Five Coins Review
Waves
Introduction
The Waves platform is a Blockchain, which while similar to BitCoin, has much more features than just being compared to a cryptocurrency. The concept is to extend Bitcoin and create a platform where cryptos, fiat currencies, and assets could be issued and traded in a similar way as bitcoin is being done now.
Waves has created a decentralised Exchange (DEX) which is integrated into the waves blockchain. Orders once posted are matched (buy and ask sides) by Matcher nodes. When a trade happens after a match, it still wouldn’t have access to the traded assets. After confirmation, user assets are traded according to the price on the blockchain. The waves payment gateways take cares of the fiat to crypto and back conversion.
Using the payment gateways one can tokenize their fiat currencies to be used on the platform. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin too could be tokenized and their equivalent assets be created on the Waves platform.
The above could be executed via the Waves lite wallet which doesn’t require you to download the entire blockchain and which is available as a Chrome, website and Android apps.
Comparison to Ethereum
The end to end workflow from creating a wallet, to transferring assets and then trading them is well integrated and thought off. Waves till now hasn’t be hacked unlike ethereum. This might change when they finally get Smart
Contracts though.
Roadmap
Waves is still a work in progress with smart contracts to be released shortly . Smart contracts would help in implementing business logic on top of the blockchain which would be equivalent to the Dapps on Ethereum. This would transform Waves from just being a token issuance & trading platform to a application platform for business & finance which would make it more attractive from the investment point of view.
Overall the platform is promising and would be attractive to both businesses and individuals. The user experience is much smoother and feels integrated than Ethereum, which is a dominant token platform.The platform is already being used by Primal Base, Wagerr, Travel Coin and many upcoming ICOs.
Market
Considering that it is trading under $5 today makes it very attractive buy option for the future.Expect the value to increase when the smart contracts feature gets live.
Augur
Augur is an decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. While a beta version was released in March 2016., a stable version is expected to be live in late 2017. Augur uses the "Collective Intelligence” principle which is another term for “Wisdom of the crowd” to forecast the future of specific events.
According to Wikipedia, “Collective intelligence is shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision Making”. Collected averaged feedback from such groups can be used to arrive at a likely outcome. A user on Augur could create his own markets for specific questions while allowing other users to predict positive or negative outcomes from whose trading he could profit.
Augur’s tokens called ($REP) short for Reputation can be bought by individuals who can than act as Reporters to confirm prediction outcomes.Correct predictions are rewarded while incorrect ones are penalized.
Competition
There has been some criticism of Augur that its goto market development roadmap is slow which has allowed competitors like Gnosis ( $200M market cap )& Stox ($60M market cap) to enter the market. Both Gnosis and Stox
are strong competitors with good teams behind them.
##Roadmap
Augur had some code security issues found in the compiler being used to generate the smart contracts.
Roadmap released in june looks positive for a release late this year to early next year though no dates are mentioned.
Market
With a slow development schedule and modest marketing , it’s not surprising that’s it price has been stable for some time. Expect this to be for another six months to a year as Augur gets ready for its
Full release.
MaidSafeCoin : Building a brand new internet
MaidSafe is an almost decade old company which has a goal a to implement the next generation decentralized and secure network called SAFE (Secure Access For Everyone). It could be described as crowdsourced internet as it uses peer to peer technology to connect its users to each other. According to their website “The SAFE Network is fully decentralised, with les distributed and stored all over the world, on different devices. This allows the network to be robust to attacks, with no central point of weakness.”
Business Model
Peer-to-peer network technology is used by SAFE to join a global network of safe users. The idea is to replace data centres and servers of today and provide a more secure service. This network as a service stores everyone’s data securely with encryption an anonymous protocol for authentication. Unlike other crypto currencies, Maidsafe does not use any blockchain platform. And unlike Bitcoin, it implements a Close group consensus which utilises a small group which is a tiny percentage of the network size, to fix a position for the entire network. This is scalable and fast as compared to the BitCoin blockchain as the network need not communicate with all nodes.
Competition
According to Maidsafe, there are no competitors in this field, it is alone in its own category. Sia and Storj use the internet and blockchain whereas Maidsafe’s mission is to create a brand new internet.
Conclusion
MaidSafe Network primary scope is to become a secure and anonymous distributed computer, data and communication network. It is the ultimate triple threat to the existing Internet, with the potential of making several industries completely obsolete.
According to their vision, there would be no more need of hosting services or
"cloud solutions" and hence CDNs, DNS, backups etc would become redundant. (everything is permanently stored in the Safe Network, with autonomous backups).
Market
According to the Maidsafe website, Alpha 1 testing is completed and Alpha 2 testing is going to start soon. This is positive news. Expect a price rise end of this year when Maidsafe finishes Alpha 2 testing.
Ardor
Jelurida is developing Ardor its next generation scalable blockchain platform based on the Nxt blockchain technology. Ardor’s design is unique that multiple blockchains, known as child chains could be created on it with many features and their security guaranteed on a global level by the parent Ardor chain. Ardor’s tries to solve the following issues which were identified with Nxt,
● Single token issuance: For all features, Nxt used a single token. This would be rectified in Ardor and it would support multiple tokens running on side chains.
● Blockchain size: In Nxt all nodes in the network are tasked with all platform tasks and housekeeping.
● Blockchain customization: Maintenance and customization of the Nxt blockchain is not simple which is Ardor is trying to fix.
Ardor will be a scalable blockchain platform where individuals, companies and organizations can create child chains and issue their own tokens to run their blockchains. These child blockchains will run on the Ardor main chain with Ardor being responsible for securing it. They would also inherit all of Ardor’s available features for example, asset creation and trading, shuffling, aliasing, phasing, multisig escrow and much more.
Comparison to other platforms
Ardor can be also called as a blockchain-as-a-service. It could be compared to Ethereum and Waves as it would allow coin tokens to be issues on its platform.
Market
IGNIS would be the first child in the Ardor blockchain. It’s ICO which started on 5th August would end on 14th October.Overall the platform shows promise, though short term gains are unlikely.
Expect a few years when the platform becomes finally ready.
0x
Many decentralised apps (dApps) have created smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain to facilitate peer-to-peer exchange. There have been concerns about the lack of best practices and security while composing and running these contracts, and as a result end users are exposed to numerous smart contracts with questionable quality, security and configuration processes which have pushed up the learning curve for understanding the
functionality exposed.
This is a costly approach on the ethereum network as it divides end users according to the particular dApp and doesn’t take advantage of valuable network effects around liquidity.
0x claims to be a solution to this problem by acting as modular, unopinionated building blocks that may be assembled and reconfigured.
What is 0x?
● 0x is a protocol for an exchange, and does not have a user-facing exchange application ui.
● As 0x is designed to be decentralized and trustless; there is no central party which can control it or be hacked into.
● Ox though a free protocol enables for-profit user-facing exchange applications to be built on top of the protocol.
● Ox is funded by a global community of stakeholders.
Business Model
Market players can use 0x protocol for off-chain order books and hence reduce costs for market makers and also ensure that the blockchain is only used for trade settlement. Hosting and maintaining an off-chain order book is a service; to incentivize users called Relayers, to provide this service they must be able to charge transaction fees on trading activity.
Relayers While free to set their transaction fees to any value they desire are
expected to be highly competitive as more players jump in.
Digital Assets supported by 0x
0x supports all Ethereum-based assets that adhere to the ERC20 token standard. It also predicts that cryptos such as Bitcoin will end up being represented as ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain in the future.
0x Token (ZRX)
0x protocol token (ZRX) is utilized in two ways:
- To drive network effects around liquidity by facilitating coordination while creating a feedback loop where early adopters of the protocol benefit from wider adoption and
- To be used for decentralized governance over 0x protocol's update
mechanism.
ICO Sale
The ZRX token sale took place on August 15. Within 24 hr 100% of the 500M ZRX tokens that were set aside for sale had been purchased for a total of $24 million. 0x claims to have accomplished this sale with zero marketing and even avoiding international ICO financing platforms.
This is very credible sign and shows confidence in the protocol
##Market
The 0x token though fairly new has raised good market capital in the last 10 days. This is a coin to watch out for as many future exchanges might be built over it.
Have been a big fan of WAVES. Was the first coin i invested in with the intent of long term holding.
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