In this guide

• Solving a problem
• How BAND coin works
• The market’s story
• FAQs

One of the biggest things in the world of crypto is decentralised finance, or DeFi for short. This term refers, put simply, to financial transactions that bypass banks.

According to the World Bank, there are 1.7 billion people who do not have a bank account, but roughly 66% of those people do own a mobile phone. Advocates of decentralised finance hope to reach these people which will, it’s hoped, promote financial inclusion.

The aim is for a fairer version of traditional financial services, accessible online. Decentralised finance has the goal of providing a modern, fairer alternative to all of these services that can be accessed over the internet.

Solving a problem

However, there is a problem that needs to be addressed. How do you connect the decentralised world with the centralised one? One potential solution is through the Band protocol.

According to the company’s website, the Band protocol aims to solve the problem by “building a decentralised bridge to enable secure interoperabilities between smart contracts and the traditional web.”

This means that dApps can use the protocol’s smart contract data points to access data that’s outside the system. The data points are part of feeds which come from sources that provide a framework for dApp users and developers to moderate, operate, and manage the data sources themselves which, in turn, means that the sources are secure and reliable.

Band protocol was founded in 2017 by Soravis Srinawakoon, a former Ericsson software engineer and Boston Consulting Group management consultant, former Turfmapp web developer and Tripadvisor engineer Paul Chonpimai, and Sorawit Suriyakarn, who previously worked at Dropbox and Quora as a software engineer. Srinawakoom serves as CEO, while Chonpimai is CPO and Suriyakam is CFO.

But that’s enough about the Band protocol. What about BAND coin?

How BAND coin works

BAND coin is the native token of the Band protocol. It represents the data sets used within the protocol, and it can be used in a number of ways.

Firstly, it can be used as a collateral for issuing record tokens. These record tokens have a value which is determined by an algorithm. Secondly, it can be used to give token holders voting rights in the network. Thirdly, it can be used for voting to secure the network through a delegated proof-of-stake (dPoS) consensus mechanism.

If you own BAND coin, then you can become a data provider for the protocol. You do this by getting a data source contract and inputting the relevant data into it. You can then become a candidate provider by deploying tokens that meet the minimum requirement and serve as collateral.

This means that the tokens can be used in stablecoins and other asset pricing feeds to conduct decentralised lending and other payment services, with dApps accessing the data through an aggregator.

One thing to look out for is the way that the value of BAND tokens gradually decreases. This is done to encourage users to take part in network staking to earn more tokens through staking rewards, with a goal of having 66% of all tokens staked at any given time. In other words, the idea is for people to use their BAND coin,, not keep them sitting in a wallet or on an exchange.

In October 2019 BAND coin launched on Binance in an Initial Exhange Offering (IEO), for selected users of the exchange. The BAND token was offered for $0.473 on Binance. In total, 27.37 million BAND were sold in the IEO, representing of 27.37% of the 100 million BAND coins that are available.

The system originally ran on Ethereum but, in 2020, it moved over to use the Cosmos system in the middle of 2020. This meant it relaunched in a simpler, more refined format. The move saw it touted as a potential rival for Sergey Nazarov’s Chainlink project.

In December 2020, BAND Protocol became the first blockchain company to join the OpenAPI initiative. The project, which includes the likes of Microsoft, Google, eBay and IBM among its members, aims to create software on a blockchain which will allow applications and projects to, in effect, talk to one another. 

Speaking at the time, Srinawakoon said:

“Our mission is to define a common API standard for blockchain applications by collaborating with prestigious partners to bridge the gap between centralised data, APIs, and smart contracts on the blockchain.”

That’s the basics of BAND coin explained, but what’s happened to the price of BAND? Let’s take a look…

The market’s story

As we’ve seen, the coin was launched on Binance in October 2019 at $0.473, and for much of the first six months of its existence it hovered somewhere between $0.20 and $0.30.

However, in late April 2020 it kicked off and broke through the $1 barrier. Its relaunch was a success, and on 22 July it reached $4.552. It then dipped slightly to $3.982 on 1 August. Then it experienced a major price boom. It rocketed up to $15.05 by 12 August, a rise of nearly 280% in the space of just 11 days.

Although it dropped down in the middle of August to $10.34, it then went back up to a (then) all-time high of $15.46 on 1 September. That’s a price increase of just over 288% in a month. However, it then dropped once more and circled around the $6 mark for much of the rest of the year.

2021 has been a wild ride for crypto, and BAND coin has been no exception. It started the year at $5.5082 then shot up to $10.35 on 8 January, nearly doubling in the space of one week. It then hovered at around $9 for a short period but on 12 February it hit $18.83.

While there was an inevitable crash after such a big rise, late March, April and early May saw it go back up again. It stood at $11.75 on 25 March, but a little more than three weeks later, on 16 April, it stood at its newest all-time high of $21.11. On 24 April it dipped to $13.71, but it was back up on 6 May at $18.26.

However, the great crypto crash of late May hit BAND, and by 23 May it was $6.8368. It stayed around this mark and on 11 June it was  $7.0102, down by more than 61% from just over a month earlier.

FAQs

Further reading

Basic Attention Token: your ultimate guide

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