12 Top blockchain companies
(Reading time 9 minutes)
In the
previous post I’ve told you about Blockchain technology with very simple words.
What is blockchain, how it works, the different types of blockchain, and the
possibility that most of the businesses will be affected by the blockchain
technology. Today I want to tell you about the 12 top blockchains protocols.
When you
think about blockchain the first thing that comes into your mind is always
bitcoin, although the original word that was used by Satoshi Nakamoto when he
described the bitcoin protocol was ‘’chains of blocks’’. Since bitcoin was the
earliest and first to use blockchain, many other blockchains appeared on the
scene.
Here are the top blockchain protocols:
•
Bitcoin
As I
mentioned in the previous posts bitcoin is the first decentralized currency,
without any involvement of middle man or a third party. Bitcoin includes
technologies such as: hash, digital signature, public key cryptography, P2P and
proof of work mining that allows users to create bitcoins.
This blend
of technology has developed a mechanism that prevents duplication of payments
and falsification. Additionally this mechanism prevents malicious users, which
are critical for the operating system like the one for the electronic money,
having no central authority.
•
Ethereum
Ethereum
is a public open source blockchain and it is well known for its smart
contracts. The contracts are applications that run as programmed and with
minimal interference from third party or censorship.
The
contract is a phrase to describe a computer code that can facilitate the
exchange of money, content, property, shares or anything of value. Because
smart contracts run on the blockchain, they run exactly as programmed without
any possibility of censorship, downtime, fraud or third party interference.
It
features a native cryptocurrency known as Ether and an Ethereum Wallet.
Ethereum allows developers to create decentralized applications as well as
democratic autonomous organizations.
•
Ripple
Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP), started in 2012 and has
been developed upon an open-source distributed consensus ledger, internet
protocol and native currency named as Ripple(XRP). Ripple inables instant, safe
and low fee global financial transaction of any scale.Ripple supports tokens that can be used to represent flat and
crypto currencies, commodity or other value units such as mobile minutes,
frequent flier miles etc. It is essentially built for banks, payment providers,
digital asset exchanges and corporate who can use RippleNet to send money
globally.
It is expected to be the third biggest cryptocurrency in
terms of market capitalization, after bitcoin and ethereum.
•
Hyperledger
Hyperledger is open source blockchain platform, that began in
2015 by the Linux Foundation. It focuses on ledgers targeted at supporting
international business transactions, catering leading financial, technological
and supply chain businesses, with the objective of improving a lot of
performance and reliability aspects.
The collaborative effort seeks to bring together people from
various industries to advance blockchain technology. It consists of leaders in
finance, banking, IoT (Internet of things), supply chain, manufacturing and
technology. It already has many projects under it. Some of its features include
support for Python (the programing language), endorsement policies for
transactions and highly confidential channel for private information sharing.
•
Openchain
Openchain blockchain is an open source distributed ledger
technology and it differs from others that it uses Partitioned consensus.
Openchain falls under the umbrella of blockchain technology, however if you
take the word ‘’blockchain’’ literally
openchain is not a ‘’blockchain’’, but a close cousin.
A block chain is a data structure that orders blocks of
transactions and links them cryptographically through hashing. Openchain does not use the concept of blocks. The
transactions are directly chained with one another, and they are no longer
grouped in blocks. Because the grouping of the transactions includes delay,
even though some systems manage to reduce the block time to just a few seconds,
it is still a long time, especially for trading.
In Openchain the transactions are linked to the chain as soon
as they are submitted to the network. The openchain is able to offer real-time
confirmations. Therefore the more appropriate term for Openchain would be
transaction chain instead of Blockchain.
It is very scalable and secure, and suitable for
organizations that wish to issue and manage digital assets.
•
IOTA
IOTA was born in 2014 and it is the only technology of its
kind. IOTA uses a blockless distributed ledger called ‘’Tangle’’, which is far
more advanced. IOTA has no mining, no blocks, no transaction fees. It has
distributed consensus and uses something similar to hash tags for proof of
work. The Tangle its self it is the ledger for storing transactions. Businesses
can not only explore new business-to-business models, but also trade
technological resources on an open market without fees.
While the world encourages the sharing of economy in every
aspect, most belongings stay idle for most of the time. Through IOTA, these can
be leased and shared, whether you are talking about Appliances, Tools, Drones,
e-Bikes, computer storage resources, computational power and Wi-Fi bandwidth
etc.
•
LISK
Lisk went live in less than 2 years ago. Lisk allows
development of decentralized applications in pure JavaScript. It is on the path
to be the first successful blockchain of its kind. The idea behind Lisk is that every Blockchain App is on its
own sidechain, separate from the main blockchain.
The benefits from this would be solving scalability issues
that many cryptocurrencies are facing, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, while also
allowing for far greater customizations to particular sidechains, which could
not be done on other platforms.
The ICO of Lisk was the second most successful crowd funded
cryptocurrency. It raised 14.000 BTC. Quickly after the trading started, Lisk
was the second most popular currency traded after Bitcoin.
Lisks uses DPOS (Delegated Proof of Stake) algorithm,
originally created by BitShares. The difference from the regular POS (Proof of
Stake) is that only 101 delegates (determined by voting weight of voters), are
actively forging and securing the network. Lisk is a slow but constant company.
Only time will show if this company will cut off an important role in the world
of crypto.
•
HydraChain
HydraChain is an extension of the Ethereum platform which
adds support for creating
(Permission Distributed Ledgers). HydraChain also allows development of
custom private blockchains where access permissions are more tightly
controlled, with rights to modify or even read the blockchain state restricted
to a few users. This kind of functions are important for financial
institutions, where they can develop blockchains where the consensus is
controlled by a pre-selected set of nodes.
For example: 20 financial institution could run nodes and 15
of them must sign each block so that block will be valid. The right to read the
blocks may be private, public or restricted to participants. Many aspects of
the system can be customized to meet the institution needs.
For example: transaction fees, gas limits, genesis
allocation, block time etc. can be easily adjusted. Setting up a test network
can be done with almost zero configuration. It is fully compatible with
Ethereum Protocol and is open source.
•
Corda
Corda is an open source distributed ledger platform. Corda is
built by R3 (distributed database technology company), and it is a protocol
used in the recording, supervising and synchronizing the financial agreements
among regulated financial institutions.
It was mainly build by and for world’s financial institutions
but applicable in multiple industries. Corda is a decentralized database system
in which nodes trust each other as little as possible. All the transactions in
Corda are validated by parties involved to the transactions, instead of
unrelated validators. Consensus is achieved at the level of individual deals
and not system level. It also directly enables regulatory and supervisory
observer nodes. Corda also records and explicit link between human-language
legal prose documents and smart contract code. Corda has no native
cryptocurrency.
•
Symbiont Distributed Ledger
Symbiont was introduced in 2016 as a development kit for
Assembly. Assembly is the permitted distributed ledger part of Symbiont’s smart
contract system. This ledger can process 80.000 transactions every second in a
local multi-node network. Symbiont is targeted at institutions to allow complex
financial instruments. It also allows for cost-saving and sharing of business
logic and market data.
Symbiont, a pioneer in the use of smart contract technology
for institutional financial markets, has been awarded the 2017 Buy-Side Technology Award for Best
Distributed-Ledger Technology Project.
As of 2016 Symbiont is working with the state of Delaware
to improve capitalization management, shareholder communication and regulatory
compliance in incorporation. Also it has partnered with ‘’Gemalto’’ which is
international digital security company providing software applications, and it
is the world largest manufacturer of SIM cards.
•
Chain
Chain is a technology company that partners with
organizations to build, deploy and operate blockchain networks. It hosts a
number of assets including securities, derivatives, loyalty points, gift cards
and currencies. Chain authored the Chain Protocol, which powers the Chain Core
blockchain platform.
With Chain Core, enterprises can issue and transfer financial
assets on permissioned blockchain networks. Institutions can use it to launch a
blockchain network or connect to a growing list of other networks used to move
funds around the world.
Chain Core Developer Edition is free but there is a Chain
Core Enterprise Edition for organizations who wish to run Chain Core in
production environments.
Although creation, control and transfer of assets is
decentralized among participants, network is governed by designated set of
entities known as a federation.
•
BigChainDB
BigChainDB is an open-source system that starts with big data
distributed database.
It then adds blockchain characteristics including
decentralized control and digital assets transfers.
With the platform, developers can deploy blockchain
proof-of-concepts, platforms and applications with a highly scalable blockchain
database.It supports creation of custom assets, transactions, permissions and
transparency.
It allows for permissions setting at transaction level and
supports both private and public networks. Another feature is the Federation
Consensus Model.
This are the top 12 Blockchain technology that I have come
across and I wanted to share them with you. Please do not mind if I have missed
some other Blockchains. As you can see most of them are offering some type of
solution to particulate problem. Some of them have a currency, but some of them
don’t, they simply act as a Blockchain. Regardless of that, this new technology
is coming into our lives on a big scale. Most probably all the organizations,
businesses, institutions will be a part of some type of a blockchain that
suites best for them in the future.
Thank you for reading
Subscribe to my blog
Comments
Post a Comment