Symbol is a blockchain platform launched in March of 2021. It's the spiritual successor to [NEM](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nem/), featuring a new consensus algorithm called proof-of-stake-plus (PoS+), rule-based tokens (called mosaics), namespaces, multisignature accounts, and aggregate transactions. Its client, [Catapult](https://github.com/symbol/symbol/tree/dev/client), is written in C++.

Symbol has a cult following in Japan and Korea. The community can be primarily found on Twitter, LINE, and KakaoTalk. Some of the most notable projects built on Symbol include:

* [QUEST](https://quest-bc.com/) | a bounty and tipping platform for creators. Follow the official Twitter account [here]( https://twitter.com/QUESTofficial5). 
* [SYMBOARD](https://symboard.tokyo/login.html) | a loyalty and rewards card for businesses. Follow the official Twitter account [here](https://twitter.com/symboard_symbol).
* [THE TOWER](https://symvolution.com/thetower/) | a endless dungeon crawler.
* [NFT DRIVE](https://www.nft-drive.com/) | a on-chain media and content storage service. Follow the official Twitter account [here](https://twitter.com/nftdrive_jp). 
* [COMSA](https://comsa.io/en) | a novel NFT marketplace developed and designed for the Japanese cryptocurrency community.

In November 2021, Symbol was forked by a pseudonymous team of cryptocurrency experts and enthusiasts alike. Titled **Cyprus**, this hard fork signaled the community’s intent to turn Symbol into the world’s leading omnichain platform with content-specific, scalable shards - powered by [zk-STARKs](https://starkware.co/stark/).

Symbol aims to solve for problems inherent in EVM-based platforms and omnichain solutions, where security is often defined at a smart-contract level (versus a network-wide level); where L2 validators are centralized and not incentivized; and where new features and functionality are decided by central client teams versus a fair and free market.

Symbol

NEM is a blockchain platform that was launched in March of 2015. It was one of the pioneers of the cryptocurrency industry, and sought to improve on the imperfections found on other chains at the time. It was one of the first non-turing complete chains to feature user-defined tokens (called mosaics), namespaces, multisignature accounts, and a P2P reputation system based on EigenTrust++. Its most notable contribution to the space is the proof-of-importance consensus mechanism, which sought to reward on-chain activity and deter the concentration of wealth commonly associated with proof-of-stake. Its client, NIS, is written in Java.

NEM has a global community. It sees the most utility as an alternative form of payment for businesses and vendors, and has a variety of social media apps built on top of it in Japan, such as nemgraph, a community-driven owned and operated alternative to Instagram.

In December 2021, NEM was hard forked by a pseudonymous team of cryptocurrency experts and enthusiasts alike. Titled Harlock, this hard fork signaled the community’s intent to take NEM from a shadow of its former self into the world’s leading payments platform for on-chain and off-chain media content.

IOST describes itself as an “ultra-fast,” fully fledged and decentralized blockchain network and ecosystem with its own nodes, wallets and based on the “next-generation” consensus protocol dubbed “proof-of-believability.”

IOST

Bora is a decentralized ecosystem for games and entertainment. Bora aims to attract games and applications from the GameFi sector to its Bora Chain to avoid building on blockchains like Ethereum that have high gas fees. For that reason, Bora follows a two-tiered blockchain system: the BORA token is traded on the Klaytn blockchain, a public blockchain that is focused on metaverse and gaming use cases. The Bora chain is a modular blockchain that can be used as an execution layer by decentralized applications.

The Bora team provides development toolkits that support developers with creating decentralized applications for its ecosystem. It also utilizes Bora Points, a currency within the ecosystem as a resource for development and to incentivize contribution to Bora. Bora Points can subsequently be converted to the BORA token.

BORA

JUST is a popular new decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem built for the TRON blockchain. It is an entire suite of products that are mostly centered around a decentralized stablecoin lending platform known as JustStable.

The platform launched in August 2020 following an initial exchange offering (IEO) on the Poloniex LaunchBase platform earlier that same year, but the native governance token of the platform (JST) has been circulating since May 2020.

It is a two-token ecosystem built around the USDJ and JUST (JST) tokens. USDJ is a multi-collateral stablecoin that has its value pegged to the value of the US dollar (USD), whereas JST has a variety of functions on the platform — paying interest, helping maintain the platform and participating in its governance, helping to set parameters like interest rates (stability fees) and the minimum collateralization ratio.

To obtain USDJ on JUST, traders need to deposit collateral in the form of supported collateral tokens — including TRON (TRX), which are exchanged to PTRX tokens and locked as collateral forming a collateralized debt position (CDP). Depending on the amount of collateral deposited, users can then mint and withdraw USDJ, which must later be repaid to retrieve the initial collateral.

The platform is designed to provide a fair and borderless hub of DeFi products, that any TRON user can access.

JUST

Qtum (pronounced ‘“quantum”)  is a proof-of-stake (PoS) smart contract open-source blockchain platform and value transfer protocol. It aims to bring together the strengths of Bitcoinand Ethereumin one chain. Qtum is built on Bitcoin's UTXO transaction model, with the added functionality of smart contract execution and DApps. Recently, the platform added support for DeFi applications. As of March 2021, there are more than 20 tokens created on the Qtum blockchain.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Qtum.

The project was announced in March 2016 and held an ICO a year after, in March 2017, which brought its founders $15 million USD. The Qtum main chain was released on Sept.13, 2017. Initially, the Qtum coin was issued as a ETH-20 token, but with the launch of the mainnet, it was converted to native blockchain.

Qtum

MediBloc (MED) is a South Korean-based decentralized blockchain protocol for the healthcare industry through which medical institutions can securely transfer, collect, store and manage data. With MediBloc, physicians can access patient information, medical history, prescribed medication, insurance issues and more. MediBloc makes medical data more accessible by allowing everyone involved to track and record medical conditions, appointments, examinations, treatments and more.

The ecosystem is built on three key elements: MediBloc Core (a layer for storing data and providing additional storage), MediBloc Application (a layer for accessing and managing data through various applications), and MediBloc Service (a layer applying smart contract technology that connects the other layers and allowing input and output of data).

The platform offers three categories of accounts: for general users (patients), healthcare providers (doctors and medical institutions) and data scientists, the latter two require proof of their accreditation. The project is aimed at improving the quality of medical services and infrastructure by optimizing information storage processes and giving users sovereignty over their own data. MediBloc is compliant with the HIPAA Security Rule, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

MediBloc

Lisk is striving to on-board 100,000,000 users into crypto and web3 by offering an accessible blockchain application platform and an industry leading JavaScript SDK.

Released in 2019, the Lisk SDK enables developers to build application-specific blockchains entirely in JavaScript, the most widely used programming language in the world. To get a deep-dive into the Lisk SDK, please visit the Lisk SDK documentation or watch Lisk.js 2019 and Lisk.js 2022.

To be released in 2022, the Lisk blockchain application platform allows interoperability between all application-specific blockchains built with the Lisk SDK. With other words, users will be able to use DeFi, NFT or Metaverse blockchain applications on Lisk.

To better understand why Lisk is important watch the following videos: The Case for Lisk and The Ultimate Vision for Lisk.

If you are curious about Lisk’s history and journey, watch Looking Back on Lisk.

The Lisk project is managed by the Lisk Foundation, a non-profit entity based in Zug, Switzerland. A local team of experts specialized in law and finance, as well as yearly audits, ensure the proper handling of funds and regulatory compliance under the supervision of the Swiss Federal Foundation Supervisory Authority (ESA, Eidgenössische Stiftungsaufsicht).

The Lisk products are developed by the Lightcurve GmbH, a Berlin based blockchain studio. With a team of over 40 blockchain experts, Lightcurve is researching, developing and promoting the Lisk SDK and the Lisk blockchain application platform.

Lisk

Orbs is a publicblockchain infrastructure that combines scalability, low fees, performance, security, and ease of use.

The platform is designed for mass-use applications and supports a complete blockchain stack. The Orbs platform is a decentralized, open and transparent network that offers practical blockchain solutions for enterprises and other large-scale consumer applications.

The Orbs protocol uses the ORBS token, which calculates commissions for executed applications and provides an incentive system that is used to select validators, thereby ensuring the integrity of the network. The ORBS token serves as the only means of payment on the Orbs platform.

Orbs was established in 2017 and was developed by experienced engineers, businessmen and scientists who have managed to create an infrastructure that uses blockchain virtualization and randomized proof-of-stake (RPoS) to ensure blockchainscalability.

Orbs

Ardor

Function X is mirroring traditional financial products on the Function X network and creating decentralized financial products and a decentralized trading system. It is a highly customizable and expandable multi-chain architecture blockchain network (subnets) that can meet different business needs.

Function X

Hive (HIVE) is a blockchain running on a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. It launched in March 2020 as a hard fork of the centralized Steem blockchain and as a gateway from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. The blockchain claims to offer “lightning-fast processing times and fee-less transactions.” Examples of use cases include social media with monetized rewards for content creators, interactive blockchain games, identity management, micro-loans and more. The platform powers decentralized applications (dApps) like Splinterlands, PeakD and HiveBlog.

Hive is a social network of apps and services, where users discover the capacity of blockchain technology, connect to the platform and securely share content through equitable redistribution of value. Thus, the users are the proprietors of the network, and sponsors can contact communities and artists directly without intermediaries.

Hive is an open source blockchain that focuses on scaling through layer-2 sidechains, while still benefiting from a common layer-1 blockchain backbone to ensure distributed data integrity. The Hive ecosystem runs on two cryptocurrencies — the native governance token, HIVE and the USD-pegged HBD stablecoin.

Hive

Fei protocol is a DeFi native algorithmic stablecoin. The aim of Fei is to propose a technological solution in a sweet spot between rigid overcollateralized decentralized stablecoin and centralised custodial stablecoins.

Fei Protocol runs on two crypto assets: FEI stablecoin and TRIBE governance token.

FEI is aimed to be a more capital efficient and fully decentralized stablecoin. The protocol uses the value it controls to maintain liquid secondary markets and earn yield for the protocol.

The project was founded in December 2020 and immediately attracted significant interest in the crypto community. It resulted in $19 million VC investment in early March 2021. Among the names that have entered this project are Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coinbase Ventures, Nascent and Framework Ventures.

There were some issues with the peg in the original mechanism, but through a series of governance upgrades the protocol recovered in the months following launch.

Fei v2 intends to be a major upgrade for the system and will launch in late 2021. It features 1:1 redeemability for FEI against protocol reserves, TRIBE buybacks and backstop, and algorithmic protocol controlled value management.

Fei USD

OMG Network, formerly known as OmiseGo, is a non-custodial, layer-2 scaling solution built for the Ethereum blockchain. As an Ethereum scaling solution, OMG Network is designed to allow users to transfer ETH and ERC20 tokens significantly faster and cheaper than when transacting directly on the Ethereum network.

The network is based on a novel scaling solution called MoreViable Plasma, which uses a sidechain architecture to group several transactions off-chain into a batch, which can then be verified as a single transaction on the Ethereum root chain. According to OMG Network, this technology has the potential to scale Ethereum to thousands of transactions per second (TPS) — instead of the 10 to 14 tps Ethereum 1.0 is currently capable of.

The network is powered by the OMG utility token, which can be used as one of the payment methods for fees on the OMG Network, and will eventually be stakable — helping to secure the network in return for rewards.

OMG Network

Ontology is a project designed to bring trust, privacy, and security to Web3 through decentralized identity and data solutions. It is building the infrastructure to provide trusted access to Web3, allowing individuals and enterprises to rest assured that through regulatory compliant digital identity solutions, users and their privacy come first.

The Ontology blockchain is a high speed, low cost public blockchain. It is designed to bring decentralized identity and data solutions to Web3, with the goal of increasing privacy, transparency, and trust. To achieve this, users and enterprises are provided with the flexibility to build blockchain-based solutions that suit their needs, while also ensuring regulatory compliance. Through Ontology’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Ontology ensures frictionless compatibility with Ethereum, the first step in the creation of the Ontology Multi-Virtual Machine and further interoperability for the chain.

At its launch, Ontology chose to forego the popular initial coin offering (ICO) model in favor of a series of community distributions and airdrops of its ONT cryptocurrency.

This helped to quickly establish both organic price discovery and a passionate community and helped the project to avoid subsequent regulatory scrutiny.

For example, for a brief period any person who signed up for the Ontology newsletter received an airdrop of free 1,000 ONT, which reached a value of $10 per token soon after the token became listed on major exchanges like Binance.

Ontology launched its own MainNet on June 30, 2018 and has been up and running smoothly since.

Ontology

aelf

Apps use ICON to operate cross-chain seamlessly, build momentum and gain reputation. ICON's Cross-Chain Framework simplifies cross-chain development with its easy-to-use xCall messaging standard and connections to secure bridging protocols.

ICON

Decred is Money Evolved.

By combining battle tested Proof-of-Work with an innovative take on Proof-of-Stake that places coin holders in charge of shaping the future, Decred is able to adapt to challenges and innovate at a rapid pace. You acquire influence in Decred by putting “skin in the game”.

Decred’s security, privacy, scalability, and decentralized treasury empower stakeholders and provides them with the tools needed to enhance their financial sovereignty.

Decred

Developed by leading Korean IT company Kakao, Klaytn is a global Layer 1 public blockchain designed to power tomorrow’s on-chain world. With the lowest transaction latency amongst leading blockchains, enterprise-grade reliability, and a developer-friendly environment, Klaytn provides a seamless experience for users and developers that is second to none. Since its launch in June 2019, Klaytn has been accelerating blockchain mass adoption through a broad array of use cases from DeFi to real-world assets, entertainment and gaming, and even the Bank of Korea’s CBDC pilot project. Today, it is one of the only globally competitive Web 3.0 ecosystems developed in South Korea, generating more than 1 billion transactions from over 300 decentralized applications.

Klaytn

Basic Attention Token, or BAT, is the token that powers a new blockchain-based digital advertising platform designed to fairly reward users for their attention, while providing advertisers with a better return on their ad spend.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Basic Attention Token.

This experience is delivered through the Brave Browser, where users can watch privacy-preserving adverts and receive BAT rewards for doing so. On the other hand, advertisers can deliver targeted ads to maximize engagement and cut down losses due to ad fraud and abuse.

The Basic Attention Token itself is the unit of reward in this advertising ecosystem, and is exchanged between advertisers, publishers and users. Advertisers pay for their advertising campaigns in BAT tokens. Out of this budget, a small portion is distributed to advertisers, while 70% is distributed to users — whereas the intermediaries that typically drive up advertising costs are cut out of the equation to improve cost-efficiency.

Basic Attention Token launched in 2017 following one of the fastest sell-out initial coin offerings (ICOs) of all time, with the platform raising a total of $35 million in under a minute. Since then, it has rolled out its attention-based advertising experience to users in most countries through its Brave Rewards program.

As of November 2020, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada had the most active advertising campaigns.

Basic Attention Token

Astar Network helps developers build decentralized applications (dApps) and layer 2 solutions by providing interoperable web 3.0 infrastructure, financial incentives, incubation programmes and technical support. It seeks to provide the best solution for all developers by supporting EVM and making a parachain where EVM and WASM smart contracts can co-exist and communicate with each other.

Astar connects the Polkadot ecosystem with layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum and Cosmos. It's a Polkadot Parachain, and was designed as a multi-chain Polkadot dApp hub with support for DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, where developers can move beyond infrastructure and focus more on application development.

The project, which is backed by Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures, operates on two layers: the first layer is built on the Substrate framework, and the second is built using OVM or Optimistic Virtual Machine, for scalability.