses Zk-snarks to reduce the entire blockchain to a single hash. Ultimately this is much more useful than requiring a complete genesis to present block verification of the entire chain! Without this verification, you shouldn't trust that there is an unbroken and untampered chain from beginning to end.

Minds folds this verification into the current state with a zero knowledge period. Thus, each user only needs to have a copy of the current block for complete verification. If course, most people will only be not be using full nodes for Bitcoin or other blockchains, but if not enough people utilise a full node then the decentralised advantage of blockchains is nullified. Mina allows all users to use the full node which is on the order of kilobytes!

This also opens up dapps to perform simple, light and private verifications of previous user signings. This would be pretty useful for ID management, single sign-ons and credit/asset verification.

Definitely an interesting project that could improve the backend of many existing real-world systems. Most importantly, it allows for verification without sacrificing privacy to the entity that is requesting verification.

The MINA team learnt from the recent crowdsales and worked with CoinList to better secure their queue system against people who were gaming the system. I have no doubt that there will be people who still try and game the queue system, but at least they are actively trying to circumvent that. Also, in a nod to the community (or looter...) demand, the top cap is lowered significantly.

As always, there is KYC and restricted locations on these sales. Unlike other sales, there is no 6-12 month lock up. I do wonder if that is a good idea. The long lock-ups of other crowdsales restricted the amount of instant dumping by those who were not followers of the project but were more interested in making a quick ROI boost. I still think that these tokens should really be time-locked, just like investor sales and developer pots.

Thankfully, there is a better proposed queue system and the sale is in the middle of Europe afternoon! This will (hopefully) be a much more enjoyable experience than the last two! There is also another uncapped crowdsale for any tokens leftover after the initial sale, but I doubt that there will be anything left!

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.