Is Bitcoin a Speculative Asset: A Data Perspective by IntoTheBlock

Bitcoin Diamond (BCD) is a hard fork of Bitcoin. The fork occurring at at block height 495866, implemented changes including a new proof of work algorithm to deter attacks on the network and segregation of transaction signatures from transactions on the chain for additional capacity allowing a greater number of transactions per second on the network as a whole.

Bitcoin Diamond

Ledger

Atomic wallet

Bitcoin Gold was founded in 2017 to become a user-friendly alternative to Bitcoin. The BTG network aims to combine the security and sturdiness of the Bitcoin blockchain and its characteristics with the opportunity for experimentation and development.

BTG enhances and extends the crypto space with a blockchain closely compatible with Bitcoin but without using resources like Bitcoin hash power or vying for the "real Bitcoin" title. The company aims to present a coin with the implementation capabilities of Bitcoin, however, expanding on the opportunities for DeFi and DApp developers to use the coin.

Bitcoin Gold

The Bitcoin Standard Hashrate Token (BTCST) was launched on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) on Dec. 13, 2020. It is collateralized by Bitcoin’s (BTC) hashrate, with each token representing 0.1 TH/s of Bitcoin mining power at an efficiency of 60 W/TH. As such, miners contribute their computational power to the platform in exchange for newly minted BTCST tokens.

BTCST’s goal is to bridge liquidity to Bitcoin’s mining market. This will allow users to get exposure to mining rewards and hashpower of any size, at a low cost. The ultimate goal of the app is to increase the liquidity and efficiency of mining power markets.

Bitcoin Standard Hashrate Token

BitShares Blockchain is a decentralized “Blockchain as Organization” (BaO); an industrial-grade decentralized open source platform built to run high-performance financial technology operations. It represents the first decentralized autonomous decentralized community that enables its core utility token (BTS) holders to decide the Blockchain future direction in order to develop and maintain a wide range of decentralized financial technology products, features and functions. BitShares Blockchain is a Blockchain that permanently records financial technology operations between different Blockchain accounts and facilitates a wide range of access controls across BitShares Blockchain user financial means.

BitShares Blockchain is a technology that supports the digital generation entrepreneurs, investors, and developers with a common interest in building and participating in free market solutions by leveraging the power of globally decentralized consensus and decision making. Consensus technology has the power to do for economics what the internet did for information. It can harness the combined power of all humanity to coordinate the discovery and aggregation of real-time knowledge, previously unobtainable. This knowledge can be used to more effectively coordinate the allocation of resources toward their most productive and valuable use.

BitShares looks to extend the innovation of the Blockchain to all industries that rely upon the internet to provide their services. Whether its banking, stock exchanges, lotteries, voting, music, auctions or many others, a digital public ledger allows for the creation of distributed autonomous companies (or BaO) that provide better quality services at a fraction of the cost incurred by their more traditional, centralized counterparts. The advent of (BaO) ushers in a new paradigm in organizational structure in which companies can run without any human management and under the control of an incorruptible set of business rules. These rules are encoded in publicly auditable open source software distributed across the computers of the companies’ shareholders, who effortlessly secure the company from arbitrary control. BitShares does for business what bitcoin did for money by utilizing distributed consensus technology to create companies that are inherently global, transparent, trustworthy, efficient and most importantly profitable.

BitShares has went through many changes and has done its best to stay on top of Blockchain technology. BitShares is using Consensus as the mechanism by which organized people decide upon unitary rational action. While not considered technology in the traditional since, consensus “technology” is the basis of democratic governance and the coordination of free market activity first coined by Adam Smith as the “Invisible Hand.” The process of consensus decision-making allows for all participants to consent upon a resolution of action even if not the favored course of action for each individual participant. Bitcoin was the first system to integrate a fully decentralized consensus method with the modern technology of the internet and peer-to-peer networks in order to more efficiently facilitate the transfer of value through electronic communication. The proof-of-work structure that secures and maintains the Bitcoin network is one manner of organizing individuals who do not necessarily trust one another to act in the best interest of all participants of the network. The BitShares ecosystem employs Delegated Proof of Stake in order to find efficient solutions to distributed consensus decision making.

BitShares

Verge is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency and blockchain that seeks to offer a fast, efficient, decentralized payments network that improves upon the original Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. It includes additional privacy features including integrating the anonymity network Tor into its wallet, called vergePay, and providing the option of sending transactions to stealth addresses.

The project describes itself as community-driven, relying on volunteers and priding itself on being open source.

Verge was first launched in October 2014 as DogeCoinDark, a fork of Peercoin (PPC). In February 2016, it was renamed Verge in order to rebrand for easier mass-market adoption and to distinguish itself from Dogecoin (DOGE), with which it has no direct connection. The project is now based on the Bitcoin source code.

Verge

Revain is an online platform for Ethereum blockchain-based tokens reviews, designed to allow developers to receive constructive feedback about their projects. The protocol also incentivizes authors to provide high-quality reviews.

Revain was the first platform to combine the features of traditional review sites and blockchain technology. Revain’s ultimate goal is to create a legitimate and genuine feedback structure for all global products and services that utilize emerging technologies, such as machine learning and blockchain.

Revain implements artificial intelligence tools and a manual review system to ensure the high quality of reviews. The core features of the protocol include:

Legitimate reviews: Revain uses only original content from a diverse range of experts on its website.

Stable system: the protocol runs on two different tokens, the REV and the RVN, allowing for smooth functioning of the system. The RVN token helps facilitate interactions between users on the platform.

Immutable information: The system does not allow both regular users and Revain itself to edit the information of other users.

Revain

Ardor

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.

DigiByte (DGB) is an open source blockchain and asset creation platform. Development began in October 2013 and the genesis block of its DGB token was mined in January 2014 as a fork of Bitcoin (BTC).

A longstanding public blockchain and cryptocurrency, DigiByte uses five different algorithms to improve security, and originally aimed to improve on the Bitcoin blockchain’s security, capacity and transaction speed.

DigiByte consists of three layers: a smart contract “App Store,” a public ledger and the core protocol featuring nodes communicating to relay transactions.

DigiByte

Komodo

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

Bitcoin SV (BSV) emerged following a hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain in 2018, which had in turn forked from the BTC blockchain a year earlier following the blocksize wars.

BSV claims to fulfill the original vision of the Bitcoin protocol and design as described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, early Bitcoin client software and known Satoshi writings. BSV aims to offer scalability and stability in line with the original description of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, as well as deliver a distributed data network that can support enterprise-level advanced blockchain applications.

To this end, it has removed artificial block size limits and re-enabled Script commands and other technical capabilities which had been historically disabled or restricted by the protocol developers of the BTC blockchain. This purportedly allows the network to process tens of thousands of transactions per second while maintaining extremely low transaction fees for micropayments, in addition to offering advanced capabilities such as tokens, smart contracts, computation and other data use cases.

The BSV network claims to be unique in its capacity for unbounded on-chain scaling while also being more aligned with the original design of Bitcoin than any other blockchain.

Bitcoin SV

Launched in 2017, Dent is a revolutionary digital mobile operator offering eSIM cards, mobile data plans, call minutes top-ups and a roaming-free experience. According to the company website, Dent employs blockchain technology’s powers to create a global marketplace for mobile data liberalization.

Dent has an ambitious roadmap ahead, with plans to expand its services to new markets by the end of 2021. The company has already attracted more than twenty-five million mobile device users, and Dent services are available in more than 140 countries. Enterprise partnerships for Dent include Samsung Blockchain, The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Telecom Infra.

Dent

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

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

Billed as "digital money for the modern world," nano is a lightweight cryptocurrency that is designed to facilitate secure, practically instant payments, without fees, and addresses some of the major limitations of both legacy financial infrastructure, and many modern cryptocurrencies.

Development of the project began in 2014 under the name RaiBlocks, and the coin (then termed XRB) launched the following year through a public faucet, which allowed users to claim small amounts of XRB after completing a captcha challenge. Anyone with access to a computer or phone could solve captchas, and be rewarded with RaiBlocks. The number of XRB people received per solved captcha varied over time

RaiBlocks (XRB) was rebranded to Nano in January 2018, with the new name chosen to better represent the speed and simplicity the project offers to users.

It is a peer-to-peer platform that uses a unique block-lattice data structure to allow users to easily transfer value to one another without relying on centralized intermediaries.

Unlike other platforms which typically use the combined proof-of-work of a massive mining network to achieve consensus, nano instead uses a system known as Open Representative Voting (ORV) — which sees account holders vote for their chosen representative, who then work to confirm blocks of transactions securely.

ORV makes Nano extremely energy efficient, positioning it as a more environmentally friendly alternative to proof-of-work (POW)-based cryptocurrencies.

In November, 2021, aiming to bring nano to the real world and to comply with the globally-recognized standards of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) requirements, nano adopted a new ticker and a standard symbol: XNO and Ӿ.

Nano

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

Steem is a community-focused blockchain that creates an instant earning opportunity for the network’s users. The protocol is designed to provide an earning opportunity for customers based on their value to the network. It is designed to provide users with a platform where they can post curated content online, and get paid in cryptocurrency.

The protocol is a publicly available, incentivized blockchain database that allows users to interact with each other and earn in return. It leverages technologies from both social media and cryptocurrency to provide users with value. The network ensures the fair treatment of contributors by running a reward structure that reflects each user’s contribution.

Steemit is the first app that was built on the Steem blockchain, and it launched on July 4, 2016. The protocol aims to provide value for its community of users in the following ways:

To provide thoughtfully chosen news and commentaries.

Creating an opportunity to earn.

As a source that offers answers to users’ inquiries.

Offering a stable cryptocurrency pegged to the USD.

Steem

Augur

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

Venus is an algorithmic money market and synthetic stablecoin protocol launched exclusively on Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

The protocol introduces a simple-to-use crypto asset lending and borrowing solution to the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, enabling users to directly borrow against collateral at high speed while losing less to transaction fees. In addition, Venus allows users to mint VAI stablecoins on-demand within seconds by posting at least 200% collateral to the Venus smart contract.

VAI tokens are synthetic BEP-20 token assets that are pegged to the value of one U.S. dollar (USD), whereas XVS tokens are also BEP-20-based, but are instead used for governance of the Venus protocol, and can be used to vote on adjustments—including adding new collateral types, changing parameters and organizing product improvements.

The governance of the protocol is entirely controlled by XVS community members, since the Venus founders, team members and other advisors do have any XVS token allocations.