S-STEM Scholar Sergio Cortez's Blog

 Decentraland     Earlier this semester I talked about NFTs on the blockchain, crypto lenders, Bitcoin and now we are going to get into another concept. There is another use case for crypto and this is called utility. We are going to use Decentraland as an example. Decentraland is an online game is a virtual reality world where you can buy and sell land or real estate. You can say its the modern day meta verse that Facebook is building. It is all built on the Ethereum blockchain as well. The token associated with it is called Mana and  it is the currency used to buy this virtual real estate.      In order to be able to make a purchase on Decentraland you can't just buy it with dollars. You have to purchase Mana and with that money you can purchase virtual real estate. That is what gives the token its utility. As a matter of fact Mana has risen up in price of around 5000% percent in the last year a lot. Not only do players money appreciate if you hold it, they know it will only keep

 Crypto Lenders     Another popular trend that is appearing in crypto right now are crypto lenders. These are companies that will pay you a certain amount of interest (APY) in order for you to let them borrow your crypto or US dollars so they can lend it out at a higher rate. In traditional banks they pay you less than 1% APY on your savings accounts to let them hold on to your hard earned money which is laughable. For example there is a company called Celsius that at this exact moment if you were to lend them your US dollars they would pay you 10.02% APY just for letting your dollars sit in their account. You can withdraw it at anytime and you get one withdraw per month of any amount for free. If you have $10,000 in there they will pay you $1000 a year paid out weekly.      The reason they are able to afford to pay out these high interest rates is because they charge more to lend it out vs them paying you to borrow yours. When they lend out money they also ask for a collateral from th

 Ethereum      Many people that come into the crypto space do either one of two things. They either go straight to Bitcoin or they go straight to riskier coins like Doge. However there is another crypto asset named Ethereum that one day might grow bigger than Bitcoin itself and is already the second biggest crypto in the world. That asset is called Ethereum. Ethereum can do everything that Bitcoin does and even more. It can be held as a hedge against inflation, used to buy products and even create decentralized applications on it.     Ethereum has been gaining traction over the last couple years and in terms of price it has sky rocketed outperforming pretty much any stock market company there is. Not to focus too much on price though lets focus on what it can do. In the world we live today almost everything we do on the web is centralized. Meaning you have to follow certain rules to put your apps in the  App Store or Play Store. However with Ethereum you can create what are called Daps