All Crypto Whitepapers selected for the Accenture Blue Tulip Awards!

We are very proud to announce that All Crypto Whitepapers has been selected to participate in the Accenture Blue Tulip Innovation Awards!

The Blue Tulip Awards is a year-round ecosystem-driven program aiming to accelerate innovators, build powerful collaborations and drive breakthrough innovation. We provide startups and innovators with a clear call to arms: connecting eight inspiring, issue-based themes with new ideas that have immense potential to transform our future. By driving collaboration between the brightest minds and accelerating the most promising innovations to reach their full potential, we can start improving the way the world works and lives right now.

The Blue Tulip Awards journey is marked by four main events. Each event rewards and brings the participants one step closer to the first prize. With the eight innovation themes, eight remarkable concepts will be named the Blue Tulip Awards winners.

Our company is participating in two sections, Education and Finance:

EDUCATION
The nature and structure of work is changing. Emerging technologies necessitate changes in both workforce and education to prepare for a radically different future. 65 percent of children starting school today will have jobs that don’t exist yet. Leading businesses need to reshape the nature of work to create new forms of value and scale up ‘new skilling’. New education system is needed to help gain versatile skills that can’t be automated – creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, ethics, and lifelong learning.

FINANCE
A new era of finance has arrived in which blockchain and artificial intelligence offer radical new opportunities. At the same time, new fintech, insurtech and regtech concepts challenge the current status quo and accelerate disruption. Innovations in finance, insurance, and regulations have the power to transform the playing field entirely. To jump on the bandwagon, we need innovative concepts and technologies that improve services and user experiences, and satisfy the needs of future consumers.

Check out our registration on their website, www.bluetulipawards.nl.

Google’s Quantum Computing breakthrough a risk for Bitcoin wallets?

Not your keys, not your Bitcoin
Everyone know it by now: Not your keys, not your Bitcoin. If you store your Bitcoin on exchange, you will always risk losing them due to bankruptcy, hacks, scams etc. Luckily, most exchanges have good insurance and security measures in place, probably better security than where your cold-storage wallet(s) are stashed away.

Everyone also knows that it is almost impossible to brute-force your way into a Cryptocurrency wallet. Although there are some projects out there that have found private keys of actual bitcoin wallets, such as Keys.lol and the Large Bitcoin Collider, all these finds are based on pure luck. Normally, it would take ages to crack a private key of a wallet.

Google’s Sycamore chip
On the 23d of October, the scientific journal Nature Magazine has published the results of Google’s efforts to build a quantum computer that can perform a task no classical computer can; in other words, “quantum supremacy.” Google’s Sycamore chip performed a computation in 200 seconds that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. In more technical terms, this is the abstract of the release paper:

The promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here we report the use of a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 253 (about 1016). Measurements from repeated experiments sample the resulting probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times—our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years. This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum supremacy for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing paradigm.

So the big take-away is that Google’s Quantum Computing chip Sycamore performed a task that would take 10,000+ years, in a little over 3 minutes.

What does this mean for your Bitcoin private keys?
For now, you are still safe. It will still take this Quantum Computer years to brute-force a private key. However, this does mean that quantum computing is a serious factor to consider and with the technology evolving rapidly, the chances are that these years will be reduced to months in the upcoming years. Luckily there are some projects that claim to be Quantum-resistant, by employing quantum-resistant algorithms, such as QRL, Hcash and Iota.

Time will tell, but stay safe!

If you want to compare wallets, you can do that here.

Photo by Moose

Litecoin turns 8 years, check out one of their first public appearances

Litecoin Logo

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. Litecoin is an open source, global payment network that is fully decentralized without any central authorities. Mathematics secures the network and empowers individuals to control their own finances. Litecoin features faster transaction confirmation times and improved storage efficiency than the leading math-based currency. With substantial industry support, trade volume and liquidity, Litecoin is a proven medium of commerce complementary to Bitcoin.

Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a Google employee and former Engineering Director at Coinbase. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011. It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time, increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified interface. So Litecoin celebrated its 8th birthday last sunday. Congratulations!

Funny fact is that Litecoin is one of the few projects that did not write a whitepaper for its cryptocurrency. One of the first public appearances of Litecoin’s CEO Charlie Lee gives us a great insight on the beginning of Litecoin:

What is a White Paper and how do you write it?

How to write a cryptocurrency whitepaper

 

What is a White Paper?

A white paper is a detailed explanation by a cryptocurrency project of what they are building and what problem they are solving. Technical, financial and commercial information about the project is explained in this document. Normally they aim to provide a document that explains in plain language what they’re planning to do, to attract investors and other interested parties. The Whitepaper is usually accompanied by a One Pager, he project summarized in one page, and a Position Paper, which details the competition and their (better) position in comparison with the competition.

Some companies do not have Whitepapers, but bring out a Blackpaper, Litepaper, Pink Paper or they just do a video explainer or presentation.

If you thinking about investing in a cryptocurrency that is doing an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) or any other crypto project, your first stop is reading the Whitepaper. Especially information about the their solution to a specific problem, the Token Allocation, the Team behind the crypto and the roadmap are important factors in assessing a cryptocurrency.

The first and most popular cryptocurrency Whitepaper is the Bitcoin Whitepaper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto.

This is the abstract of the Bitcoin white paper, just to give you an idea what the content of this site is about:

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they’ll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.

White paper?
White paper?

How do you write a white paper?

A standard whitepaper on any cryptocurrency project contains the following elements:

  • Introduction
  • What is the problem you have encountered?
  • How are you going so solve this problem?
  • What is your (technical) solution to that problem? e.g “We are going to use blockchain to build a registry of whitepapers”
  • What is the use of your cryptocurrency?
  • How are you going to raise funds? For example, through an ICO, STO or IEO.
  • How are you going to use these funds?
  • What is the token allocation? Meaning, how many tokens are being sold to investors, used for marketing, paid to the team etc.
  • What team is behind the project? What is their experience?
  • What is the roadmap of your project?What are the development phases?
  • Conclusion

In short, the above elements will get you started with writing a whitepaper. Of course there are many other elements you could add, more info is always good!

In what format should a whitepaper be?

In our opinion, the best format for a whitepaper is the Bitcoin whitepaper format. It still is the best way to explain the technology behind your project and it looks clean and professional. The great thing is that you can highlight your whitepaper abstract on the first page, just like the example below, and use some keywords. The Ethereum white paper and Ripple white paper also used the same format. Don’t use too much colors, graphics etc., unless you are targeting a specific audience. In our experience, the biggest projects all have a clean looking whitepaper. Below an example of Ripple’s whitepaper, which is a great example of how much information you can give away on your first page in a clean overview.

Ripple white paper

Conclusion

Make sure you tell the truth in your whitepaper. There is no need to make things bigger than they are or claim things that aren’t finished (yet), like partnerships and approvals from authorities. The same goes for any graphics and content you use from third parties, this should be your own work or properly credited. Your potential investors will do their own research and review your whitepaper, so is has to be to the point, self-explanatory and people should feel excited to contribute to your goals.

Thanks for reading!

John

Ps. If you liked this article, let us know and we’ll blog more often on how to’s regarding whitepapers!

Photo credits: Alexey Sokolov

 

CryptoCurrency Mining in 2019

CryptoCurrency mining has been around for almost 10 years. It started with Bitcoin mining in 2009, building fortunes for some, and pushing others out of business. But let’s not rush and first learn what cryptocurrency mining is:

What is CryptoCurrency mining?

All cryptocurrencies have the same thing in common- they are secured by cryptography(that’s why they’re called “cryptocurrencies”).

In a nutshell, many computers from all over the world connect into the same network. They solve complex mathematical puzzles, and make sure that a once approved transaction stays approved forever.

Blockchain is the process where all transactions are stored, and all computers make sure that Blockchain cannot be altered backwards. A stronger network usually means that more computers secure it. And stronger the network is, harder to hack or alter it. That’s why the system had to include an incentive for people to join and utilize their computers for this purpose. The incentive is proportional to computers strength, and it is given as a coin of the currency that they protect. This process is called cryptocurrency mining, and people who engage- miners.

Simply put, you rent your hardware to protect the cryptocurrency network, and get rewarded with some cryptocurrency in return.

The five cornerstones of crypto mining

There are 5 things involved in cryptocurrency mining, and getting grasp of those is essential in order to mine successfully(and profitably).

Mining hardware

The hardware used for mining isn’t much different from your ordinary PC. No matter what you mine, a standard set will be needed- power supply, motherboard, CPU, GPU, hard drive, network port and peripherals. However, mining is all about calculations, so the essential and most expensive parts are CPUs and GPUs. This is also why the more experienced miners often place multiple GPUs inside machines. As higher number of GPUs means more power and profit, they often buy motherboards that have multiple GPU slots, thus saving space and money on other PC components. And when world started catching up- new specialized mining hardware was born. Now we also have ASICs(Application Specific Integrated Circuit), which can’t be used for anything but mining. But at the same time, they’re very good for mining and easy to use. The good news is- you don’t need to know any of this to begin. Your own PC will suffice for testing and also earning some crypto along the way.

Mining software

The first few years of BTC mining were fairly tough on the average PC user. And in my own opinion, this was one of the biggest problems that prevented Bitcoin mining from widespread adoption. First, it was relatively hard to find the info and get involved. And then, those who have found it and tried were struck with complications and a requirement to be an advanced PC user. I’m a web developer and administrator, so I don’t mind working with console applications. But for an average user, this is a big and stressful step. What mining software basically does is utilize hardware for mining purposes. Except connecting your info and monitoring, the process is mostly automatic. Still, it took years for crypto enthusiasts to realize that console miner won’t get their product adopted in the 21 century. After several years, mining software with a GUI started showing up, bringing simplicity and ability for beginners, necessary to bring mining into homes from all over the world. Thanks to this, anyone can start mining today, with their own PC and simplicity in range of using an ordinary software, like a music player or text editor.

Mining difficulty

Contrary to its name, the mining difficulty isn’t that difficult to grasp. Since anyone can join and start mining his crypto reward, everyone would actually join at some point and start earning. But this had to be prevented in order to be able to pay everyone who joins. That’s why mining difficulty was invented. It’s purpose is to regulate the reward system, making the rewards smaller as more and more people join. Likewise, when people start leaving the system, the difficulty goes down thus increasing the mining rewards. Although mining difficulty does define how much crypto coins you’ll earn with certain mining power, it doesn’t really define how much you can earn in USD(or any other FIAT currency). Which brings as to the fourth cornerstone:

Mining earnings

As we just learned, the mining difficulty decides how much cryptocurrency you earn with your hardware. But how much dollars you can make depends on your ability to understand crypto markets. Crypto markets are working 24 hours per day, every day, and are the most fluctuating markets that we yet experienced. It put many people out of business, but many became rich as well. Basically, every better known cryptocurrency has a price in US dollars, and this price goes up and down- usually on daily basis. This is why selling as you mine isn’t always the best option. A coin worth $10 today, may be worth $10.000 in the future. Same logic applies when the coin is falling, so going permanently to $0 is always an option as well. Beginner miners don’t need to worry a lot though- using your own PC means there’s no capital needed, and you can just stop mining if the market goes sideways.

Mining energy

Even though beginner miners don’t need to care about buying the mining equipment, there’s an expense you can’t avoid regardless of your mining level and skill- energy. Mining process is energy intensive, and this means that your PC will work hard in order to solve complex mathematical puzzles and earn you some coins. A good analogy of mining is gaming. They both use lots of resources, thus spending lots of electricity. Depending on your country of residence, this single factor can decide whether mining is profitable for you or not. In countries with cheap electricity(up to 5 cents per kW), mining is still very profitable. In countries with pricier electricity(around 10 cents and above), mining is often not profitable. But as mentioned before, mining earnings heavily depend on difficulty(amount of coins you get) and price(how much $$ one coin is worth). What this means is that even if you pay your electricity a lot, mining can be profitable when done strategically.

I’m in, how to start mining?

If you find this interesting and want to try it out- you can do so today. Luckily for you, cryptocurrency mining is much easier in 2019 then ever before. For starters, just turn on your PC, download the GUI mining software and give it a go. If you’re not sure how to proceed, I can recommend you this little guide, which should get you up and running today.

*This is a guest post.

Superorder Review: The King of Trading Features

Superorder Review: The King of Trading Features

Professional cryptocurrency traders pride themselves in the dedication they give to the trade. To them, it is not just a mere hobby. It is their way of life. Crypto traders spend most of their time exploring crypto markets, testing new strategies, managing their portfolio, and placing well-thought-out trades. It sounds like a handful, but upon closer look, you’ll notice they rely on useful tools to do it all.

Crypto traders work from exchange platforms and trading terminals when trading. Exchanges are simple web-based platforms that support the exchange of one cryptocurrency for another. They have limited tools and resources to support full-on trading. Terminals, on the other hand, provide traders with more powerful tools that help them make profitable trades in a highly dynamic market. Today, we take you through Superorder; a feature-packed trading terminal that guarantees manageable and profitable trading.

What Is Superorder?

Superorder is an API-based terminal for trading cryptocurrencies. It is a comprehensive trading platform which presents users with a centralized place to perform their trades conveniently. The terminal combines the functionality of exchanges, trading bots, analytical systems, and portfolio trackers to present traders with the arsenal they need to master the market.

What Makes Superorder Special?

Trading terminals differ in their structure and functionality. Superorder stands out from the competition by providing a central, fully-automated platform. Automation plays a key role in market analysis. In retrospect, cryptocurrency trading is a wide venture with repetitive processes. Traders benefit from using terminals that aid in automating some of the resource-heavy processes for them.

Superorder tracks the volatile crypto market, notes the differences in the value of crypto coins, identifies trading opportunities, and with the help of strategies, trades on your behalf. Besides, it relies on your personal strategies to do this with minimum human supervision. As a result, traders can customize their habits and have Superorder trade for them even at odd hours of the night. You can read more about how automation benefits your trade here.

What Features Does Superorder Offer?

1. Access to Crypto Exchanges

Common cryptocurrency exchanges specialize in facilitating efficient exchange of one cryptocurrency coin for another. However, they only give traders access to one market. Professional traders differentiate their portfolio by trading across multiple exchange platforms. With Superorder, traders have access to four of the most common exchange platforms: Bittrex, Binance, BitMEX, and CEX.IO. The developers are currently working on adding support for other commonly used exchange platforms, including Coinbase.

2. Full Automation without Coding

The main feature of Superorder lies in the idea of strategy building. Users get access to visual editor in which they can drag and drop orders just like LEGO blocks. It’s pretty simple and convenient. When the strategy is ready, a trader can run it to make the terminal work. Superorder tracks active strategies, checks prices of the assets including in them, and executes orders once conditions are met. It’s all possible without coding at the user side.

3. Extra Orders

Orders refer to the executable instructions coded in trading strategies by automated cryptocurrency terminals. They guide trading platforms in knowing when to buy coins and when to sell them to realize profits. Superorder provides traders with extra orders from the ones commonly used by most terminals. These include:

  • Limit buy/sell orders
  • Market buy/sell orders
  • Limit stop loss orders
  • Limit take profit orders
  • Trailing stop orders

Apart from these actions, Superorder provides for conditionals. Tools like AND/OR Forks allow splitting strategies into several parts. Tech indicators like MACD and RSI help to base trading actions on more conditions.

4. Crypto Bots

Based on user-created strategies, Superorder bots automate everything even more. If a particular trader doesn’t want to spend time studying strategy building, he or she can rent an already designed, tested, and optimized strategy in the form of a bot.

Currently, Superorder offers three bots: for scalping, for short trading, and for long trading.

5. Portfolio Management

Your cryptocurrency portfolio tells the tale of how successful your trading has been. Professional traders that trade on multiple exchanges often have to visit each of the exchange sites, track their portfolio, and manage it on each of those exchanges. It is a tiresome and repetitive process that could cause discrepancies and inconsistency in simultaneous open options.

Superorder accesses and tracks your trading reflecting the assets’ price. You can then manage your portfolio from the terminal. The feature is especially important as you can view any open positions that may have grown too large. It also aids in helping traders identify any unnoticed losing trades that might cost them their portfolio.

Why Trade with Superorder?

The Superorder team constantly releases new features and updates that aim at improving the efficiency of cryptocurrency trading. Here is why you should make Superorder your number one trading terminal of choice.

  • Full Customization

Terminals fetch information from multiple exchanges and present them on one central platform. Beneficial as it is, not every trader needs all the information presented by the terminal. Superorder offers its users the option of customizing their experience and only having the information they need.

  • Referral Programs for Strategy Builders

Are you an expert in creating cryptocurrency trading strategies? Do you wish you could make some money from sharing it with other traders? Superorder got your back! Registered pro traders on Superorder stand to gain percentage from the invited users’ spending when other traders use the strategies.

  • Notify Action Algorithm

With terminals, automated trading happens independently. To see the results at the end of day trading, traders have to visit the terminal. Superorder offers a more efficient way of knowing how your trading strategy faired on. With the new Notify algorithm, traders can set an alert on their trading strategies. Once a trade is triggered by the right parameters, you receive a reminder text on your linked email or a pushover application. Click here to know how to set up a notify action for your strategy.

  • Free Subscription

While Superorder has professional plans and even custom-based sets of features, all the tasty tools are available for free. Surely, the most basic subscription has its limitations referred to lower trading volume. But it still allows users to create strategies, automate them, and rest while the terminal trades on their behalf.

Final thoughts

Superorder delivers the best crypto trading features on one platform. Even with the free plan, you get access to full automation trading with analytical charts and portfolio management. It is an offer you ought to consider.

Go to Superorder.io to learn more!

*This is a sponsored post

Bakkt Launched, Bitcoin down

bakkt

The highly anticipated Bakkt Exchanges has launched today. Bakkt is a bitcoin futures exchange & digital assets platform, made available by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The launch was highly anticipated since it enables traditional investors to easily buy Bitcoin Futures.

The expectation was that the launch of Bakkt would result in an uptrend for Bitcoin. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price has dropped below 10k. It traded above the 10k mark at the launch of the platform:

One of the perks of of Bakkt is the Bakkt Warehouse, an online (“warm”) and offline, air-gapped (“cold”) digital asset storage. Bakkt rebalances between warm and cold storage tiers to minimize risks associated with warm storage, and those wallets are covered by a $125,000,000 insurance policy from a leading global carrier. In addition, Bakkt is working with one of the largest custody banks in the world, BNY Mellon, as part of its safekeeping process.

The launch of such a futures platform is definitely a good thing for Crypto. It will attract new institutional investors who want a piece of the Bitcoin Pie, but for now, this might be a classic Sell The News – move of Bitcoin!

0Chain partners with Oracle Blockchain!

0Chain’s dStorage teams up with Oracle Blockchain to provide a single source of truth for Hyperledger Fabric data

0Chain LLC, a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today, announced a collaboration with Oracle to provide Hyperledger Fabric customers a solution to use 0Chain dStorage as a trusted party for file-based transactions that require data validation from endorsers. The concept is to have enterprises upload the data to dStorage and submit a transaction to the Fabric with the document hash, and have it verified by endorsers retrieving the data directly from dStorage or through a 3rd party distributed verifier.

There are several use cases for multi-party transactions involving documents in various verticals. One example is in healthcare where a medical claim document shared between patient, hospital, doctor, lab, and insurer need to be secured to prevent fraudulent activity. Other verticals such as supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, banking, real estate, agriculture, identity, voting, insurance, cross-border payment, clearing house, licensing & IP, energy trading, certificates, deeds, ad, registry, telecom, forensics, and government industries could all use the Fabric with dStorage for an end-to-end secure transaction platform.

“The 0Chain dStorage platform protects enterprises from data breaches and provides a single source of truth for multi-party transactions to reduce costs associated with fraud, liability, and dispute,” said Saswata Basu, CEO, 0Chain LLC. “Oracle and 0Chain are at the forefront of innovation and with this relationship, customers can migrate their entire set of existing applications to the blockchain seamlessly.”

About 0Chain
0Chain is a decentralized storage platform, protecting enterprises from data breaches, and providing a single source of truth for data, with unparalleled privacy, security, transparency, and performance. For more information about 0Chain, please visit https://www.0chain.net, or email at zero@0chain.net

About Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) is Oracle’s partner program that provides partners with a differentiated advantage to develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle’s products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle’s growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Partners engaging with Oracle will be able to differentiate their Oracle Cloud expertise and success with customers through the OPN Cloud program – an innovative program that complements existing OPN program levels with tiers of recognition and progressive benefits for partners working with Oracle Cloud. To find out more visit: https://www.oracle.com/partners/index.html.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 16, 2019 / article by PRNewswire/ —

Bakkt Bitcoin futures details released

bakkt

The Intercontinental Exchange has released the details on the upcoming Bakkt futures:

” ICE Futures U.S. will begin to trade and ICE Clear US will begin to clear the BakktTM Bitcoin (USD) Monthly and Daily Futures contracts on Monday, September 23, 2019. The Exchange notice announcing the launch as well as full contract specifications can be found here. As such, the following tentative margin requirements will be effective with the opening of business on September 23,2019 and there after”

Interesting detail is that the initial hedge requirement will be $3900. More in the PDF below:

Bakkt Futures details PFD

VanEck launches an ATF-like product backed by Bitcoin

VanEck logo

Since the decision on the ETF-application is again delayed by the SEC, VanEck has found another way yo offer a bitcoin backed product to institutional investors. Therefore, VanEck and SolidX announced that the VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust (the Trust) will issue shares (the Shares) to Qualified Institutional Buyers (QIBs) in accordance with Rule 144A under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act).

VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust 144A Shares (the “Trust”) looks and feels like a traditional ETF. The Trust seeks to provide qualified institutional buyers (QIBs) access to a convenient and cost-effective way to buy and hold bitcoin through a cleared security that is tradeable through traditional and prime brokerage accounts. The investment objective of the Trust is to reflect the price of bitcoin, less the expenses of the Trust. The bitcoin held by the Trust are protected by multi-factor, cold storage security. The Trust’s bitcoin holdings are audited and insured by a syndicate of A-rated underwriters against loss or theft.

“Institutional demand for bitcoin exposure is uncertain, because institutional quality vehicles simply have not, to this point, been readily available,” said Jan van Eck, Chief Executive Officer of VanEck. “We’re introducing a solution for institutions that fits within their operational processes and the current regulatory framework.”

This news has already resulted in a spike for Bitcoin, will it reach new highs again?
Read more in the official announcement.