Diving Into Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) - Bitcoin Cash's Strange Token

While doing the grunt work for my article on my Earnings from 5,000 Crypto Twitter Giveaways, I received a mysterious token known as RFND. Upon further research I found out RFND was a token created on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, using Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP). The more I found out about SLP the more I fell in love with this strange token system. During my research I found some valuable projects built on the SLP token system (monthly dividends, airdrops, tipping bots, etc.) as well as some less than valuable projects. Let me know if you have any experience with SLP below or what your opinions are of it, I hope you enjoy!

Simple Ledger Protocol

Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) is a simple token system built on top of Bitcoin Cash. SLP was started in 2018 and already has a total of 9,529 tokens created - for reference, according to ledger.com, there were over 200,000 ERC-20 tokens created as of the 23rd of October, 2019. Currently almost 10% of Bitcoin Cash's daily transactions (1,898 of 19,262) involve an SLP token according to simpleledger.info. The current highest market cap token, ZAPT, is over $11,573,314.10 - which puts it in line to be around 300th in market cap size on CoinGecko. 

To go a little more in depth into how SLP works technically, SLP transactions are like transaction-ception. They are a transaction within a transaction and work by using the OP_RETURN output, which is a part of any standard BCH transaction. When a small, dust, amount of satoshi is sent the transaction also contains the data for the token. SLP tokens also require 0 confirmations and support instant arrival times, meaning no more paying $5 to send my $2 worth of LINK from one wallet to another. 

Why get involved in SLP?

Good question, I can make an easy argument against SLP - Bitcoin Cash isn't necessarily known for being on the cutting edge of technology. At this time it doesn't appear to be quite as robust as ETH or even TRX currently are in their ability to create dApps, but with that being said there are also quite a few arguments for SLP. I don't believe they're trying to compete with ETH or even TRX in trying to create a robust dApp environment. SLP even states on their website their tokens would be best suited for "virtual gaming assets, licenses, digital media rights, gift cards, and company stock shares". Their aim is not to usurp ETH, it's simply to provide a cheap, easy to use alternative in a niche space and they seem to have done a great job in doing just that.

Outside of what I covered above their gas fee is essentially zero, a very small amount of BCH is required to send any amount of tokens (whether it's one billion or one). They also already have a decent amount of backing just two years into their project, I already said the top rated token on the memo DEX is at a market cap of over $11 million (which is right around LBRY's market cap size), there's several other tokens hovering at or around that amount on there as well. On that topic the majority of solid token projects supported include monthly/weekly divdends and airdrops. The token I mentioned above, RFND, has a pretty solid dividend portfolio their building - as does SOUR, currently one of the highest priced tokens on SLP (nearly 14k Sats or $0.03/ea).

Supported Wallets

There are four major ways to store your SLP tokens, I'm only going to cover my two favorites because...they're my favorite.

#1 - Zapit.IO, who at this time only support their wallet on mobile but due to it's ease of use and clean UI make it my favorite. They also already support the ability to top up using everything from Cash App to Google Pay. And also currently have a pretty solid referral program so if you're a referral king I'd recommend getting in on that now. On that note if you want to use my referral code it's absoluteunit, I think you'll also get the same reward I will for using it.

#2 - Memo.Cash. Yes the weird BCH social media website is also the most popular place to hold your SLP tokens. More importantly though is their built-in decentralized exchange where quite a bit of SLP token trading activity goes down. Memo.Cash is where the majority of these SLP tokens will post updates, share airdrop schedules and post general nonsense. I don't want to be political in anyway but I will let you know it does lean one way and you should be able to tell just by going to the site. However I don't really care I'm just there to learn.

Where Can I Get SLP Tokens?

I answered this mostly above, memo.cash is definitely the best spot if you're looking to trade or buy SLP tokens. However there's a couple of different exchanges, such as Anycoin.cash, Coinex or Atility that you can use as well. Of those Anycoin.cash lists the most variety of tokens (but lower volume overall) while Coinex and Atility list Spice/HONK/USDH as their only three SLP tokens, albeit they both have higher volume overall.

There are also quite a few Telegram faucet groups - some I'm not allowed to share but are fairly easy to find if you head over to the official SLP Tipping Bot website and look at the top tipped tokens and then do some searching on memo.cash. 

Conclusion

I'm glad I was able to investigate and dive into Bitcoin Cash's most promising token system so early into it's development. It seems like there's quite a bit of promise there as well as some early Crypto style things to be seen. There's quite a bit more that I could write about SLP but I wanted to keep this a little shorter and expand more if I feel people want to know about it. The thing that kept popping in my head most while roaming Memo.Cash or searching for more info on SLP was just how much it reminded me of the early days of ETH and Crypto in general. It was almost 2017-esque where every token had a funny name and would eventually moon (shouts out to you Potato Coin, RIP). I can't say if it would be a good idea or not to invest in SLP but it's certainly a blast from the past and an interesting project to look into!

I hope you enjoyed reading and learning about SLP. Thanks for reading/following and liking the post! Have a great day!