Quant launched in June 2018 with the goal of connecting blockchains and networks on a global scale, without reducing the efficiency and interoperability of the network. It is the first project to solv ...e the interoperability problem through the creation of the first blockchain operating system.
To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Quant.
The project is built as an operating system distributed ledger technology— and Overledger Network — for connecting different blockchain networks. The project is billed as the first OS to be built for blockchains.
The main aim of Quant — using Overledger — is to bridge the gap that exists between different blockchains. The backbone of the project is the Overledger network, which Quant bills as the ecosystem on which the future digital economy ecosystem will be built.
Overledger allows developers to build decentralized multi-chain applications (known as MApps) for their customers. For developers to build a Mapp on the network, they must hold a certain amount of Quant tokens (QNT).
Who Are the Founders of Quant?
Gilbert Verdian, one of the founders of the Quant network, had the idea for the blockchain project while he was working in the healthcare sector. Verdian identified the importance of interoperability in ensuring that patients registered on different platforms are covered.
Verdian has over 20 years of industry experience in upgrading the security, technology and business strategies of businesses around the globe in order to achieve tangible results.
Prior to the Quant Network, Verdian served as the chief information security officer (CISO) of Vocalink, a Mastercard card company, the chief information officer of NSW Ambulance, the CISO of eHealth NSW, and the security lead of the Ministry of Justice, UK.
The second co-founder, Dr Paolo Tasca, is an entrepreneur, digital economist who specializes in distributed systems. Dr. Tasca has served as the special advisor on blockchain technologies for the EU Parliament, the United Nations and numerous central banks worldwide.
He is also co-author of several books on fintech and is the co-founder and governing board chair of Retail Blockchain Consortium. Show More
The worlds first smart phone web3 application utilizing LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology to scan real life objects in 3D & convert it to a NFT.
MindTrade builds & deploys any trading algorithm you can imagine through natural language & simple UI. Built on Mind — create complex programs without code
Monero was launched in 2014, and its goal is simple: to allow transactions to take place privately and with anonymity. Even though it’s commonly thought that BTC can conceal a person’s identity, i ...t’s often easy to trace payments back to their original source because blockchains are transparent. On the other hand, XMR is designed to obscure senders and recipients alike through the use of advanced cryptography.
The team behind Monero say privacy and security are their biggest priorities, with ease of use and efficiency coming second. It aims to provide protection to all users — irrespective of how technologically competent they are.
Overall, XMR aims to allow payments to be made quickly and inexpensively without fear of censorship. Show More
ApeCoin is an ERC-20 governance and utility token used within the APE Ecosystem to empower and incentivize a decentralized community building at the forefront of web3.
ApeCoin holders govern themse ...lves via the decentralized governance framework controlling the ApeCoin DAO, and vote on how the ApeCoin DAO Ecosystem Fund should be used. The APE Foundation administers proposals agreed upon by ApeCoin holders. Show More
Chiliz is the leading digital currency for sports and entertainment by the eponymous Malta-based FinTech provider. It operates the blockchain-based sports entertainment platform Socios, which enables ...users to participate in the governance of their favorite sports brands. Multiple fan tokens by Socios.com are an example of that. For sports clubs and associations, fan tokens offer a way of connecting with their fans and unlocking new revenue streams.
For instance, fans can participate and influence club-related decisions through surveys and polls, such as messages the captain should wear on his armband. The company aims to bridge the gap between being an active and a passive fan. Chiliz has developed partnerships with some of the biggest sporting institutions in the world: FC Barcelona, Manchester City, Juventus Turin, and Paris Saint-Germain. It also boasts partnerships with the UFC and gaming organizations. By purchasing CHZ, fans get access to various fan tokens and literally have a stake in their club. Show More
Filecoin is a decentralized storage system that aims to “store humanity’s most important information.” The project raised $205 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017, and initially pl ...anned a launch date for mid-2019. However, the launch date for the Filecoin mainnet was pushed back until block 148,888, which is expected in mid-October 2020.
The project was first described back in 2014 as an incentive layer for the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer storage network where users pay for data storage and distribution services in $FIL. Filecoin is open protocol and backed by a blockchain that records commitments made by the network’s participants, with transactions made using FIL, the blockchain’s native currency. The blockchain is based on both proof-of-replication and proof-of-spacetime.
Filecoin is open-source and decentralized, which means that all governance is in the hands of the community. On the Filecoin platform, developers have the opportunity to create cloud file storage services like Dropbox or iCloud. Anyone can join Filecoin and start storing their data or earn money by providing space for someone else's funds. The creators of Filecoin opted for their blockchain technology to run the network and their token with their own consensus.
$FIL is the native currency of Filecoin that powers the entire network and all processes. Clients pay for transactions in FIL tokens. Miners place FIL as collateral, guaranteeing their services.
The developers claim that Filecoin solves the problem of inefficient file storage and retrieval. Customers can find the right solution with an efficient set of tools and its core development, IPFS.
Who Are the Founders of Filecoin?
Filecoin was founded by Juan Benet, who also created the Interplanetary File System. Benet is an American computer scientist who studied at Stanford University. After founding Protocol Labs in May 2014, he attended Y Combinator in the summer of 2014 with the intention of supporting both IPFS and Filecoin, as well as other projects.
What Makes Filecoin Unique?
Filecoin aims to store data in a decentralized manner. Unlike cloud storage companies like Amazon Web Services or Cloudflare, which are prone to the problems of centralization, Filecoin leverages its decentralized nature to protect the integrity of a data’s location, making it easily retrievable and hard to censor.
Decentralized storage systems like Filecoin allow people to be their own custodians of their data, as well as makes the web more accessible to people worldwide. Since participating in the Filecoin network by mining and storing is directly related to winning more block rewards, Filecoin incentives participants to act honestly and store as much data as possible.
How Does Filecoin Work?
There are three parties involved in the Filecoin system: clients, storage miners, and retrieval miners. These groups of users interact closely with each other, concluding transactions, exchanging information, and making micropayments in $FIL.
Clients pay for storing or retrieving data. They place an order on the online storage market, where a deal is subsequently concluded with storage miners. Storage miners, in turn, store client’s data and receive rewards. This group of users places files in free sectors of a hard drive, all actions are recorded in the blockchain, and clients receive private keys.
Retrieval miners extract data at a request of a client. Clients place a trade on the off-chain Retrieval Market. Retrieval miners can also act as storage miners.
Filecoin is based on IPFS where all data is stored on a peer-to-peer blockchain. To start the process, users choose miners to store personal data and pay for placement in FIL tokens. Thereby, miners execute trades, and receive participation fees and FIL rewards. The more storage miners offer, the higher the chances of getting rewarded. At any time, clients can check how their data is stored during a transaction, as proofs are fixed in the blockchain. The Filecoin network uses the Proof-of-Replication (PoRep), while the miners use the Proof-of-Spacetime (PoSt).
Therefore, if a client wants to hopefully keep their data safe on the Filecoin network, then they must pay the miner. The cost is set by the open market, and the price is made up of several factors. In the open market, there is hyper competition among miners, where everyone puts forward their own minimum price for storage.
Benefits of Filecoin
Firstly, with the launch of a large and free market specializing in data storage, there is a tendency to reduce the cost of the service itself. The market becomes more open to everyone, which gives a lower price for using the network.
As of September 2022, the network has united over 20,000 users and computers around the world, creating an extensive community with similar goals and requests. Moreover, Filecoin opts for existing resources, instead of creating new technologies and devices. Miners can join the network from anywhere in the world.
Finally, Filecoin is a decentralized network with its own ways of protecting information and preventing single-point attacks.
Related Pages:
Check out CMC Alexandria’ deep dive into Filecoin.
We’ve also prepared a list of the 5 things that decentralized storage aims to fix.
See terms you don’t know? Check out our glossary on Alexandria.
How Many Filecoin (FIL) Coins Are There in Circulation?
Protocol Labs describes Filecoin’s tokenomics, or economic model, as a “market for data” where users can sell their storage space to other users, who are looking to rent. Five stakeholders will be able to trade tokens: developers, clients, miners, token holders and ecosystem partners. There will also be three Filecoin markets, according to Protocol Labs: file storage, file retrieval and on-exchange token trading.
In fall 2020, 400 miners participated in what was called the “Space Race” testnet phase, increasing Filecoin’s network data capacity by over 325 pebibytes; approximately 3.5 million FIL tokens will be released to the Space Race participants. Show More
NEAR Protocol is a layer-one blockchain that was designed as a community-run cloud computing platform and that eliminates some of the limitations that have been bogging competing blockchains, such as ...low transaction speeds, low throughput and poor interoperability. This provides the ideal environment for DApps and creates a developer and user-friendly platform. For instance, NEAR uses human-readable account names, unlike the cryptographic wallet addresses common to Ethereum. NEAR also introduces unique solutions to scaling problems and has its own consensus mechanism called “Doomslug.”
NEAR Protocol is being built by the NEAR Collective, its community that is updating the initial code and releasing updates to the ecosystem. Its declared goal is to build a platform that is “secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people.”
Flux, a protocol that allows developers to create markets based on assets, commodities, real-world events, and Mintbase, an NFT minting platform are examples of projects being built on NEAR Protocol. Show More
The Internet Computer blockchain incorporates a radical rethink of blockchain design, powered by innovations in cryptography. It provides the first “World Computer” blockchain that can be used to ...build almost any online system or service, including demanding web social media, without need for traditional IT such as cloud computing services. As such it can enable full end-to-end decentralization. Show More
Launched in 2011 by Pixowl, The Sandbox is a blockchain-based virtual world allowing users to create, build, buy and sell digital assets in the form of a game. By combining the powers of decentralized ... autonomous organizations (DAO) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the Sandbox creates a decentralized platform for a thriving gaming community.
According to the official whitepaper, the Sandbox platform’s main mission is to introduce blockchain technology in mainstream gaming successfully. The platform focuses on facilitating a creative “play-to-earn” model, which allows users to be both creators and gamers simultaneously. The Sandbox employs the powers of blockchain technology by introducing the SAND utility token, which facilitates transactions on the platform. Show More
Bitcoin Cash is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that aims to become sound global money with fast payments, micro fees, privacy, and high transaction capacity (big blocks). In the same way that p ...hysical money, such as a dollar bill, is handed directly to the person being paid, Bitcoin Cash payments are sent directly from one person to another.
As a permissionless, decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Cash requires no trusted third parties and no central bank. Unlike traditional fiat money, Bitcoin Cash does not depend on monetary middlemen such as banks and payment processors. Transactions cannot be censored by governments or other centralized corporations. Similarly, funds cannot be seized or frozen — because financial third parties have no control over the Bitcoin Cash network.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is an alternative to the oldest and most traded cryptocurrency - Bitcoin (BTC), only the BCH network is much faster and cheaper. In 2017, BCH developers modified the BTC code, releasing their own version of the software and a full-fledged competitive product, which split Bitcoin into two blockchains: Bitcoin / Bitcoin Cash, and consecutively, two assets - BTC / BCH. Bitcoin Cash is a clear result of a hard fork in blockchain. Moreover, another hard fork, which divided Bitcoin Cash into two parts: Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV, took place in the fall of 2018.
There are several distinctive features that separate BCH from the origin. The main one remains about the block size. Blocks in the BCH blockchain can be larger, which means that more transactions can be processed at a time, so that the additional space helps to avoid higher fees. However, since the potential block size is larger, storage & audit become more costly and users may find it troublesome to download a copy of the blockchain.
From the technical perspective, Bitcoin Cash is very similar to the Bitcoin algorithm, namely: both projects have a hard cap of 21 million coins, and also use Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus framework and nodes to verify transactions. Thus, traders can consider BCH as a hedging tool, investing in which may save them some risk.
On the plus side, due to the larger block size, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) works faster and has lower transaction fees, which makes BCH a better option for small everyday transactions. Furthermore, Bitcoin Cash supports smart contracts and ecosystem apps like CashShuffle, a coin mixing protocol, and CashFusion, a privacy-enhancing solution for the Bitcoin Cash network. These technologies have their pros and cons: thanks to CashFusion, it becomes extremely difficult to trace the path to the user's assets, however one should bear in mind that commissions are charged for each mixing, so making frequent mixed transactions may have a cost.
Bitcoin Cash provides a platform for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) payments between individuals, with the average transfer fee being as low as $0.01, and the settlement is instant. This means that Bitcoin Cash is suitable for money transfers, international trade, everyday transactions and microtransactions. In addition, Bitcoin Cash supports economic freedoms by providing an alternative form of money, protected against confiscation, any other forms of censorship and devaluation (due to inflation).
Bitcoin Cash is a decentralized network where users influence the development of the protocol. One key attribute is fixed in the code: the maximum supply of BCH is capped at 21 million coins, which is likely to remain so. Show More
Algorand is a self-sustaining, decentralized, blockchain-based network that supports a wide range of applications. These systems are secure, scalable and efficient, all critical properties for effecti ...ve applications in the real world. Algorand will support computations that require reliable performance guarantees to create new forms of trust.
The Algorand mainnet became live in June 2019, and was able to handle almost 1 million transactions per day as of December 2020. Algorand transaction metrics can be viewed here. Algorand initial coin offering (ICO) was held in June 2019, with the Algorand price of $2.4 per token.
Who Are the Founders of Algorand?
Silvio Micali is a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the founder of Algorand. He is a recipient of the Turing Award (in 2012) for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of secure two-party computation, electronic cash, cryptocurrencies and blockchain protocols. This makes him one of the foremost creators of crypto in the world.
What Makes Algorand Unique?
Algorand was invented to speed up transactions and improve efficiency, in response to the slow transaction times of Bitcoin and other blockchains. Algorand is designed so that there are lower transaction fees, as well as no mining (like Bitcoin's energy-intensive process), as it is based on a permissionless pure proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain protocol. Show More
Ren (REN) is an open protocol built to provide interoperability and liquidity between different blockchain platforms.
To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Ren.
Formerly k ...nown as Republic Protocol, Ren launched RenVM, its virtual machine mainnet, in May 2020, having completed a $34 million initial coin offering (ICO) in 2018.
The protocol’s native token, REN, functions as a bond for those running nodes which power RenVM, known as Darknodes.
Ren aims to expand the interoperability, and hence accessibility, of decentralized finance (DeFi) by removing hurdles involved in liquidity between blockchains. Show More
Hedera is the most used, sustainable, enterprise-grade public network for the decentralized economy that allows individuals and businesses to create powerful decentralized applications (DApps).
It ...is designed to be a fairer, more efficient system that eliminates some of the limitations that older blockchain-based platforms face — such as slow performance and instability.
It was funded through an initial coin offering (ICO) in August 2018 and first launched open access to its mainnet just over a year later in September 2019. As part of the ICO, investors were able to purchase the platform’s native utility token (HBAR) at the lowest possible pricing.
The HBAR token has a dual role within the Hedera public network.
First and foremost, HBAR the fuel that powers Hedera services, such as smart contracts, file storage and regular transactions. Second, it's used to help secure the network, since HBAR users can stake their tokens to assist with maintaining the integrity of the platform.
Hedera (HBAR) is the native cryptocurrency of Hedera Hashgraph, a platform that is positioned as an alternative to traditional blockchain technology and aims to excel in speed, efficiency and security.
Older blockchains tend to use a consensus mechanism like proof-of-work (PoW) to validate transactions, while younger blockchains opted for proof-of-stake (PoS). The Hedera Hashgraph system has a structure that was created from scratch particularly for the project. Hedera is based on a PoS model that is believed to increase the efficiency of transaction verification in the network, provide a high level of security, and protect the network from hacker attacks. Its ecosystem has the underlying hashgraph consensus algorithm and the global enterprise governing body.
Hedera Hashgraph is a distributed ledger technology (DLT). According to the project website, Hedera differs from other blockchains because it uses a new consensus algorithm called hashgraph. It intends to process and execute transactions faster, eliminate delays, and smooth out the TPS (transactions per second) indicator. Hashgraph is claimed to be an upgrade in transaction speed, cost, and scalability. Show More
One key function of the token is to reduce commissions for trading operations on the exchange, which are usually paid from users' wallets. Yet the token has much more to offer. Using HT, users can pur ...chase monthly VIP-status plans to receive discounts on transaction fees. Token holders have the right to vote on exchange decisions, can receive crypto rewards for seasonal buybacks, and also get early access to special events. HT holders can, at any point, trade the token for other cryptocurrencies. Show More
Flow is a fast, decentralized, and developer-friendly blockchain, designed as the foundation for a new generation of games, apps, and the digital assets that power them. Flow is the only layer-one blo ...ckchain originally created by a team that has consistently delivered great consumer blockchain experiences: CryptoKitties, Dapper Wallet, NBA Top Shot. Show More
OKB is a cryptocurrency released by the OK Blockchain Foundation and Maltese crypto exchange, OKEx. The exchange is one of the largest in the world and currently ranks third in liquidity, fourth in tr ...ading volume, and provides a wide selection of trading pairs. OKEx is similar in many aspects to the cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance, but there are a few key differences. The OKEx platform has its own cloud mining service, and the company has a more focused reach in providing options trading for users. Meanwhile, Binance strives to offer a broad range of crypto services globally. Show More
Elrond is a blockchain protocol that seeks to offer extremely fast transaction speeds by using sharding. The project describes itself as a technology ecosystem for the new internet, which includes fin ...tech, decentralized finance and the Internet of Things. Its smart contracts execution platform is reportedly capable of 15,000 transactions per second, six-second latency and a $0.001 transaction cost.
The Elrond network rewards the community and active participants with EGLD tokens. EGLD, or Electronic Gold, is Elrond's native token. It acts as a store of value currency to pay for network usage. The coin also serves as a medium of exchange between platform users and validators. Users pay transaction fees in EGLD and validators provide services.
EGLD allows developers to deploy smart contracts, protocols, and dApps on the platform. It empowers participants to perform any network action. Through staking and validation rewards, as well as transaction fees, EGLD manages the Elrond network. Plus, EGLD is endowed with the functionality of a governance token, so its holders can vote on network decisions. Show More
TON is a fully decentralized layer-1 blockchain designed by Telegram to onboard billions of users. It boasts ultra-fast transactions, tiny fees, easy-to-use apps, and is environmentally friendly.
