Apr 3, 2018
The Crypto and Blockchain Talk
EPISODE 7: COINS, TOKENS AND GETTING TO KNOW THEM, part
2
NEO, STELLAR, MONERO, IOS, DASH, IODA, NEM
- NEO [NEO]
NEO is a blockchain platform
and cryptocurrency which
enables the development of digital assets and smart
contracts. The project was founded by Da Hongfei in 2014 in
China. The project was initially under the name of AntShares, but
later it was renamed to NEO.
Interesting facts:
- NEO is often called “Chinese Ethereum”;
- NEO is partnered with a company called OnChain which has
extensive experience in integrating blockchain to businesses;
- While Ethereum only supports their own programming language –
Solidity; NEO supports most of the common programming languages
around, like C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Java and Python;
- NEO is essentially developing their platform to be quantum
computer proof;
- The fact that China acts quite independently from the West
shows that Chinese companies like Alibaba, WeChat and NEO can
become hugely successful even if there are already more successful
and established counterparts from the West;
- NEO is currently not a distributed blockchain, which means
that, while it is decentralized, it is only operated on a few
nodes, which are all controlled by NEO itself. But during 2018 they
have promised to start distributing the network;
- The cost of launching a smart contract on NEO is quite
expensive – over $10,000USD.
Whitepaper: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/
Website: https://neo.org/
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo
Stellar [XLM]
Stellar is an open-source protocol for exchanging money founded
by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim in early 2014. Stellar was
initially based on Ripple systems, with the aim of redesigning the
global economy for more inclusiveness. But citing the complexity of
the system, Stellar later redesigned itself with a brand new system
of its own.
Interesting facts:
- The native asset of Stellar is called Lumens [XLM];
- One of the major partners with Stellar is IBM;
- While Ripple is developed by ex-bankers and financial
professionals, Stellar is built by start-up veterans, like
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Y-Combinator President Sam
Altman;
- Jeb McCaleb, co-founder of Stellar, and also a co-founder of
Ripple, was banished from Ripple before creating Stellar, but he
still receives payments from the company;
Whitepaper: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf
Website: https://stellar.org
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar
Monero [XMR]
Monero is an open-source cryptocurrency created in
April 2014 that focuses
on privacy and decentralization. Monero aims to
improve on existing cryptocurrency design by obscuring sender,
recipient and amount of every transaction made as well as making
the mining process more equal.
Interesting facts:
- Monero’s focus on privacy has attracted many people who are
interested in evading the law. Its egalitarian mining process is
also used by hackers who embed mining code into websites and
apps.
- Monero uses Ring Signatures, Stealth Addresses and Ring
Confidential Transactions to provide its users with maximum
privacy.
- Monero is often associated with Darknet and illegal activities
because of its enhanced anonymity and privacy.
Whitepaper: https://getmonero.org/resources/research-lab/
Website: https://getmonero.org
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero
EOS [EOS]
EOS is a blockchain-based, decentralized operating system,
designed to support commercial-scale decentralized applications by
providing all of the necessary core functionality, enabling
businesses to build blockchain applications in a way similar to
web-based applications.
Interesting facts:
- “EOS” is not an officially defined acronym, but the community
has given it many different names like, “Ethereum On Steroids”,
“End Of Silence”, “Endless Online Scaling”, and even “EOS Operating
System”.
- EOS distributes its tokens during a 341-day ICO, which has an
entirely novel structure. The ICO is divided into 350 23-hour long
windows, in every window 2,000,000EOS tokens will be distributed
amongst investors at market price.
- The first 5 days of EOS’s ICO were done “traditionally”, during
which EOS raised around $185M in ETH.
- Running an EOS node requires Linux/OS X operating system.
Whitepaper: https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/TechnicalWhitePaper.md
Website: https://eos.io
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/eos
Dash [DASH]
Dash is a peer-to-peer open-source cryptocurrency like Bitcoin,
acting as digital cash that can be sent without the need for
middlemen like the bank. Dash was created by Evan Duffield and
launched on the 18th of January, 2014 as a fork of Litecoin. The
coin started off under the name XCoin, later to be renamed to
Darkcoin, and was finally rebranded to Dash (derivative of
“Digital” and “Cash”).
Interesting facts:
- Dash is classified as a DAO (decentralized autonomous
organization) because of its self-governance practice;
- Within the first 48 hours from the creation of the coin around
1.9 million or approximately 10% of the total supply of the coins
were mined. This mishap happened because of a bug in the difficulty
parameters in the code when Litecoin was forked to create Dash. The
problem was quickly fixed.
- Dash uses two-tier The first tier consists of regular miners
who confirm the transactions, and the second tier consists of
MasterNodes that perform InstantSend, PrivateSend and governance
functions.
- Running a MasterNode costs an initial payment of 1000
DASH;
- Dash’s partnership with Coinapult makes it possible to buy Dash
with over 20 different fiat currencies.
Whitepaper: https://github.com/dashpay/dash/wiki/Whitepaper
Website: https://www.dash.org/
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dash
IOTA [MIOTA]
IOTA is a next generation public distributed ledger that,
unlike other cryptocurrencies that utilize blockchain, utilizes a
novel technological approach, called the “Tangle”. The Tangle is a
new data structure based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).
Interesting facts:
- IOTA was founded in 2014 as a German non-profit
organization;
- IoT devices have been regarded as the 4th industrial
revolution, as it opens up never before seen opportunities, and
IOTA is positioning itself as a critical factor to make IoT
revolution happen;
- In November 2017, Microsoft's Blockchain specialist, Omkar Naik
was quoted saying that Microsoft will partner with IOTA, which was
later proven to not be the case;
- In December of 2017 the price of IOTA skyrocketed from around
$1 to $5 in a matter of a week, as IOTA announced partnerships with
Samsung and Fujitsu.
Whitepaper: https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf
Website: https://iota.org/
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/iota
NEM [XEM]
New Economy Movement (NEM) is an enterprise-grade solution
to power the impending blockchain
economy, focusing on creating a smart asset blockchain which could
effectively work under heavy workloads. Originally NEM was
intended to be a fork of NXT, but the community decided to go with
a completely new code. The alpha release was launched on June 25,
2014 and the full version was launched on March 31, 2015.
Interesting facts:
- The idea behind NEM was started by a Bitcointalk forum user
called UtopianFuture, and the developers of NEM are keeping
themselves pseudonymous.
- The launch of the currency was not a smooth road. People who
held the NEMstake asset or signed up to Bitcointalk forum to
receive their coins did not receive them, instead the coins;
- To run a booted and synchronized node a harvester must hold at
least 10,000 NEM;
- At the start of 2018, over $500 million in NEM was stolen from
a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck.
Whitepapers and documents: https://docs.nem.io/en
Website: https://nem.io/
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nem
More info:
http://cryptoandblockchaintalk.com/
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