Binance

Horizen

Ledger

Trezor

Trust Wallet

Math Wallet

MyZenWallet

#Horizen ($ZEN) is the zero-knowledge enabled network of blockchains.

Zcash is a decentralized cryptocurrency focused on privacy and anonymity. It uses the zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proof technology that allows nodes on the network to verify transactions without revealing any sensitive information about those transactions.

Contrary to a common misunderstanding, the majority of cryptocurrencies on the market, including Bitcoin (BTC), are not anonymous, but rather pseudonymous; while they do not explicitly reveal the identities of their users, each user has their own public address or addresses which can be traced back to them via the methods of data science and blockchain forensics.

Zcash transactions, on the other hand, still have to be relayed via a public blockchain, but unlike pseudonymous cryptocurrencies, ZEC transactions by default do not reveal the sending and receiving addresses or the amount being sent. There is an option, however, to reveal this data for the purposes of auditing or regulatory compliance.

Zcash was first released on October 28, 2016, and it was originally based on Bitcoin’s codebase.

Zcash

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

Qtum is a decentralized blockchain network that supports smart contracts using the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The blockchain itself is based on Bitcoin’s UTXO model, but uses proof-of-stake for consensus. Because Qtum is a hybrid project that takes the best parts of Ethereum and Bitcoin, it also has the ability to merge future updates from these projects and place them on top of the Team’s own unique developments.

Qtum is truly decentralized, there’s no “delegated” proof of stake, or other forms of masternodes required to make it appear fast. Anyone can participate in the transaction validation process, all they require is an internet connection and a device that can run a node. There’s no need to hold coins or vote for a centralized validator. Block targets are set to average 32 seconds, and up to 8000kb of data can be stored in each block. Bundled with SegWit, it’s possible to achieve 1100 transactions per second. Because Qtum is based on Bitcoin, if necessary, a Layer2 network can push this throughput to “millions or billions” of transactions per second with Lightning.

The Qtum project supports multiple token standards, including its own implementation of Ethereum’s ERC-20, dubbed QRC-20. Qtum also integrated the BRC-20 standard that appeared on Bitcoin, dubbing it qBRC-20. Along with NFT support, Qtum offers developers more than Bitcoin or Ethereum can do independently.

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

Qtum

Launched in 2017, Livepeer is the first live video streaming network protocol that is fully decentralized. The platform aims to become a viable blockchain-based, economically efficient alternative to centralized broadcasting solutions for all new and existing broadcaster companies.

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

As stated in the official Livepeer whitepaper, the live video streaming and broadcasting industry is growing at a rapid pace, and the company is looking to ride this wave and introduce decentralization to the environment. Livepeer aims to streamline the broadcasting process by allowing producers to submit their work on the platform, taking care of reformatting and distributing the content to users and streaming platforms.

Livepeer

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

Dash is an open-source blockchain and cryptocurrency focused on offering a fast, cheap global payments network that is decentralized in nature. According to the project's white paper, Dash seeks to improve upon Bitcoin (BTC) by providing stronger privacy and faster transactions.

Dash, whose name comes from "digital cash," was launched in January 2014 as a fork of Litecoin (LTC). Since going live, Dash has grown to include features such as a two-tier network with incentivized nodes, including "masternodes," and decentralized project governance; InstantSend, which allows for instantly settled payments; ChainLocks, which makes the Dash blockchain instantly immutable; and PrivateSend, which offers additional optional privacy for transactions.

Dash

UMA was founded in 2018 by Allison Lu and Hart Lambur, two ex Goldman Sachs traders, with the goal of making global markets universally fair, accessible, secure and decentralized.

The team drew inspiration from traditional finance derivatives to define an open-source protocol to allow anyone, anywhere, to design and build trustless financial contracts.

Compound is a DeFi lending protocol that allows users to earn interest on their cryptocurrencies by depositing them into one of several pools supported by the platform.

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

When a user deposits tokens to a Compound pool, they receive cTokens in return. These cTokens represent the individual’s stake in the pool and can be used to redeem the underlying cryptocurrency initially deposited into the pool at any time. For example, by depositing ETH into a pool, you will receive cETH in return. Over time, the exchange rate of these cTokens to the underlying asset increases, which means you can redeem them for more of the underlying asset than you initially put in — this is how the interest is distributed.

On the flip side, borrowers can take a secured loan from any Compound pool by depositing collateral. The maximum loan-to-value (LTV) ratio varies based on the collateral asset, but currently ranges from 50 to 75%. The interest rate paid varies by borrowed asset and borrowers can face automatic liquidation if their collateral falls below a specific maintenance threshold.

Since the launch of the Compound mainnet in September 2018, the platform has skyrocketed in popularity, and recently passed more than $800 million in total locked value.

Compound

0x is an infrastructure protocol that allows users to easily trade ERC20 tokens and other assets on the many different blockchains (including Ethereum) without relying on centralized intermediaries. It is a protocol for decentralized exchange.

0x achieves this decentralized exchange functionality using a collection of open-source, publicly auditable smart contracts that work together to produce a flexible, low-friction trading protocol that developers can easily weave into their products.

The protocol is used by companies building web3 apps such as wallets, DEXes, portfolio trackes, and others. It is a used by hundreds of developers for their projects. The protocol has facilitates over $200B in trading volume since its inception. One can track its usage in its dedicated https://explorer.0x.org/.

The protocol is powered by an ERC20 governance token known as ZRX. ZRX holders can participate in protocol governance, having direct power over protocol changes and its community treasury.

0x Protocol

Bancor is an ecosystem of decentralized, open-source protocols that promote on-chain trading and liquidity.

Its main protocol, Carbon, is a decentralized trading protocol allowing users to perform automated trading strategies using custom on-chain limit orders and range orders, with the option of combining orders together to create automated buy low, sell high strategies.

By design, Carbon orders are irreversible on execution, easily adjustable directly on-chain, and resistant to MEV sandwich attacks. These capabilities give users an unprecedented level of control and automation to perform novel trading strategies on-chain.

Fast Lane, a separate open-source arbitrage protocol, allows any user to perform arbitrage between Bancor ecosystem protocols and external on-chain exchanges and redirect arbitrage profits back to the Bancor ecosystem.

All Bancor ecosystem protocols are governed by the BancorDAO via staked BNT.

Bancor

Waves is a multi-purpose blockchain platform which supports various use cases including decentralized applications (DApps) and smart contracts.

Launched in June 2016 following one of the cryptocurrency industry’s earliest initial coin offerings (ICO), Waves initially set out to improve on the first blockchain platforms by increasing speed, utility and user-friendliness.

The platform has undergone various changes and added new spin-off features to build on its original design.

Waves’ native token is WAVES, an uncapped supply token used for standard payments such as block rewards.

Waves

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

Celo is a carbon-negative, permissionless, blockchain with a rich ecosystem of global partners building innovative Web3 dapps to support a more inclusive financial system. Accessible to anyone with a mobile phone, the Celo ecosystem consists of a decentralized, proof-of-stake blockchain technology stack (the Celo platform), CELO governance asset, and several Mento stable assets (cUSD, cEUR, cREAL) that allow for real-world users to use digital assets. The open source Celo mainnet launched on Earth Day 2020.  The Celo community passed an indicative on-chain governance proposal (temperature check) to have Celo migrate to an Ethereum layer-2.  Google Cloud, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, and many others run validators on the Celo Platform.  Today, the Platform supports 1,000+ projects in over 150 countries are building on Celo to, helping to create the conditions of prosperity for all.  For more information, please visit Celo.org.

Celo

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

Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that is able to take real-world data and supply it to on-chain applications, while also connecting APIs to smart-contracts to facilitate the exchange of information between on-chain and off-chain data sources.

By supplying reputable, verifiable real-world data to blockchains, Band Protocol unlocks a range of new use cases for developers to explore — since they can now use any type of real-world data as part of their decentralized application (DApp) logic, including sports, weather, random numbers, price feed data and more.

Band Protocol initially launched as an ERC-20 project on the Ethereum blockchain in September 2019, but transitioned to the Cosmos network in June 2020 with the release of Band Protocol 2.0. The new protocol is built on BandChain using the Cosmos SDK. Oracle nodes on BandChain not only relay data but are also involved in block production/validation, giving them a dual role.

BAND is the native token of the Band Protocol ecosystem and is used as collateral by validators involved in fulfilling data requests, as well as the main medium of exchange on BandChain — being used to paying for private data.

Band Protocol

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

Balancer is an automated market maker (AMM) that was developed on the Ethereum blockchain and launched in March 2020. It was able to raise a $3M seed round by Placeholder and Accomplice. Balancer protocol functions as a self-balancing weighted portfolio, price sensor and liquidity provider. It allows users to earn profits through its recently introduced token ($BAL) by contributing to customizable liquidity pools.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Balancer(https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-balancer.

The protocol operates a few types of pools:

Private pools give the owner governance over the pool, and make the person the sole contributor of liquidity to the pool. Also, all the parameters are mutable by the owner.

Shared pools are for those who want to become liquidity providers (LPs). The LPs are rewarded with the Balancer Pool Tokens (BPTs).

Smart pools are similar to private pools but are controlled by a smart contract. They also reward using BPTs and allow anyone to contribute liquidity to the pool.

Balancer

Self-described as "Polkadot's wild cousin," Kusama is an experimental blockchain platform that is designed to provide a massively interoperable and scalable framework for developers.

Kusama is built on Substrate — a blockchain building kit developed by Parity Technologies. Kusama has almost the same codebase as Polkadot — one of the most successful interoperable blockchains.

By deploying on Kusama, fast-paced projects gain access to a highly scalable, interoperable sharded network, with features that are not yet available on Polkadot. To that end, Kusama describes itself as a “canary network.”

The platform is designed to provide a testbed for developers looking to innovate and deploy their own blockchain and can be used as a preparatory network before launching on Polkadot — though many projects opt to stick with Kusama for their final product.

Kusama benefits from a low barrier to entry for deploying parachains, low bond requirements for validators, and is most commonly used by early-stage startups and for experimentation.

Kusama

Kava is a Layer-1 blockchain that combines the speed and interoperability of Cosmos with the developer power of Ethereum.

Kava was built from the ground up to optimize its resources for protocol growth, strengthened by its Cosmos EVM technology that enables maximum scalability, speed, security, and developer support.

Builders on Kava earn a share of Kava Rise's $750M developer incentive fund via the program's blockchain-based distribution method, designed to reward the top protocols every month based on usage.