The coronavirus crisis was a breakout of a new revolution in the financial world as millions of users found themselves stuck in lockdown, signing up to trading apps and using the opportunity to explore the world of stocks and cryptocurrency, signaling a new change and approach to the financial world.

Like Bitcoin, Tesla, and the SPAC IPO, social media saw an exponential growth of over 300% across all mainstream in 2020, showcasing how strong the space has become. The main idea is to combine community interaction and investing.

As a result, this change has received a serious push from Gen Z and millennial generations. This revolution has been strongly powered by social media such as Reddit, X, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, as this community has driven up the investment of hashtags by over 4.2 billion views in the past few years.

The effect of social media has been unfathomable before now, as there has been high speculation of the transfer of wealth to Gen Zs and millennials by 2050, with an estimated growth of 70%, amounting to $60 trillion in the hands of these individuals inclined to the internet age.

Social Media’s Influence On Investing Behaviour

In today’s investing world, timing and information play a significant role in the financial market. With the emergence of technology, many social media outlets, such as X and Telegram, have become peddlers of information for the investment world, whether good or bad.

In this digitalized trading environment, many retailers and users have tons of information online to make their investment decisions, from social media community channels to news media to trading exchanges offering tools and strategies to help retailers make informed decisions on what trading system best fits their style.

Additionally, through social media like X, many retailers and Gen Z alike connect with professional traders in the industry who have gained much expertise for over 10 years and have become profitable by leveraging the financial market as a full-time endeavor.

The rise of social media has had a rapid influence on the hearts of many users today as there are simpler, quicker, and more efficient ways of disseminating information as regards the financial market.

A study shows that 80% of retailers are more inclined to source information online, while 30% of such users take investment information seriously. This is all thanks to easy access to the financial market’s data and new avenues of making money online.

A side note: although social media has positively influenced the financial market, like cryptocurrency and stocks, risks are also associated with this information and data due to finding genuine information and avoiding dubious persons and platforms aiming to manipulate users for their own selfish gains.

The tendency for retailers to follow and copy other experienced investors has become a spiral behaviour and has affected many in the cryptocurrency market. Users should take the time to source information and investment data from authentic sources.

Social Media Influencers Lure Gullible Gen Z With Fake Photoshopped PNL

The financial market witnessed a boom during the advent of social media buzz in the past few years. Despite such growth in the financial market, a problem has arisen with many fake, experienced traders or influencers out to deceive users and retailers with fake portfolios to amass much wealth for themselves.

These investors or traders with huge online followers of over 120k on X or YouTube rely on fake trading strategies as a way of projecting themselves as successful long-time traders with fraudulent claims of highly enormous profits on social media, claiming to help while looking to extort these gullible users of their hard-earned money.

This side of the social media world is all part of reality now, as information and activities are blown out of proportion. It has peaked with lightning speed, with many Gen Z looking for a quick-rich scheme or viewing the financial market as a means to get rich overnight.

With such practices becoming pronounced in the financial market and being aided by social media, financial regulators have struggled to catch up or try to curb these practices among fake trading influencers posing to infiltrate the market.

Could the rise of copy trading filter out fake traders from experienced traders, enabling retailers and other users to harness different strategies and profitability from experienced traders?

How Margex Copy Trading Eliminates The Fear Of Unthinkingly Following A Trader On Social Media Out Of False Pretence

Copy trading is a strategy that allows retailers and users to link a certain amount of their investment portfolio to a selected experienced trader and then replicate all trades automatically without monitoring the trades or worrying about the best strategy for better profitability.

All future trades under the experienced trader’s account are replicated without the user initiating subsequent trades, enabling users to compound gains while diversifying their portfolio to other investments or building their trading experience.

Margex copy trading eliminates the fear many retailers and users have from following large accounts on social media such as X and YouTube with no track records of trades executed. With Margex copy trading leaderboard, all trades, strategies, PNL, return on equity (ROE), followers, and trader’s equity.

This system employed by Margex is a big step toward enabling less experienced users to trade quickly and choose traders among a large pool of experienced professionals with good trading histories and the most traded assets among their strategies while eliminating the negative noise effect from social media.

Margex remains one of the top copy trading platforms, designed with its users in mind. It bridges the gap between real, profitable, and experienced traders while giving value to retailers looking to replicate their trade easily.

Spending over $3 million to redesign its platform has never been talked about enough as Margex pushes to give its users the best experience they can think of with additional features such as a zero-fee converter to enable swaps without additional cost and plans to introduce an ultra-modern wallet to enhance security and custody of assets in one place.

With the following 3 simple steps, retailers can access the Margex copy trading platform.

1. Create A Margex Account

Having an account with Margex opens the doors to endless profitability opportunities in copy trading with access to the best traders in the industry and guaranteed profitability.

2. Follow Profitable Expert Traders

An account with Margex enables users to access the copy trading leaderboard and all metric strategies of expert traders, giving them the information they need to make an informed decision about which trader to follow to automate their trades.

3. Allocate Funds

On confirming the desired trader to follow and allocating a set amount you wish to replicate, the Margex platform will instantly replicate subsequent trades by the trader in real time.

As low as $10 is the minimum amount Margex requires to participate in copy trading strategies.

The quest for financial freedom has birthed copy trading, a modern-day tool that promises the best trading experiences for retailers. With the Margex copy trading platform at the helm of this evolution, retailers and users have a better blueprint for becoming rich through copy trading. With an impressive track record and data-driven insight into profitability, Margex offers transparency and a ready performance metric away from social media pretence.

By Adam Efrima

The crypto space is full of buzzwords and abbreviations, and today, I’ll be discussing one that’s not quite so widespread yet: Decentralized Validator Technology, or DVT. It promises to fix a major worry about how traditional validator setups operate on Ethereum by significantly decentralizing and securing the process.

Validators are the entities that build blocks in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains, similar to miners in Bitcoin (and other Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols). Ever since Ethereum moved entirely to PoS in September 2022 with The Merge, the blockchain has been supported by a set of approximately 900,000 validators, which theoretically makes it the most decentralized PoS network currently live.

However, not all that glitter is gold in this space. Multiple issues have been raised regarding how PoS is currently implemented in Ethereum, all of which contribute to making it a bit less decentralized than it would seem. But first, we need to dive into the weeds of what a validator in Ethereum really is.

Ethereum Validators Aren’t Like the Rest

A big difference between Ethereum and other PoS networks is that the validator nodes need to have a stake of 32 ETH — no more, no less. This limit was chosen so that it’d offer a reasonable entry point for average Joes to stake while still not creating too many validators for no reason. Right now, 32 ETH is worth about $95,000, but back when staking was first introduced (first as a separate chain) in 2020, it was closer to $30,000.

If you hold more than 32 ETH though, you’ll need to split your stake between multiple “validators,” which explains the very large number of active validators today. In practice, there are likely 10,000-20,000 independent entities (including companies and indie stakers) who are contributing to Ethereum security.

On a technical level, validators are a special entity controlled by their own private keys, which are activated when a prospective staker bridges 32 ETH to the Beacon chain. This chain manages the consensus process, assigning a portion of validators to propose blocks while others “attest” that these blocks are correct. Behaving improperly, for example, by signing invalid blocks or by being offline, leads to stake slashing (though it’s usually quite soft) or penalties incurred on the ETH principal.

Many PoS systems (a.k.a Delegated-PoS or DPoS) enable stake delegation, where users can natively assign their coins to a particular validator, who they trust to do a good job validating the chain and earning staking yield (a centralizing force). On Ethereum, there are no native mechanisms to do this, meaning that people must either run their own validator (self-custody of keys) or trust a service to do so — that is, until DVT came along.

The Pressing Need to Decentralize Staking

The premise of Proof-of-Stake is that no single entity can control more than a certain percentage of the total stake that is currently engaged in validating a protocol. In that case, they can dictate what is the “majority” chain and start behaving incorrectly without penalties, jeopardizing the functioning of the network.

In Ethereum, currently, the vast majority of the staking power is held by Lido, a decentralized finance protocol that offers a convenient “wrapper” or liquid staking token (LST) of a user’s staked position called stETH. The benefit of this system is that you can just stake on the protocol or even buy the token and start staking to earn yield without doing anything else — the underlying system does everything for you.

Lido as a whole currently controls a bit more than 31% of the ETH staked, which is dangerously close to the 33% threshold needed to prevent Ethereum blocks from being finalized (if Lido wished to do so). This sounds worse than it really is: Lido is a decentralized protocol that spreads its stake over many independent node operators, so it can’t really coordinate easily to perform this attack.

Also, as a decentralized business whose entire model relies on being trusted by the Ethereum community, it has no incentive to do so. Finally, a 33% attack is not the end of the world for Ethereum, as it’d just result in blocks not being finalized — they’d still be correct, and the attacker wouldn’t be able to really exploit this issue.

But despite some caveats, some in the community are uneasy about Lido’s dominance, as ultimately, the node operators it chooses have custody over the staked ETH and control part of the validation process. Lido has, however, started implementing technologies to decentralize its node operations by integrating the Simple DVT module.

These advancements promote increased participation and collaboration, facilitating smaller operators to align with larger counterparts thereby fostering a more diverse and robust network. This inclusive approach sets the stage for a trustless future, allowing even at-home validators to integrate with Lido seamlessly.

Decentralized Validator Technology to the Rescue

If the issue is that validators are custodial and somewhat centralized, the logical solution is to turn this process into a decentralized and trustless mechanism. This is, in a nutshell, what DVT offers today.

DVT works by splitting an Ethereum validator’s private key into multiple shares via various cryptographic techniques. The shares are encrypted and distributed to node operators, who then simultaneously run the validator to contribute to Ethereum’s security. Because the actual validator key is never seen or controlled by the operators, the process becomes non-custodial, trustless, secure, and much more fault-tolerant.

DVT is only starting out, but it could be a significant part of Ethereum’s future roadmap. As the network pushes for more scalability, there are serious discussions of increasing the 32 ETH limit to make the total validator numbers more manageable. To counteract the increase in centralization, DVT is being proposed as one of the ways to enable fully decentralized staking pools for smaller users.

Author bio

Adam Efrima is the SSV Core team Co-founder, a decentralized validator infrastructure for ETH staking. He has been active in the crypto industry since 2013. Over eight years living in China working in the financial industry and fintech space, Adam has worked in CITIC Bank covering outbound investments for Chinese SOEs. He was also in charge of setting up eToro’s Shanghai operation. Since then, Adam has been deeply involved in Ethereum staking, co-founding the performing staking project Bloxstaking.

TL;DR

• Ripple’s XRP is holding steady at $0.50 despite a broader market upturn. Analysts foresee a potential bull run, with resistance at $0.49 seen as crucial.
• Future Projections: XRP’s price movement may depend on Bitcoin’s performance, with predictions suggesting it could rise significantly if market conditions are favorable.

XRP’s Next Possible Move

The cryptocurrency market experienced a resurgence today (May 13), with numerous digital assets entering green territory. For instance, Bitcoin (BTC) briefly exceeded the $63,000 level, whereas Ethereum (ETH) neared the $3K mark. Ripple’s XRP lagged behind the leaders, registering little-to-no volatility and maintaining its $0.50 level.

Numerous analysts, though, believe the asset is yet to witness a rapid price revival. One example is the X user EGRAG CRYPTO, who praised XRP’s recent consolidation and suggested it will soon be replaced by a bull run:

“XRP is holding strong LIKE A BOSS. The Launching Channel features partial wicking candles, with the top end showing an ascending consolidation, indicating Bullish strength.”

The analyst predicted that the token remains poised to skyrocket to $6.40 in the following months as long as it keeps trading above the $0.49 resistance level. 

CrediBULL Crypto chipped in, too, arguing that XRP’s potential price ascent in the future partially depends on Bitcoin. In their view, a BTC spike towards $69-70K could be one factor fueling a rally for Ripple’s native token:

“If BTC bounces soon as expected, let’s see how strong the reaction on XRP is. If it’s strong enough to get us back above .64, then that is a very good sign.”

Some Previous Forecasts

Other analysts who envisioned an XRP rally in the near future are David Watt and Crypto Tony. The former assumed the asset’s price could climb to $0.56 in the next few days.

Crypto Tony was even more bullish, predicting a bull run once XRP reclaims the major support zone of $0.67. Recall that the last time it reached that level was in mid-March.

Many industry participants believe the ongoing lawsuit between Ripple and the US SEC is the main obstacle standing in the way of an XRP rally. Those curious to learn the specifics of the case and its possible impact on the token’s value, please take a look at our dedicated video below: