Four Most Promising Investment Platforms That Shall Make It Big in early 2020s
Financial inclusion, decentralized finance, mobile money, staking are some of the most widely used terms of the modern finance world. While initially conceived for select market and limited use cases, these concepts have blossomed last year whereby in 2020, the definition, scale, adoption and use cases have exponentially evolved. Financial inclusion started primarily as a term used to describe how some did not have access to a bank account, it now has come to mean a much wider range of services — ranging from credit to insurance. Thanks to the dramatic rise in internet and smartphone adoption, increased interoperability and new business models, customers can now choose from a suite of tailored products. The blockchain technology simply fueled what is no lesser than a disrupted world whereby financial inclusion is evolving to enable everyone everywhere to participate fully in the new digital economy — create, save, invest, borrow, and grow. It’s no longer good enough to have a bank account, but you also need a system to transact online. It’s no longer good enough to have isolated, single asset bearer asset schemes, it’s important to have mechanisms to access credit online it’s critical to have tools which allow people to invest and plan for their futures online. Blockchain is leading the digital revolution and disruptive in essence vs the digitization by the traditional fin players. Perhaps the best quote to contextually place blockchain in play is by none other than Vitalik Buterin, co-founder Ethereum, Ranked №10 on Fortune’s 2017 list of the most influential people in business under age 40. “Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchain automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.” As a direct benefit, it can cut out intermediaries, reduce corruption, increase trust, prevent fraud or double spending and empower users as governance is distributed. So who are intermediaries? The intermediaries are the torchbearers of traditional world’s operations management; record keeping, perform all of the business and conceive transaction logic, reconcile and settle, come up with commerce reward/penalty mechanism; think of big institutions: banks, governments, credit-card companies, regulators. However, the 2007–8 global financial crises highlighted both the risk severity and scale impact of potential chaos intermediaries and central governance could bring as a single point of failure.
Perhaps the biggest financial freedom courtesy to the technology led winds of digital era is masses accessibility of multiple asset type classes. There are new players redefining the financial space, following are some of the most promising platforms offering cross assets investment flexibility with a rich eco system.
EToro
Another online social and copy trading platform, EToro has a graphic-intensive platform that serves cryptocurrency traders along with select stocks and some basic commodities. The key feature of this proprietary platform is the ease in which an individual client is able to implement copy trading. Inexperienced retail account holders too can mimic the trading strategies of the most successful traders, automatically and in real time. Primarily, eToro is a CFD and forex broker. However, you can also trade with real stocks, ETFs, and a lot of different cryptos. eToro has two distinctive innovations, CopyTrader and CopyPortfolio. Both are great. CopyTrader is the so-called social trading feature. What is eToro really good at? Well, this is it! One by one you can copy the portfolio of traders, who also trade with eToro. This can be quite useful. You can browse through the profiles of other eToro traders, checking their previous performance on an annual and a monthly level. Their portfolio is public information. Additionally, eToro also applies a risk score to each trader. There are tons of more stats for each profile, like trades per week, average holding time, performance on charts, and you can also see their detailed profiles as well as their news feed comments. Imagine Facebook profiles, but with fewer inspirational and more market quotes.
Etoro minor disadvantage is that it has one account base currency and despite getting exponential surge in its user base, somehow the customer support couldn’t scale up at the same pace.
ZuluTrade
Relaunched in 2014, ZuluTrade is another famous online social and copy trading platform. Essentially, it allows traders “followers” to copy the trades of experienced traders “signal providers” in the forex and financial markets to achieve a level of automated trading copy trading options across forex, indices, stocks, cryptocurrency and commodities markets. The users classified into signal providers and followers keep a healthy balance of social and copy trading model. Zulutrade biggest claim to fame is the broad base of signal providers the platform hosts, this essentially means more variety and flexibility of traders pool to copy. Secondly, some of its performance algorithms are unique and well respected in the industry, one of its feature Zuluguard is a unique feature that protects Copy Traders if erratic trades are opened by traders they are following. An excellent risk management addition. ZuluTrade offers relatively low on-going fees. You only have to pay for the spread. In addition, there are no entry costs and minimum deposits start at just a few hundred dollars. Lastly the platform offers a totally free and fully functioning demo account. This is perfect for beginners looking to get familiar with the markets.
SwissBorg
Founders of CHSB Token, Swissborg is blockchain native with a fully functional wealth management app offering crypto assets investment solutions in a user friendly manner. Something of specific interest is the focus on security, swissborg platforms uses multi-party computation (MPC) technology. MPC technology involves multiple parties performing mathematical computations, which results in data being split into multiple encoded parts. These parts come together to compute a public key and wallet address, which can be used for depositing digital assets. Ultimately, MPC technology doesn’t rely on a private key, which eliminates the single point of failure. At a functional level, a key differentiator is Swissborg’s Smart Engine whereby connecting to multiple exchanges, the engine can get it users the best liquidity and rates in a matter of seconds.
Zin Finance
A unicorn in the making, Zin Finance is a blockchain platform that empowers its global users (agnostic of region, race and risk appetite type) with a highly intuitive, super friendly investment environment. From the platform’s inspiration to its portfolio management prototype app, Zin Finance future looks extremely promising. Unlike other platforms cited here and countless others already available in the market, Zin Finance platform seems to be truly purpose led with its design prompting its users to get in the multi-generational old habit of saving vs the run of the mill trading tactics. The offering includes simple, contemporary, intuitive access to commodities, indices, stock, Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. In general, its expected to provide value propositions from electronic trading brokerages, traditional metal assets and crypto world whereby technological expertise and AI guidance shall help users in savings/investment decision making. Furthermore its purpose led roadmap journey includes a key milestone of Introduction of financial trading academy enriched with virtual courses to facilitate financial decision making and general investment wisdom.
The platform’s highly talented global team is making Zin a passionate advocate for society’s ignored voices with the mantra of financial independence being every individual’s right. While the app full version as per the project’s whitepaper is to be launched next year, Zin Finance under the radar seems to be “always on” with the platform development efforts, in fact the team has done a remarkable feat in a more sustainable etiquette to exceed the investor expectations by pre-achieving milestones earlier than planned dates. Zin 100% token burn program, rich industry-first features, true democracy to its token holders with governance voting etc are just a few indicators indicating it a disruptor thats poised to witness organic growth in scale, influence and global audience.