Saturday, June 12, 2021

Jabra Fan : A NFT powered fan based marketplace

About Jabra

This is an early support based NFT marketplace, mostly aimed at content creators. Imagine getting supported for your initiatives by strangers on the internet who believe in you because of your past track record?

What's in it for these supporters you ask? Well they can sell these NFTs when you become a public sensation. This serves as a dual edged sword as the people who believe in you will also be the advocate of your success and help you reach there faster.


Use Case 1

Imagine you create educational videos on machine learning. You have made 4 videos and now you need some money to create more/new videos. You can mint a NFT on our platform and sell it to your supporters. This NFT would guarentee one-on-one time and certain exclusive features by the creator. Now, when and as channel grows these NFT (and thus the exclusivity) associated with it can be sold to new members of the community.

Use Case 2

Imagine you are a TV actor who is out of work at the moment (as we saw during the pandemic) , now you need some money in order to sustain a certain lifestyle. So you can reach out and mint NFTs and the exclusivity could be the videos of incorrect takes that took place, inside gossips, artworks from sets that you have, behind the scenes footage, reaction of your own memes. Your fans will buy it for certain premium and then as you grow to become a bigger star, these exclusivity can be sold out to the potentially highest bidder.


Technical Architechture

It uses

  • Zilliqa BlockChain
  • Scilla Smart Contracts
  • ZilPay Wallet Chrome Extension is Required
  • ReactJS for frontend
  • Rails Backend for storing some centralized data
  • AWS Amplify and AWS EC2 for hosting frontend and backend respectively.

Screenshots


Demo Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqDsqNygJdg

(Apologies for the low audio)

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Machine Learning Components

 1. Introduction 

Basic Mathematics behind traditional data algorithms, Only topics would be explored for theoretical understanding and no code would be written for the same.


  1. Naive Bayes Classifier

  2. Term Frequency - Inverse Term Frequency 

  3. Cosine Similarity 

  4. Linear Regression 

 

2. Applications and breakdown,
  

  • Tabular Data

  • Images 

  • Audio

  • Video


This breakdown along with the detailed analysis on each component would help you figure out how to work on Machine Learning Models.

Most of the research papers whether in computer vision, speech and text need a very good understanding of four things. All of these require thorough understanding along with the code. The idea is to first process them in 3 line definition format and then experiment with the TensorFlow. 

  • Components

    • Recurrent Neural Networks

    • Convolutional Neural Networks 

    • Long Short Term Memory Cells

    • Gated Recurrent Units

  • Topology Used 

    • Encoder/Decoder

    • Bidirectional 

    • Grid LSTM

    • Tree LSTM

  • Additional factors

    • Attention

    • Normalization

    • Regularization 

    • Share/Unshare Something

  • Activation Function

    • TanH

    • Rectified Linear Unit

    • Parametric Rectified Linear Unit 

    • Exponential Linear Unit 

    • Sigmoid

    • Softplus

3. Conclusions and Rules of Thumb for practical purposes. 

Saturday, June 5, 2021

"Real Value" Of CryptoCurrency


I think most people reading this would know about BitCoin and would have some vague ideas about trading in cryptocurrency (apps like WazirX and  CoinDCX). This article is meant for people who would want to start trading in cryptocurrency but have no idea where to start. It should obviously not be taken as investment advice.

The volatility in crypto markets is very high and there are macro trends and micro trends. The micro trends are very hard to predict for any cryptocurrency and for new currencies with less number of coins out there, the percentage change with these micro-trends can be massive in terms of numbers and thus it's advisable to tread carefully.  These trends are often because of trading bots and hypes perpetuated on internal groups. Although, that's something not to worry about if you understand the "real" value of that cryptocurrency. Any currency has value based on the number of people adopting it. So, the more projects are built using cryptocurrency, the more people get attracted to it, the more people use it. This adoption often shows compounded effect given a sensible leadership is heading the project with genuine social good in mind. Often at times the leadership gets' greedy and wants to manipulate the projects to benefit their own greed hurting the community at large that supported them in their endeavor. The current stage of a lot of adoption of this tech is based on the hope of growth and it has shown massive promises. 

As of now the sovereign funds, pension funds have not invested in these currencies and thus acts as an early investment. If any of these big cheque funds decide to pick up any cryptocurrency then it would totally change the shape of it. (Few million dollars is small number for them).

Real Projects are not replicas. 

As I said above the value of any currency is based on projects that use it. If your neighbourhood e-commerce store starts using a coin then you can buy stuff from them without getting into the national currency loop, thus making the currency more valuable. Obviously, every project helps but to truly have massive adoption of any cryptocurrency, the projects built on top of it cannot be "Replica of X in Crypto", the value lies in building something truly innovative and engaging for the community while leveraging the currency. 

If you are just looking for trends to understand so that you can invest, the first and foremost thing to realize it is that do not have a tunnel vision but a long term thought, here are some pointers that you can use. 

  • Wallet address growth
  • The blockchain's transaction volume and growth 
  • Real Projects and adoption 
  • dApp creation and usage growth 
  • Community Address and Resolution of Technical Problems associated with scaling up
  • GitHub work contributed to a blockchain 
  • Developers adding to the blockchain. Are developers growing, stagnant or decreasing over time?
  • Key partnerships that are adding value. Not just announcing the name of someone to put on your website but what the partnership is actually doing to drive adoption and value creation. (Partnerships with bigger currencies)
  • Celebrity Endorsements and Influencer marketing 
  • Reddit / Closed Groups Sentiment 
There are often Red Flags associated, which can be tracked down if you are watching very closely, these are, 
  • How many ICOs are happening? Are we seeing an increase of more and more ICOs raising tens of millions of dollars with no working product?
  • Is the growth euphoric or optimistic? 
  • People will increase their risk appetite to try and get more return as higher returns become harder in the top 50 cryptos because most of that price action will have been exhausted. So investing in big players is indeed very stupid. They are fluctuating with micro-trends and have very little to offer in terms of growth and adoption. 
  • What is the economic outlook in the traditional world? Negative sentiment among the community is to be feared as it spreads like wildfire. 
The biggest and most indicative is obviously Wallet Address Growth closely followed by transaction volume and growth.  Comparing this with other currencies and comparing it with it's own trends over the spectrum of months would give you a good long term measure of the currency's future. 

Is it advisable to invest your life savings in crypto? 
Obviously No. 
My advice would be to make bets to small unheard currencies in a way that losing that money would not affect you a bit. 5% - 7% of your savings at max.