Author: Liu Peng
foreword
Some people say that the blockchain industry is hot at present, and various projects emerge in an endless stream, but there are only a few that actually land. There are even extreme remarks that 99% of blockchain projects will eventually die. Is this really the case? This issue of blockchain chief (id: cmcmbc) will sort out the four best projects in the global blockchain industry at present, and take you to know more about the blockchain industry through sorting out and summarizing these projects.
Why are these four the best blockchain projects at present?
At present, there are many blockchain projects. According to the blockchain industry chain, the chief classifies the main projects into five categories, namely digital assets, global payment, finance, platform applications and underlying technologies.
The chief thinks that whether a blockchain project is good or not is determined by many factors and indicators. However, if several major factors such as financing scale, market value and user scale are integrated, the level of the project can be reflected to a great extent. Based on this, the blockchain chief selects the best project from the first four categories of five major projects (because the chief has not accumulated enough technical knowledge about the underlying blockchain, he will not analyze such companies for the time being). If you have any questions about whether these projects are the best, please contact our chief for discussion.
Ethereum- digital currency, whose market value is second only to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the most well-known digital currency. In addition, there are other popular currencies, such as Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple Coin, etc. According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 1,300 kinds of digital currency in the market at present, and these digital currency are mainly used to represent value storage, exchange media or account units.
In digital currency, Ethereum, a token issued by Ethereum, is second only to Bitcoin in terms of user scale and market value.
The Ethereum project was initiated at the end of 2013, marked by the release of the first edition of the Ethereum white paper by the founder Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum is the first competitive currency in the world. Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum has outstanding advantages in transaction speed and technological innovation. It is the first project in the world to introduce virtual machines and smart contracts into blockchain and create a new era of blockchain. On the whole, the brief history of Ethereum can be roughly divided into three stages: birth, rapid rise and renewal iteration, and it is still in the third stage.
be born
The Ethereum project started at the end of 2013. It is a new blockchain platform and also an open source project. Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum is more open and flexible. It allows anyone to build and use decentralized applications running through blockchain technology in the platform, not limited to digital currency transactions.
By April 2014, the community, code quantity, wiki content, commercial infrastructure and legal strategy of Ethereum were basically perfect. It was announced in its Yellow Book of Technical Description of Ethereum Virtual Machine that Ethereum clients supported seven programming languages, including C++, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, Haskell, Rust and so on.
On July 24, 2014, Ethereum opened a 42-day pre-sale of Ethereum coins, and finally sold 60,102,216 Ethereum coins, raising a total of 31,531 Bitcoin, which was equivalent to 18.43 million US dollars according to the currency price at that time, making it the second largest crowdfunding project at that time.
Rise rapidly
In July 2015, Ethereum released the official Ethereum network, which marked the official launch of the Ethereum blockchain. At the end of the month, Ethereum began to trade in several exchanges. At present, the price of a single Ethereum has reached as high as 400 US dollars.
Update iteration
Up to now, the Ethereum project has occupied half of the bottom application of blockchain, which is not only superior to Bitcoin, but also has the positive effect brought by the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) composed of large enterprises including JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and Intel.
With the rapid development of Ethereum, some problems are gradually exposed. For example, with the recent network congestion caused by the launch of the virtual cat CryptoKitties, whether Ethereum can improve the transaction speed and capacity of the system through updating iteration will directly determine how far Ethereum can go in the future.
Interlocker-a practitioner of global cross-border payment based on blockchain
InterLedger is a cross-ledger agreement launched by Ripple, which helps banks to settle accounts quickly. Ripple, founded in the United States, is a financial technology company that uses blockchain technology to develop cross-border settlement. It constructs a distributed payment network without a central node, with a view to providing a cross-border payment platform that can replace the SWIFT network and create a global unified network financial transmission protocol. Ripple’s cross-ledger agreement allows participants to see the same ledger. Through the company’s network, bank customers can realize real-time point-to-point transnational transfer without central organization and management, and support different currencies in different countries.
InterLedger project background
At present, there are many kinds of digital currency based on blockchain. If the value is transferred and exchanged directly through digital currency in different blockchain, there will be some problems. For example, user A wants to buy a computer from user B with bitcoin in his hand, but user B’s computer is priced in etheric currency and does not accept bitcoin. At this time, user A must exchange bitcoin in his hand for etheric currency. In order to solve the problem of unstable digital currency value, loss of value and complicated transaction process, Ripple proposed a technical protocol for cross-chain value transmission, InterLedger.
InterLedger
In InterLedger system, two different ledger systems can exchange currencies with each other through a third party. The ledger system does not need to trust the third party, because the protocol uses cryptographic algorithm to create fund custody for the two ledger systems and the third party. When all participants reach a consensus on the funds, they can trade with each other. The third party provided by the "account book" will assure the sender that their funds will be transferred to the connector only when the "account book" receives the certificate and the receiver has received the payment; The third party also guarantees that the linkers will receive the money from the sender once they have completed the final part of the agreement. This means that this kind of transaction does not need the protection of legal contracts and too much review, which greatly lowers the threshold.
Market performance
At present, banks from 17 countries have joined the Interledger project, and giant companies including Apple and Microsoft have also joined. On January 26th this year, Brad Garringhouse, CEO of Ripple, said at the first China-US blockchain summit that Ripple would consider entering China in the future to cooperate with the People’s Bank of China and other institutions.
Coinbase- the first bitcoin exchange in the United States
found
Coinbase was established in June 2012, and it is committed to making it easier for consumers to use Bitcoin.
main business
1. Bitcoin wallet: Bitcoin wallet service was initially provided to help customers store digital assets.
2. Bitcoin exchange: On the morning of January 27th, 2015, Coinbase officially opened the first licensed Bitcoin exchange in the United States, providing traders with the service of exchanging or selling cryptocurrencies.
Official certification
On January 17, 2017, the head of new york Financial Services Department (NYDFS) announced that it had applied for the license of Coinbase, a bitcoin trading platform, which meant that Coinbase’s operation in New York State of the United States was finally officially certified. Coinbase has been licensed by 20 States in the United States for three years.
Coinbase has become a unicorn company in the field of bitcoin.
In June 2017, Coinbase said that the company’s latest valuation exceeded $2 billion. By June 2017, Coinbase had accumulated 27.8 million wallets and 8.4 million users, with a transaction scale of 20 billion US dollars, covering 32 countries. We have provided development tools and services to more than 10,000 developers and expanded 46,000 corporate customers such as Expedia (the largest online travel platform in the United States), Dell and Overstock (a well-known American retailer).
core product
1. Coinbase- Bitcoin Exchange
2. Coinbase- Bitcoin wallet
3. Coinbase digital API platform.
Steem- the originator of content incentive based on blockchain
Project background
Users bring a lot of traffic and income to social media, but rarely enjoy the dividends brought by the development of the platform. In the traditional content distribution and copyright trading process, it is difficult for most of them to get any income, regardless of content producers or ordinary users. Steem project uses cryptocurrency to reward users to solve the unreasonable distribution of benefits in the existing social platforms.
Steem is a digital currency published by Steemit, a social media website. After users publish content (articles, pictures, comments) on the platform, they can get a system reward token Steem according to the rules of users’ voting and comments. Simply put, Steem is a blockchain database that supports community building and social interaction through cryptocurrency rewards.
Market performance
As of March 2018, Steem had more than 330,000 registered users. At its peak, Steem showed on coinmarketcap.com that its market value was as high as $1.27 billion, but now it has dropped sharply, and it is currently around $450 million. At present, the price of Steem is around $1.9.
summary
Through combing several blockchain projects in this issue, we find that blockchain technology has been gradually applied to all walks of life, whether it is cross-border payment, financial transactions or media distribution. In different segmentation scenarios, some companies have obtained a large number of users and financing. The chief believes that the technologies and models of these companies are of positive significance to the latecomers in the blockchain industry. For example, Steem is a model that many Internet companies can learn from and solve the pain points of traditional media distribution through blockchain technology. In addition, on the whole, the blockchain industry is currently the most widely used and widely used in the financial sector, including payment, trading, loans, insurance and other sub-sectors in various financial fields are actively embracing the blockchain. In the future, with the blockchain technology gradually adapting to the requirements of regulatory policies, it will become a powerful tool for regulatory technology.
This article is reproduced from the blockchain chief (ID:cmcmbc), the most attitude blockchain market research and analysis of new media, and the blockchain is deeply interpreted with data.