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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 blockchaintechnology.  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 blockchainplatform, 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’’  literallyopenchain 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 Ethereumplatform 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.  Symbiontis 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 2016Symbiont 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 blockchaindatabase. 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 ablockchain that suites best for them in the future.

 

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