I'm probably not the first person you're hearing about RaiBlocks (XRB) from.

I probably won't be the last!

The CryptoCurrency's price has increased almost 1000% in the last month; and at the time of writing this it has the 17th highest market capitalization according to https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/raiblocks/.

The coin boasts some amazing features, and IMHO, can fight with the best of them.

RaiBlocks transactions are 100% fee-less. This means you can send any amount, and no matter how small or large, the recipient will recieve exactly how much you sent.

RaiBlocks also is one of the fastest crypto's in existence; Wallet-to-Wallet transactions can take as little as 2-3 seconds.

Also due to the nature of how RaiBlocks operates, (I liked this article that did a good job of explaining the technology: https://hackernoon.com/iota-vs-raiblocks-413679bb4c3e), the coin can handle an astoundingly large amount of transactions per second, or TPS: 7,000+ at this moment in time.

This CryptoCurrency is a force to be reckoned with, with winning features left and right. Almost sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?

Well you might be right. (Sort of)

For those that don't know, CryptoCurrency's are purchased on special websites called "exchanges" that allow you to purchase coins with either Fiat currency (IE: USD), Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others.

Here is where the problem starts though.

RaiBlocks is only available (at the time of writing this) on two Exchanges: www.mercatox.com, and www.bitgrail.com.

These exchanges aren't the biggest in the market, (such as www.binance.com, or www.bittrex.com), and because of that, they have faced issues that most likely wouldn't have faced those larger exchanges.

For example, BitGrail.

BitGrail is an exchange who's most traded crypto by volume is (much like Mercatox), primarily RaiBlocks.

There's no intrinsic problem with this at all, both Exchanges and Crypto's have to start somewhere.

The problem comes when a lesser experienced exchange becomes a little more populated than they can handle.

The RaiBlock's network is comprised of "Nodes", basically computer servers set up primarily for broadcasting transactions through the system.

After BitGrail started having problems with RaiBlocks withdrawals and transactions, news broke out that the whole exchange (which at the time of writing this has handled over $56 million USD in trades) has been using ONE singular node for all of their Deposits and Withdrawals through the exchange.

This is, if my Spanish Classes in high school have taught me anything, "no bueno".

A single Node being used for the whole of the BitGrail was bound to fail eventually, and it did 2 days ago, when BitGrail took their XRB wallet down for maintenance. Fortunately, it was brought back up about 24 hours later.

This situation says a couple things about XRB.

1. It shows that even though BitGrail was in the wrong trying to only use a singular Node for their whole website, It speaks wonders towards RaiBlock's system that it was handled so well while it lasted.
   (Albeit, the technical problem was a minor bug in XRB's node programming that only presented itself when a Node was overloaded with transactions, but still). And,

2. The reason BitGrail's system was brought back up so quickly, (relatively, you'll understand soon) was because of the RaiBlock's developer team. When news broke about what has happening to the Exchange, the XRB team took it upon themselves to help them fix the problem, and they did so really quickly IMO.

Although thanks to the XRB Dev team the issue with BitGrail was fixed relatively quickly, this was still a big fuckup in one of the only two exchanges you can currently purchase this coin that currently has a market cap of over $3 Billion.

Now this part of the story gets ugly here, when we talk about the other exchange I mentioned, Mercatox.

Mercatox over the last couple days has been responsible for my blood pressure spiking, and I'm not alone.

Here's what happened, if you're not in the loop.

3 days ago, Mercatox went offline. Any attempts to visit the site were met with this splash screen:

Sounds well enough, they might just be down for regular server maintenance. However, this is where it gets interesting.

Over the next 72 hours, Mercatox's twitter page went from reason to reason as to why they were down.
From DDOS:
To a domain issue:
And even two days later when they said the problem was fixed, and they were going to be back online, the website was only up for a total of 4-5 minutes, then down for the rest of the day.

Finally, today, the 4th, Mercatox finally comes back online.

But myself, and thousands of other people spent those three days worrying about our funds stored on the website.
Thankfully the RaiBlock's team said on their twitter that they had contacted the Mercatox team and that coins were safe and not to worry.

The Mercatox exchange showed their utter incompetence and lack of professionalism throughout these last couple days. Thankfully while the exchange was down, our coins on the website were safe, however, the price of RaiBlock's dropped from $35 to $25, almost a 30% drop that resulted in millions of dollars of unrealized/lost capital.

The RaiBlock's coin itself is absolutely amazing, and will be around for a long time (you're hearing it here now), but at this very moment the only way to acquire any is to roll the dice on these exchanges staying online and working correctly.

This is the struggle.

Thankfully, because of RaiBlock's massive surge in popularity, other exchanges are going to be listing it soon.

https://www.rightbtc.com is in the process of rolling out XRB listings and trading, and there's a community vote ending tomorrow on Binance (www.binance.com/vote.html) and RaiBlocks is leading that vote.

So there's hope for the future! The price for RaiBlocks will most likely surge once it hits major exchanges, and that will be a blessing. But at this very moment, unfortunately, there just doesn't exist a stable exchange to purchase RaiBlocks on.

Thanks for reading!