You can now deposit, withdraw, and trade ENS, ZIL, ASTR, and ICX against USD on Okcoin. Here’s what you need to know about these four tokens.
TL;DR
- What? You can now deposit, withdraw, and trade ENS, ASTR, ZIL, and ICX against USD on Okcoin.
- Who? All Okcoin customers including those in the United States, except for residents of the EU, the UK, Singapore, and Brunei.
- When? Deposit, withdrawal, Quick Buy, and trading are live for all four assets as of April 19.
What is the Ethereum Naming Service?
ENS is the native token of the Ethereum Naming Service, a decentralized naming system built on Ethereum. ENS has similar goals to DNS, the Internet’s Domain Name Service (often referred to as the “phone book of the internet”). Like DNS, ENS operates on a system of dot-separated hierarchical names called domains, with the domain owner having complete control over subdomains.
So what does this look like in practice? Participants can claim a human-readable name (i.e. Vitalik.eth) that maps directly to their Ethereum address, allowing users to send any cryptocurrency or NFT to an easy-to-remember link.
ENS is the governance token of the Ethereum Naming Service and is used to govern the protocol, vote in the ENS DAO, and influence pricing decisions for .eth addresses.
What’s Zilliqa?
Zilliqa is a blockchain platform that is designed to address scalability issues that plague other blockchain networks. Zilliqa accomplishes this through the use of sharding – the process of dividing a network into smaller component networks (called shards) that can process a high number of transactions in parallel.
Smart contract security is another area where Zilliqa seeks to set itself apart. In traditional software, bugs can be fixed easily with a product update. Smart contracts, due to their immutable nature, do not have this luxury. Zilliqa hopes to improve this with their own smart contracting language, Scilla (short for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language). It was created to detect common security weaknesses and bugs found in smart contracts.
ZIL is the native token of Zilliqa. ZIL connects you to all dApps on the Zilliqa blockchain. It can also be used to pay for gas fees, products and services, NFTs, and more.
What’s Astar Network?
Polkadot has grown in popularity in recent years, quickly becoming a key player in resolving the problem of blockchain interoperability. Their goal is to create a network that allows any type of data to be sent across any type of blockchain. However, by design, Polkadot does not support smart contracts. It’s the job of parachains (custom, project-specific blockchains) to bring new use-cases to the Polkadot ecosystem.
Enter Astar Network, a multi-chain smart contract platform built on Polkadot. What makes this project unique is that Astar provides a smart contract hub that allows for interoperability between smart contracts written in several languages, including any language that compiles to WebAssembly. Whatever a team requires from their dApp, they should find a blockchain structure that is appropriate for the use case and write the code in the language most convenient and practical for them.
The ASTR token is used to pay for transaction fees on the network. It can also be staked through dApp staking, a unique staking method in which dApp developers receive rewards in proportion to “nominations” made by the community for the most useful dApps.
What’s ICON?
The ICON ecosystem is a blockchain protocol that allows heterogeneous blockchains to transact with each other. The project’s goal is for computer applications to use the Icon software as an infrastructure to create their own currencies and economies, which may be thought of as digital nations. Computers using the software (nodes) can then choose to support these “nations” based on their preferences, all while transacting on the same network.
ICON does this through the Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP), a standard that defines specific message specifications, relayers, and verifies smart contracts. In this way, it’s an alternative to Cosmos’ Inter Blockchain Council (IBC) standard.
ICX is the layer-1 native token for the ICON network and is used to pay for gas fees, payments on ICON dApps, as well as to participate in the ICON governance protocol.
