- #Siacoin ($SC)
SC Project Breakdown
Competing with the likes of Amazon, Apple, DropBox and Amazon S3, Siacoin is a decentralized cloud storage platform utilizing unused and idle hard drives across the world to rent out spare hard drive space. Sia’s decentralized infrastructure enables a competitive blockchain marketplace where users compete for business and determine hosting prices, and has drawn parallels with AirBnb and Uber’s two-sided, community-based platforms.
In a world where centralized file and data storage is the norm and controlled by a select few and control, reliability, security, and cost-efficiency are virtually non-existent, Sia offers a cheaper, low-latency, reliable, more secure solution, allowing users to enjoy benefits of cloud storage, without waiving control.
#Why You Should Watch SC
Sia isn’t just aiming to capture 10% of the $200 billion cloud storage market, they are striving to dominate it, citing a 70-90% share as their ultimate goal in their Wiki FAQ. And, all for a price of $.50/TB (100 times cheaper than the world’s leading CDN, Akamai). For scale, with storage points spanning 50 countries and 6 continents, and hosts within 50 milliseconds of every major city in the world, Sia’s reach already exceeds that of Amazon . Already in the billion dollar market cap club, Sia’s blog predicts big developments in 2018, namely, the release of file sharing between Sia users, approaching major companies to act as their storage layer (including Dropbox and Netflix), and elevating Sia’s public profile through PR and marketing efforts.
If you’re curious about further mid-to long-term developments, Sia’s Trello board provides an active and up-to-date resource.
- #Nano ($NANO/XRB)
NANO/XRB Project Breakdown
Recently rebranded from RaiBlocks to Nano, Nano is everything Bitcoin never was. Correcting and building on three fundamental issues impeding Bitcoin’s mass practicality (lack of scalability, high latency, and power inefficiency), Nano is a low-latency, high-performance, trustless cryptocurrency utilizing a novel block-lattice data structure.
As opposed to distributing an entire public ledger across all nodes, Nano users enjoy their own individual account-chain, which is only able to be updated by the respective account holder (them). Due to its lightweight protocol, Nano boasts instantaneous transactions, unlimited scalability, and no fees, offering an effective, and superior alternative to Bitcoin.
Why You Should Watch NANO/XRB
With a recent rebranding and listing on Binance, Nano has created a brand ready to be recognized and adopted by mainstream audiences. As addressed in a February 6th SEC hearing on virtual currencies, money laundering, energy consumption and ICOs are all contentious issues likely to be regulated in crypto’s upcoming future. And, should these regulations be passed, Nano stands to fare quite well due to its transparency, lack of high-power mining hardware and minimal required resources.
With already 4 million transactions under their belt, a vibrant supportive community and more upcoming exchange listings, 2018 could be the year of mass adoption for this practical and cost-efficient Bitcoin alternative.
- #Cardano
Cardano is home to the Ada cryptocurrency, which can be used to send and receive digital funds. This digital cash represents the future of money, making possible fast, direct transfers that are guaranteed to be secure through the use of cryptography.
Cardano is more than just a cryptocurrency, however, it is a technological platform that will be capable of running financial applications currently used every day by individuals, organisations and governments all around the world. The platform is being constructed in layers, which gives the system the flexibility to be more easily maintained and allow for upgrades by way of soft forks. After the settlement layer that will run Ada is complete, a separate computing layer will be built to handle smart contracts, the digital legal agreements that will underpin future commerce and business. Cardano will also run decentralised applications, or dapps, services not controlled by any single party but instead operate on a blockchain.
This is the first blockchain project to be developed from a scientific philosophy, and the only one to be designed and built by a global team of leading academics and engineers. It is essential that the technology is secure, flexible and scalable for use by many millions of users. Consequently, considerable thought and care from some of the leading experts in their fields has been devoted to the project and informed design decisions. The scientific rigour applied to mission-critical systems such as aerospace and banking has been brought to the field of cryptocurrencies, with a high assurance implementation. We believe this is the first time that this has been done.
A major innovation of Cardano is that it will balance the needs of users with those of regulators, and in doing so combine privacy with regulation. The vision for Cardano is that its new style of regulated computing will bring greater financial inclusion by providing open access for all to fair financial services.
- #LISK ( LSK)
#1 - It is a ‘modular’ cryptocurrency
The first of its kind, Lisk brands itself as the “first modular cryptocurrency utilising sidechains”. We’ll get to the sidechains part in a bit and focus on ‘modular’. As the name suggests, this coin involves ‘modules’ that serve as the basis of its design and construction. The overall design is its trump card - the Lisk system allows anyone to use its ‘designing blocks’ to construct their own decentralised apps . The language of choice for Lisk for individual app construction is Javascript, one of the most popular programming languages. Loads of programmers know Javascript, so we can say that the applicability value of Lisk is quite high.
#2 - Utilises ‘sidechains’
By this point, we are all familiar with the blockchain, usually defined as public ledger of all completed transactions. One problem that exists with blockchains is that it can be artificially bloated with test or fake transactions. When there are too many bad transactions, the ‘blocks’ get full faster and slow down the network (this is called ‘bloated’ network). No one likes a slow network.
Enter Lisk’s solution, the sidechain. Sidechains are additions to the main blockchain. Think of it like Post-It notes applied on book pages - you can add more value yet not clutter the main text. Sidechains can be attached to independent blockchains and serve as a place to put all the high-volume transactions without interfering with the main blockchain. As a result, this will ensure a fast network all day, every day (in theory). You can read more about sidechains in the whitepaper or Richard Brown's simple explanation.
#3 - Former Ethereum core members joined Lisk
On June 8 2016, Lisk CEO Max Kordek announced the addition of Charles Hoskinson (ex-CEO of Ethereum) and Steven Nerayoff (ex-advisor for Ethereum) as Senior Advisors of Lisk, to facilitate Product Development. According to Kordek,
“There is no one else in the world like Charles who has the vision to build a successful cryptography project and Steven, who has an invaluable entrepreneur insight after founding six companies and being a venture capitalist.“
Worth noting – Ether’s market cap is impressive, standing at 1.4 billion dollars at time of writing.
#4 – Designed for App Developers
We briefly touched this in #1, but this deserves a special mention. Lisk wants to be the 'de-facto standard for blockchain applications and services', that are 'standalone, decentralised, blockchain-based apps developed in Javascript'. Decentralised apps ('dapps') has great potential to be integrated into a wide variety of applications, including 'immutable storage, a decentralized federation of hosting, oracle services, or computation of smart contracts.' (source for quotes)
Lisk CEO, Kordek said,
“There is no public cryptocurrency platform which allows developers to easily deploy their own blockchain and build a JavaScript blockchain app on it… This will give millions of developers the ability to create their own sidechains, particularly around consumer applications, including games, social networks and the Internet of Things, but the same core functionality can also be used to develop and scale business applications.”
Basically, Lisk for programmers and developers is like easy-to-use Wordpress templates for web designers. Instead of wasting time with complex coding languages, Lisk can be used to simplify the process of building, publishing, distributing and monetising applications without sacrificing quality.
#5 – One of the Most Successful Cryptocurrency Crowdsale
From February to March 20116, Lisk crowdfunded 14,052 bitcoins, or about US$9.76 million (as of current bitcoin price at the time of writing). That is a lot of money. It was the fourth-highest crowdfund for any cryptocurrency, ever.
To be fair, it does pale in comparison against the #1 spot The DAO kind of overshadowed Lisk with a ridiculous US$164 million raised.
#6 - As a Developer Tool, It Works as Advertised (But Small Sample Size)
How does a decentralised app (again, ‘dapps’) look like? The potential of the Lisk network, with its modular cryptocurrency and utilising sidechains is what Lisk is trying to show. In its main page, Lisk showcases some examples: Criterion (Concept; Proof of Existence), Dust (Concept; Decentralised Trust on Lisk), Discovr (Concept; A social network for artists), MarketPlace (Prototype; A Decentralised Store on Lisk) and BlockData (Prototype; Smart Home on Lisk).
A quick look in the Blockchain Application section in the official Lisk forum yields some more ongoing projects, including ideas for an online card trading game and P2P drone delivery.
#7 - Country Ambassadors
The developer community is a tight-knit community, so it’s little wonder that Lisk started a Country Ambassador initiative to promote the Lisk ecosystem and help provide technical support. So far, they have 11 country ambassadors who were cherry-picked (you can’t volunteer yourself) to act as community managers in their respective countries. According to this document which detailed responsibilities of ambassadors, they are not paid for this role (although bounties are available).
#8 - Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)
Last but not least, you should know about Lisk’s consensus model. Each LSK carries one vote, and only the top 101 users with the heaviest votes (ie highest number of Lisks individually owned) will be able to cast votes to carry forward motions and have a say in problem solving resolutions. You can learn more about the DPoS model here.
Conclusion
Many comparison has been made between Lisk and Ethereum. However, CEO Kordek maintains that Lisk is ‘not competitor to Ethereum’.
All in all, the Lisk ecosystem look great from the developer/programmer point of view. How about for investors? As of 16 June 2016, Lisk has the following statistics on CoinGecko's home page:
lisk
Currently ranking 8 on CoinGecko's overall ranking, Lisk also ranks as an altcoin with the 14th largest community and 13th most active development. As Lisk continues its momentum in the future, it will be interesting to note the improvement on Lisk's rank on CoinGecko.
Research-wise, Lisk has a higher ‘knowledge’ entry barrier for non-coders, so to fully understand and appreciate how it works, a background in programming won’t hurt. Like other altcoins, Lisk is also not immune to volatility. Since this cryptocurrency is very new, only time will tell if Lisk has what it takes to take off among mainstream Javascript coders, but there are certainly positive signals that they are heading in the right direction.
To wrap up, below is an infographic made by Kordek to show differences between Lisk and Ether.