Belacoin Review: Earning Crypto by Sharing Pictures on Belacam

The world of social media is on the verge of being disrupted by a new wave of blockchain based projects.

The current giants of the industry rely on centralized platforms that offer their users and content creators very little for their efforts; despite this, apps such as Instagram and Snapchat retain a loyal following that will take some persuading in order to switch over to another platform.

Belacam which is based on the Bela (BELA) blockchain aims to provide a decentralized alternative that directly rewards its users for their efforts.

What is Belacoin?

Belacoin (BELA) was originally created in 2014 as a charity coin for organizations that specialized in helping children. A percentage of the circulating supply was donated to different organizations and used in a Bela faucet in order to try and widen the distribution of the coin.

This idea never really took off and the project switched focus in 2016 after the Ambia Fund took over development of Belacoin. A rebranding followed along with updates to the Bela wallets. The team also focused on attracting both dedicated and independent miners to help secure the blockchain.

Originally based on Litecoin, Belacoin utilized the Dark Gravity Well difficulty adjustment algorithm and boasted a swift block time and was able to adopt technological advances such as SegWit and the Lightening Network.

As a result, Bela was able to facilitate fast peer to peer transactions and this helped attract the Belacam team who were looking for a suitable network that could support their social media platform.

In order to help facilitate the growth of the Belacam platform, BELA is being transformed into an ERC-20 token in order to help it seamlessly integrate into an already existing infrastructure.

What is Belacam?

Belacam is a platform that allows its users to share both pictures and gifs, and to be rewarded in BELA for uploading content. In addition, content creators can also receive BELA for each like their images get and users can withdraw their funds or use them to like other users’ photos.

The platform is scheduled to work in a manner similar to Steemit and users will be able to both interact with and reward their friends and favourite personalities, as well as organizations and other content creators.

The team behind Belacam are working in unison with the Ambia Fund team and the two parties are aiming to create a unique social platform that taps into a substantial market of photo sharing app users.

How Viable is the Project?

Social media plays a huge role in today’s society with Snapchat having over 400 million daily active users and Instagram having over 2 billion users. The picture sharing sector may prove to extremely lucrative for Belacam and Steemit has shown that decentralized social media projects can definitely be successful.

While the mainstream platforms have amassed huge numbers of users, they do not directly reward content creators and they either go unpaid or enlist the help of third party sites in order to find sponsors or advertising partners. By enabling content creators to be directly rewarded by other users of the platform, Belacam has the potential to disrupt the current market and attract a significant number of young, crypto friendly users.

Belacam is also being closely monitored by the Ambia Fund which specializes in developing cryptocurrency start-ups and the Ambia team have been behind sourcing programmers and designers, in addition to managing the project’s media and public relations campaigns.

Bela is also supported by Live Bela LLC, the company behind the cryptocurrency with the team headquartered in Charlottesville, USA. They remain fully compliant and Live Bela LLC is registered with the US Government and retains the Delaware LLC File Number: #6507095.

Live Bela maintains and develops Bela's source code, software projects, and plug-ins as well being involved in building its community.

The interaction between Bela and Belacam will prove vital as people will need Bela to pay for special features in Belacam and as the platform grows in popularity the demand for Bela will increase. Content creators are also set to receive Bela from both followers and advertisers and when they choose to exchange their earnings for other currencies, this will help create substantial trading volume for Bela, and in turn, help it to gain further traction.

In addition to the Belacam platform, Bela also supports Bella chess, an android app that allows users to play chess against a number of opponents and to receive BELA as a reward for winning.

Is BELA Worth Investing In?

The BELA token has struggled recently as the market downturn has seen it lose the vast majority of its value. After peaking at a price of around $0.52 in January, BELA is currently trading at a price of $0.09 and retains a market cap of approximately $4m. At its peak it was worth over $20m and the team have some work to do in order to attract investment back into the project.

There are a number of developments in the pipeline and the Bela team has decided to switch BELA over to an ERC-20 token and to incorporate a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The main objectives are to incentivize true everyday users and to also move away from more centralized mining pools. These shifts are also aimed at improving interoperability with ERC-20 tokens being well integrated with exchanges and hardware wallets.

The swap is scheduled to take place over the coming weeks and each old BELA will be exchanged for an ERC20 BELA on a 1:1 ratio.

The Belacam platform is also in development with the Gamma version close to being launched. Testing applications were taken between January 29 and February 20, and the individuals selected have since been testing out Belacam Gamma with the release scheduled for Q2 of this year.

As with any blockchain based project a lot depends on how the team manage to stay on top of developments and to also move ahead of their competitors. The decentralized social media sector can prove difficult to navigate, and while Steemit has proved to be a success, Indahash has performed badly while the team behind Props project has been forced to delay launching their video sharing platform.

Building a strong social media platform takes time, even though these projects are able to grow their user base at an almost exponential rate.

There also exists the possibility that Belacam is not well received by the general public as platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat maintain a strong hold over their users. The success of Belacam very much depends on the token revenue sharing model becoming more visible and everyday users getting more accustomed to exchanging value via tokens. The project can market itself heavily to the cryptocurrency community and build itself up from there, similar to the way Steemit has operated.

So far the project looks set to incorporate a number of positive features and Belacam includes a clean and intuitive interface and as well as interactive features such as a leader board highlighting the users who have given the most likes within a 24 hour period.

By giving away a large amount of likes on the site and making it onto the leader board users will have their profiles featured in front of thousands of other users. Features such as these can help incentivize users to interact on the platform.

The Belacam application could prove to be potentially profitable for holders of BELA as applications such as Instagram and Snapchat attract huge numbers of users, whilst Facebook and Twitter also incorporate a heavy amount of image sharing and are immensely popular.

By using blockchain technology to facilitate swift payment and rewards for liking and sharing content, Belacam has every possibility of carving out a portion of the market for itself. With a current market valuation of around $4m, BELA also plenty of room to grow and provides investors with the possibility of significantly healthy returns.