Autor Cointelegraph By Cointelegraph Research

For payment tokens such as Alchemy Pay’s ACH, there may not necessarily be a world where cryptocurrencies are widely accepted as a medium of exchange for everyday transactions, such as buying a gallon of milk in the grocery store, without fiat. This is because two parallel economies exist, and bridges between fiat and cryptocurrency are needed for the time being.But how does one price such a token with payments as its bedrock? Is there a way to arrive at a fair valuation for ACH, whose growing dominance in the payments scene is evident in the number of payment channels that integrate with its technology? Or for any other payment-focused cryptocurrencies, for that matter? Cointelegraph Research dives deeper into this subject in its most recent report.Alchemy Pay is a Singapore-based provider of cryptocurrency payment systems and solutions. Its technology allows for the use of cryptocurrencies to pay for a product or service. Payments made in crypto are then converted for the merchant into fiat currency in real time for settlement. The ACH token is not the actual medium of exchange in this equation, but it’s crucial in facilitating fiat and cryptocurrency transactions. For starters, the token is pledged by the network’s ecosystem partners in order to access Alchemy Pay’s services. It’s also utilized as an incentive to boost cryptocurrency transactions, as ACH tokens are rewarded to merchants and users each time cryptocurrencies are used at a point of sale. Earned ACH can later be used to pay any fees associated with the Alchemy Pay platform.Valuing payment tokensIn the report, the valuation metric looks into various use cases a token can have. But given the payment tokens studied in the report, the most suitable use cases are estimated to be remittances, digital commerce and gaming. Download the full report here.The market size of these relevant applications is approximated, along with the penetration rate for each token over a 10-year period. Velocity, which is the number of times a token changes hands in a year, is also factored in, providing an estimate of a token’s long-term, non-speculative value. For instance, tokens with high velocity tend to have more downward price pressure, as users who own them don’t have an incentive to keep them for the long haul, whereas low velocity means the opposite. In the end, the report aims to discover the potential value of a token, with the most conservative adoption rate taken into consideration.Alchemy Pay in the payments sceneIn the payments arena, Alchemy Pay has already built a strong base. It is compatible in numerous payment industries, such as online, in-store, e-commerce, entertainment, bulk transactions, supply chain finance and remittances. And its growing list of integrations and partnerships opens it up to more merchants and payment channels globally.Alchemy Pay can support more than 300 payment channels in over 70 countries and more than 20 major cryptocurrencies. Its partnership with Shopify alone allows it to tap into more than 1 million merchants, plus millions more since teaming up with Binance. Some of the well-known brands that have integrated with Alchemy Pay include Hong Kong’s Pricerite, Singapore’s Ce La Vi, Canadian footwear brand Aldo and many others.But even with Alchemy Pay’s advancements, the report shows that ACH has only penetrated around 0.2% of relevant applications, suggesting that ACH is still at the very early stage of adoption. This perhaps comes as no surprise considering how nascent the broader cryptocurrency industry still is.While Bitcoin (BTC), with its relative dominance in the space, has grown to become accepted at over 28,600 venues worldwide, this is still relatively small compared with the potential markets it can capture. There is also a good reason to believe that users who own Bitcoin would rather hold on to the cryptocurrency than spend it on day-to-day transactions, further accentuating its store-of-value characteristics.Nevertheless, it all boils down to how much adoption can continue to grow for the industry. Regardless of ACH’s utility, more users will need to start trusting it as a better alternative to current solutions. Perhaps the adoption objective is better realized not by challenging existing systems but by integrating the technology into as many channels as possible.The report was commissioned and written in collaboration with Alchemy Pay. This article is for information purposes only and represents neither investment advice nor an investment analysis nor an invitation to buy or sell financial instruments. Specifically, the document does not serve as a substitute for individual investment or other advice.

When calculating the return of an NFT collection, most analysts calculate the average return. For example, the first CryptoKitties were sold in December 2017 for an average price of $3.24 each. On the first day, 105 CryptoKitties were created, and a total of $340.63 worth of Ether (ETH) was spent on those CryptoKitties by different collectors. That makes an average price of $3.24 per CryptoKitty. Currently, CryptoKitties are trading for an average price of $256.99. This equates to an average price of $256.99 per CryptoKitty and an average collection all-time return of over 7,800%.Out of CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, which nonfungible token (NFT) series was the most profitable for investors since 2017? More importantly, which one was the most profitable in 2021? The Cointelegraph Research team answers this question in its 80+ page research report on NFTs. However, the average price is considered to be an unreliable metric for estimating a collection’s value since a few sales of very expensive NFTs can skew the data. For example, the most expensive “CryptoPunk #7523 COVID Alien” created by Larva Labs sold for $11.7 million in June of 2021. That is why the CryptoPunk all-time return of over 700,000% is so high — a few CryptoPunks have sold for millions of dollars. Just a caveat, the very first CryptoPunks were actually given away for free, so technically the all-time return of CryptoPunks is infinite. For this analysis, Cointelegraph Research used the price on the first day they traded — i.e., June 23, 2017, when 19 CryptoPunks sold for a total of $1,020.3. Download the full report hereInstead, the Canadian concept artist and Medium blogger Kimberly Parker suggests that median price is a better reflection of how much people are really paying for NFTs on the market — and, more importantly, how much artists can reasonably expect to sell their NFTs for when collectors fancy their content. To calculate the median price of all NFT sales for a specific collection, the sales’ prices are listed in order from lowest to highest. The median is the sales price exactly in the middle. A final metric that is often used to measure the return on investment for an NFT collection is floor price. The floor price is the lowest open sale price of an NFT within a collection on a marketplace. For example, the floor price for a Bored Ape is currently 38 ETH or approximately $125,000 on OpenSea. This means that an owner of a Bored Ape is willing to accept $125,000 for their NFT, but not lower. After Visa paid $150,000 for a CryptoPunk in August 2021, the floor price of that collection rose 280% to $425,000.So, to answer the question, the CryptoPunks collection has had the highest return for collectors since its inception in 2017; however, Bored Ape Yacht Club, which just launched on April 30, 2021, has had the highest return for collectors year-to-date in 2021. Launched in October, Cointelegraph Research’s NFT report covers how to value different types of NFTs and how to discover exciting NFT collections before they go mainstream. The report also sheds light on the darker sides of NFTs, including their ecological impact and lack of liquidity. The report is supported by projects, including Enjin, OneOf, Nansen, Mintable, Alien Worlds, Animoca Brands, NFT Bank, The Sandbox and Pinata.This article is for information purposes only and represents neither investment advice nor an investment analysis or an invitation to buy or sell financial instruments. Specifically, the document does not serve as a substitute for individual investment or other advice.

In contrast, a transaction on Tezos takes 0.0016 kWh or less than the energy required to charge an Apple Tablet for 10 minutes. 100 Tezos transactions is equivalent to driving 10 km in a Tesla Model 3. The energy use of the entire Tezos network is approximately equivalent to two households in the U.S. for the whole year. One question, though, is how competing blockchains such as Tezos, Polkadot and Solana will perform on the market once Ethereum transitions to Eth2.According to Cointelegraph Research’s original investigation into the most energy-efficient blockchains for nonfungible tokens (NFT), the Ethereum network is currently using more energy than Costa Rica does during an entire year. To put this into perspective, a single transaction on Ethereum uses roughly 30 kilowatt-hour, which is equivalent to powering a house in the United States for a whole day. 100 Ethereum transactions is equivalent to driving approximately 390 kilometers in a Tesla Model 3. However, Ethereum’s upcoming move to Eth2 will change all of this for the better.Blockchain energy consumption has been subject to intense debate. While NFTs are present on several blockchains, the new research report only compared energy consumption on two chains. Energy consumption is directly related to a blockchain’s consensus mechanism, where Ethereum represents proof-of-work (PoW) and Tezos is used as an example of proof-of-stake (PoS).Download the full report here, complete with charts and infographics.The results show that the Ethereum blockchain is significantly more energy-intensive than an alternative PoS chain such as Tezos. In 2021, transactions on Tezos have been more than 35,000 times more energy-efficient than those on Ethereum. When addressing the issue of energy consumption, one, first of all, needs to distinguish transaction costs and the costs of maintaining the network. Naturally, a PoW system such as Ethereum will be more energy-intensive than a PoS blockchain such as Tezos.The PoW vs. PoS debateA PoW blockchain network depends on a large number of individual miners contributing to the network’s hash power in order to secure the network. Thus, the energy consumption of Ethereum, for example, is not directly related to the number of transactions. Each transaction only contributes marginally to the total energy consumed. However, when comparing energy consumption across blockchains, it needs to be scaled by a metric that captures how extensively a network is used. Therefore, the total energy consumption is divided by the number of transactions that a network performs within a day. For Ethereum, the total energy consumption is a product of the average daily hash rate and an estimate for hardware efficiency. Finally, the results are annualized for comparability.For Tezos, a slightly different strategy was followed, as energy consumption in a PoS network does not depend on hash rate. The calculation comes down to the total energy consumption for each day and multiplying it by the number of active delegates — that is, the number of active bakers by the daily energy consumption of a baker. The results support previous findings on the vastly different energy consumption of PoW vs. PoS blockchains. It can be estimated that in August 2021, the creation of an NFT on Tezos was roughly equivalent to using a hairdryer for two seconds, while creating an NFT on Ethereum amounted to using it for more than 20 hours.All about efficiencyFor now, the Ethereum blockchain is not as energy efficient as PoS alternatives leaving aside potential security concerns when comparing PoW and PoS blockchains. Thus, minting an NFT on Ethereum appears to be less environmentally friendly compared to less energy-intensive alternatives. However, Ethereum’s move toward a PoS algorithm will likely lead to a substantial decrease in energy usage, which is going to change the situation for the better. This article is for information purposes only and represents neither investment advice nor an investment analysis or an invitation to buy or sell financial instruments. Specifically, the document does not serve as a substitute for individual investment or other advice.