Day: October 1, 2018

NEM

NEM stands for New Economy Movement and powers the Smart Asset System. It’s written in Java and was launched in 2015 – the platform’s currency is called XEM. XEM are harvested through Pol – once you own 10,000 XEM and deposit them in the official NEM Nano wallet they begin ‘harvesting’ and therefore grow in number through interest. Smart Assets allow unique data to be created representing any asset meaning that these assets can be traded using XEM. Multiple ledgers can also exist on one blockchain. CoinDesk also provides a…

NEO

NEO is a smart contract platform, similar to Ethereum, that was created by a team of developers in China and was formerly known as Antshares. It was designed to utilize “blockchain technology to digitize assets using smart contracts and common programming language”. The platform was created by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang. It has the ability to process 10,000 transactions per second. It enables two types of tokens: NEO and GAS. NEO is not a currency or asset, but a proxy for voting rights within the blockchain governance system. GAS…

Tron

Justin Sun founded the Tron Foundation in Singapore in 2017 with the aim of creating a protocol that could “decentralize the internet” and support decentralized applications. Beginning on Ethereum, it migrated onto its own blockchain in 2018, and Sun has now directly positioned Tron as a competitor to Ethereum. According to the foundation, the July 2018 acquisition of BitTorrent further cemented TRON’s leadership in pursuing a decentralized ecosystem. In 2019, Tron and Tether announced a partnership to launch USDT on the Tron blockchain as a TRC-20 token – the protocol’s…

IOTA

IOTA is a cryptocurrency set up to allow data exchange between any data recording machine as part of the Internet of Things. IOTA is novel in that it doesn’t use a blockchain and instead enables a different type of system of a web of connections. The new system is called Tangle and is based on a type of cryptographic verification known as Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). In order to make a transaction, the user must validate two previous transactions in the web. This means the system is proportional in speed…

Dash

Dash is derivative of Litecoin, which itself is a derivative of Bitcoin. It was created by Evan Duffield in January of 2014. It was originally known as Darkcoin but later rebranded as Dash in March of 2015. It uses a mix of miners and masternodes to validate transactions. A unique feature of Dash is that it ensures network security by asking all masternodes to stake at least 1,000 DASH in cold storage. Transaction speed can be increased through masternode only validation which excludes miners. Privacy can also be enabled through…

Monero

Monero is a privacy focused currency created in 2014. A participant on the Bitcointalk forum going by the username “Thankful_for_today” forked Bytecoin to create Monero, which was later maintained by the decentralized developer community. Monero is fungible, meaning that involvement in previous transactions does not affect the value of any one coin as all transaction history is completely unknowable. Monero uses senders’ unique ring signatures, confidential recipient addresses and Ring Confidential Transactions to enable privacy and prevent coins being spent more than once at a time. CoinDesk also provides a…

Cardano

Launched in 2017, Cardano is billed as a third-generation blockchain (following Bitcoin and Ethereum as the first and second generations, respectively) that aims to directly compete with Ethereum and other decentralized application platforms as a more scalable, secure and efficient alternative. Decentralized applications are similar to applications on a smartphone. However, the main difference is dapps run autonomously without any third party operating in the background. They achieve this autonomy by using smart contracts – computer programs specifically designed to perform a function when certain predetermined conditions are met. For…

Litecoin Price | LTC Price Index and Live Chart — CoinDesk 20

Litecoin is a cryptocurrency launched in late 2011 by former Google and Coinbase engineer Charlie Lee. To create Litecoin, Lee copied the Bitcoin codebase, increased the total supply, and changed the speed at which new blocks are added to the blockchain. Only approximately 84 million litecoins will ever be created, quadruple the total bitcoin supply. Litecoin also creates new blocks every 2.5 minutes, four times faster than Bitcoin. The Litecoin investor and developer communities view the protocol as a complementary pseudo-testnet for Bitcoin and a “digital silver” to Bitcoin’s “digital…

Stellar Price | XLM Live Price Index and Chart — CoinDesk 20

Lumen (XLM) is the native cryptocurrency for Stellar, an open source blockchain payment system. The purpose of Stellar is to connect financial institutions via the blockchain and provide cheap transactions in developing markets. Jed McCaleb, a longtime cryptocurrency entrepreneur who founded bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox and co-founded blockchain-based payment system Ripple Labs, created Stellar in July of 2014. Stellar uses a federated byzantine agreement (FBA) algorithm instead of a traditional mining network to validate transactions. Since the transfer of lumens doesn’t require approval from traditional cryptocurrency miners, the Stellar network…

EOS Price | EOS Price Index and Live Chart — CoinDesk 20

EOS is the native cryptocurrency for the EOS.IO blockchain platform with smart contract capabilities. The company Block.one created EOS.IO in September 2017 and it now has over 100 dapps with thousands of daily active users. It enables decentralized apps, or dapps, to be created by software developers. The platform is more scalable than many other blockchain networks, with the ability to process one million transactions per second without any fees. Its dapp development capability makes EOS similar to Ethereum with the notable distinction that transaction confirmations are done through a…