Cryptocurrency Overviews

ICON (ICX)

ICON is one of the largest blockchain networks in the world. ICON boasts independent blockchains comprised of reputable institutions in major industries.

IOTA (IOT)

IOTA is a distributed ledger for the Internet of Things. The first ledger with microtransactions without fees as well as secure data transfer. Quantum proof.

Lisk (LSK)

Lisk is Javascript platform for decentralized applications & sidechains. Using Lisk, developers can code DApps using Javascript, the most popular programming language on Github. Lisk is founded from the team behind Crypti - Olivier Beddows, CTO and Max Kordek, CEO. Both the founders were previously active members of the Crypti Foundation. Lisk started out because the founders disagreed with the direction that Crypti is taking. They forked Crypti used a decentralised startup model instead of a foundation model in progressing this cryptocurrency. Lisk conducted an ICO in early-2016 that raised 14,079 BTC and 80,696,177 XCR which totalled about $6.15 million at the time of the ICO closing. A total of 100 million Lisk will be distributed to the following: - 85% for ICO participants - 8% for the core team - 4% for campaigns and bounties - 2% for advisers and partners - 1% for social bounty campaigns There is a block reward of 5 LISK for the first year which goes down by one LISK every year until a stable block reward of 1 LISK per block. Lisk has already been deployed to Microsoft Azure's 'Blockchain as a Service' (BaaS).

Populous (PPT)

Populous is a smart contract invoice finance platform on the Ethereum & RSK blockchains. It allows SME owners to upload invoices and based on the Altman Z-Score, Populous does an in-depth credit risk analysis of the borrowers, linked companies and their customers. Once approved, SME owners may get the money to ease cashflow. The flow of funds within Populous uses Pokens, a token pegged one-to-one with fiat currencies. The team is based in London.

Qtum (QTUM)

Qtum (pronounced as Quantum) is a project coming out of China that aims to make decentralised blockchain technology easy to deploy for enterprises. It provides a Turing-complete blockchain stack and is able to execute smart contracts and decentralised applications like the Ethereum blockchain. Qtum builds on Bitcoin's UTXO transaction model and uses the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. It is backed by some highly prominent members of the blockchain community such as Anthony Di Iorio, Xu Star, Bo Shen, David Lee, Jehan Chu and Roger Ver. Qtum conducted its crowdsale in March 2017 where 51 million Qtum tokens were sold in 117 hours raising 11,156 BTC and 77,081 ETH (~US$15.6 million)

Ripple (XRP)

Ripple is the name for both a digital currency (XRP) and an open payment network within which that currency is transferred. It is a distributed, open-source payments system that's still in beta. The goal of the ripple system, according to its website, is to enable people to break free of the "walled gardens" of financial networks - ie, credit cards, banks, PayPal and other institutions that restrict access with fees, charges for currency exchanges and processing delays.

Steem (STEEM)

Steem is a cryptocurrency that rewards users for community building by posting and upvoting valuable content for others. Steem was inspired from the success of Reddit where the community helped enrich the shareholders. Steem aims to help distribute the rewards to the community members who help create the community in the first place. Steem aims to provide various services to its members such as a source of curated news, Q&A, job boards etc. The founders of Steem came from BitShares with Dan Larimer involved as well.

Stellar (XLM)

Stellar is an open sourced decentralized protocol to transfer money in any pair of currencies. For instance, Joe can send a USD transaction to Marie in Euro or Bitcoin seamlessly. The way it works is by using Lumens as an intermediary currency for conversion between currencies. Money balance is maintained via a gateway, a network participant whom you trust to accept a deposit in exchange for credit on the network. Stellar's mission is to expand financial access and literacy worldwide. Stellar is a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money led by Jed McCaleb from Ripple and the original founder of Mt. Gox.

Stratis (STRAT)

Stratis is a powerful and flexible Blockchain Development Platform designed for the needs of the real world financial services businesses and other organisations that want to develop, test and deploy apps on the blockchain. Stratis significantly simplifies the development process for creating Blockchain applications and accelerates the lifecycle for Blockchain development projects. Stratis private chain allows businesses to deploy their own customise blockchain without the costs of running their own blockchain network infrastructure.

TRON (TRX)

TRON is a blockchain-based decentralized protocol that aims to construct a worldwide free content entertainment system with the blockchain and distributed storage technology.

Tether (USDT)

Tether is backed 1-to-1 by traditional currency held in reserves. 1 USD₮ is equivalent to 1 USD. Tether utilizes the Omni Layer for asset exchange.

VeChain (VEN)

The world's leading blockchain platform for products and information.

Verge (XVG)

Verge is a rebrand of DogeCoinDark. It is created to fulfil the original ideals of cryptocurrencies: decentralization and anonymity. DogeCoinDark's original goal was to make a friendly, fun and anonymous Dogecoin-based cryptocurrency but with modern privacy features. There is an optional setting to run wallets on dedicated DogeCoinDark TOR nodes for wallet online anonymity.

Binance Coin (BNB)

Binance is currently the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, with over $6 billion in assets traded in an average 24 hour period. Binance's rise to the top has been swift. Since its launch six months ago, Binance has grown at a rapid rate. Millions of users per week sign up to use the exchange, including 240,000 members last Wednesday alone. Wednesday's daily record came after Binance lifted a temporary freeze on new member registrations. Binance is also the name of a cryptocoin (BNB) traded and used on the Binance exchange. Since the ICO six months ago, the value of BNB has risen with the growth of the exchange. BNB is now among the top 30 cryptocurrencies in the world by market cap. What about Binance makes it so compelling? Why are so many people signing up to use this new exchange? In this article, we'll dive into those questions. The answers are surprisingly simple. The simplicity of Binance's business model has been the key to its success so far, and it bodes well for future success.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash is a split from Bitcoin with a protocol upgrade to fix on-chain capacity. If Bitcoin Cash gets majority of Proof-of-Work then it becomes de facto Bitcoin. It will be a Bitcoin without Segregated Witness (SegWit) as soft fork, where upgrades of the protocol are done mainly through hard forks, without changing the economic rules of the Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash will be a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain, one-to-one.

Bitcoin Gold (BTG)

Bitcoin Gold is a community-activated hard fork of Bitcoin to make mining decentralized again.

Zcash (ZEC)

Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies expose your entire payment history to the public. Zcash is the first open, permissionless cryptocurrency that can fully protect the privacy of transactions using zero-knowledge cryptography.

Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is the first successful internet money based on peer-to-peer technology; whereby no central bank or authority is involved in the transaction and production of the Bitcoin currency. It was created by an anonymous individual/group under the name, Satoshi Nakamoto. The source code is available publicly as an open source project, anybody can look at it and be part of the developmental process. Bitcoin is changing the way we see money as we speak. It is a decentralized peer-to-peer internet currency making mobile payment easy, very low transaction fees, protects your identity, and it works anywhere all the time with no banking hours. As of the current design, there will only be 21 million Bitcoin ever created, thus making it a deflationary currency unlike fiat currencies. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm with an average transaction confirmation time of 10 minutes. Miners today are mining Bitcoin using ASIC chip dedicated to only mining Bitcoin, and the hash rate has shot up to peta hashes. Being the first successful online cryptography currency, Bitcoin has inspired other alternative currencies such as Litecoin, Peercoin, Primecoin, and so on.

Bytecoin (BCN)

Bytecoin is the first cryptocurrency created with CryptoNote technology and is not a Bitcoin fork. Bytecoin allows users to make absolutely anonymous money transfers through the CryptoNote algorithm. CryptoNote implements the ring signature technology which allows you to sign a message on behalf of a group. The signature only proves the message was created by someone from the group, but all the possible signers are indistinguishable from each other. Even if outgoing transactions are untraceable, everyone may still be able to see the payments received and thus determine one's income. By using a variation of the Diffie-Hellman exchange protocol, a receiver has multiple unique one-time addresses derived from his single public key. After funds are sent to these addresses they can only be redeemed by the receiver; and it would be impossible to cross-link these payments. Bytecoin is CPU-minable and ASIC resistant. Difficulty and max block size readjust automatically based on the system's previous state.

Cardano (ADA)

Cardano is a decentralised public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source. Cardano is developing a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed.

Dash (DASH)

Dash (formerly known as Darkcoin until March 26th 2015) is a cryptocurrency that focuses on privacy and anonymity. Dash protects your privacy by anonymizing transaction that you make over the network using a technology that is developed by the Dash team called DarkSend. DarkSend is inspired out of the CoinJoin project that was meant to anonymize Bitcoin transactions. The new Dash rebranding of Darkcoin focuses on making open-sourced private digital currency more mainstream. Heavy emphasis are placed on security, instant transaction, and security when it comes to the Dash core development team. Dash was released on the 18th January 2014 with zero premine coins. It uses 11 rounds of hashing algorithm namely blake, bmw, groestl, jh, keccak, skein, luffa, cubehash, shavite, simd, and echo which makes it highly secure. As of the current design, there will only be 22 million Dash ever created, making it a deflationary currency.

Nano (NANO)

Digital currency for the real world - the fast and free way to pay for everything in life. Instant transactions, Zero fees, Infinitely scalable

EOS (EOS)

EOS.IO is software that introduces a blockchain architecture designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralized applications (the "EOS.IO Software"). This is achieved through an operating system-like construct upon which applications can be built. The software provides accounts, authentication, databases, asynchronous communication and the scheduling of applications across multiple CPU cores and/or clusters. The resulting technology is a blockchain architecture that has the potential to scale to millions of transactions per second, eliminates user fees and allows for quick and easy deployment of decentralized applications. For more information, please read the EOS.IO Technical White Paper.

Ethereum Classic (ETC)

Ethereum Classic is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. Ethereum Classic is a continuation of the original Ethereum blockchain - the classic version preserving untampered history; free from external interference and subjective tampering of transactions.

Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum is the first Turing-complete cryptocurrency that uses Ether as fuel to incentivise its network. The idea is the brainchild of Vitalik Buterin. The project received US$18million worth of bitcoins during its crowdsale in August 2014. It uses the Ethash mining algorithm, which is based off the Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm.

Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created by Charlie Lee. It was created based on the Bitcoin protocol but differs in terms of the hashing algorithm used. Litecoin uses the memory intensive Scrypt proof of work mining algorithm. Scrypt allows consumer-grade hardware such as GPU to mine those coins. The transaction confirmation time taken for Litecoin is about 2.5 minutes on average (as compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes). The Litecoin network is scheduled to cap at 84 million currency units. Litecoin has inspired many other popular alternative currencies (eg. Dogecoin) because of its Scrypt hashing algorithm in order to prevent ASIC miners from mining those coins. However it is said that by the end of this year, Scrypt ASIC will enter the mass market.

Monero (XMR)

Monero (XMR) is a new privacy-centric cryptocurrency based on the CryptoNote protocol. Monero is competing directly with coins like Darkcoin, AnonCoin, and LibertyCoin in solving the problem of making digital cash transaction anonymous. CryptoNote features an entirely new code base and is not a fork of Bitcoin. More info about CryptoNote can be found at their website https://cryptonote.org/ CryptoNote uses Ring Signatures to conceal sender identities via mixing and it also has unlinkable transactions that is achieved using 1-time keys for each individual payments. CryptoNote should not be confused with CoinJoin. Although they are both aiming to make digital transaction anonymous, they are two entirely different implementation.

NEM (XEM)

NEM is a peer-to-peer crypto platform. It is written in Java and JavaScript with 100% original source code. NEM has a stated goal of a wide distribution model and has introduced new features in blockchain technology in its proof-of-importance (POI) algorithm. NEM also features an integrated P2P secure and encrypted messaging system, multisignature accounts and an Eigentrust++ reputation system. NEM has gone through extensive open alpha testing starting June 25, 2014, followed by lengthy and comprehensive beta testing starting on October 20, 2014. POI is the consensus algorithm used in NEM to determine who will calculate the next block. An account's importance is determined by how many coins it contains and the number of transactions made to and from that account. POI is different from other initiatives which use a fee-sharing model that does not take into consideration one's overall support of the network. In some proof-of-stake systems a person only needs to have large amounts of coins to form a block; however, in NEM the transaction amount as well as support of the network become a factor. This has been designed to encourage users of NEM to not simply hold NEM but instead actively carry out transactions within the NEM ecosystem.

NEO (NEO)

NEO, formerly Antshares, is China's first ever open source blockchain. Founded in 2014, NEO's mission has been to reinvent the way commerce is done. We believe technology drives progress and together we can create the future. Motivated by this, NEO has been created to shift our traditional economy into the new era of the Smart Economy.

OmiseGO (OMG)

OmiseGO is a public Ethereum-based financial technology for use in mainstream digital wallets, that enables real-time, peer-to-peer value exchange and payment services agnostically across jurisdictions and organizational silos, and across both fiat money and decentralized currencies. Designed to enable financial inclusion and disrupt existing institutions, access will be made available to everyone via the OmiseGO network and digital wallet framework.