## What Is IOST (IOST)?

IOST describes itself as an “ultra-fast,” fully fledged and [decentralized](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/decentralized) [blockchain](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/blockchain) [network](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/network) and ecosystem with its own nodes, [wallets](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/wallets) and based on the “next-generation” [consensus](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/consensus) [protocol](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/protocol) dubbed “proof-of-believability.” 


### Who Are the Founders of IOST?

The project was launched in January 2018 by Jimmy Zhong, Terrence Wang, Justin Li, Ray Xiao, Sa Wang and Kevin Tan.

 

Zhong has founded other tech startups in the U.S. and China. After his university days, he returned to Beijing and co-founded IOST, among other projects.

Wang’s previous experience includes serving as an Uber software engineer. He holds a degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota and a masters in computer science from Princeton University.

 

Li previously worked as an investment banking associate at Goldman Sachs and a data scientist at Mobike. He graduated with a degree in applied mathematics and computer science. Meanwhile, Tan was a co-founder at Ethercap, while he received a degree in computer science from Tsinghua University.

 

Xiao co-founded Dora — alongside Jimmy and Sa — an AI company focused on intelligent kiosks. He studied computer science and quantitative economics at university.


#### What Makes IOST Unique?

IOST’s blockchain infrastructure is open-source and designed to be secure and scalable — all in the hope that it will serve as the backbone for online services in the future.

The team have developed a “proof-of-believability” [consensus](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/consensus) [algorithm](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/algorithm) to ensure [transactions](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/transaction-tx) on the network are secure and efficient.

One of the biggest challenges that IOST aims to resolve centers on how big companies may not be able to embrace blockchains in a customer-facing environment unless they are scalable. The Internet of Services Token is put forward as a way of tackling this problem.

 

To understand IOST, the best way to do it is by comparing it to its nearest competitors: [Ethereum](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum) is the most popular smart contract platform for developers. It can also be compared to [EOS](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/eos) and [TRON](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tron), which are highly scalable smart contract platforms with high usage.

 

The largest difference between IOST and its competitors is how it claims it can process up to 100,000 transactions per second compared with Ethereum’s 20, Tron’s 2,000 and EOS’s 4,000. 

In order to reach these transaction speeds, the IOST team has created a novel blockchain architecture, which introduces and combines several innovations including a Distributed Randomness Protocol, Efficient Distributed Sharding, TransEpoch, Atomix, Proof-of-Believability and Micro State Blocks.


#### Related Pages:

[Learn more about cryptocurrencies](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria).

[Stay up-to-date with the latest crypto headlines](https://coinmarketcap.com/headlines/news/).

[Subscribe to the CoinMarketCap newsletter](https://coinmarketcap.com/newsletter/).


#### How Many IOST (IOST) Coins Are There in Circulation?

IOST has a total token supply of 21 billion. An ICO was held in January 2018 where 40% were sold, raising about $31.3 million worth of ETH at the time. 

As for the remainder, 35% has been retained by the IOST Foundation, 12.5% was allocated to building the community, 10% went to the IOST team and 2.5% was dedicated to investors and advisors.


### How Is the IOST Network Secured?

In order to compete with hundreds of niche blockchains, IOST relies heavily on its proof-of-believability protocol (PoB) and efficient distributed sharding (EDS) to improve the scalability and security of its blockchain. 

IOST is built for enterprise use, so it claims to be able to handle heavy loads produced by big tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. Partnerships appear to be key for the project’s success.


### Where Can You Buy IOST (IOST)?

IOST can be bought at many exchanges such as Bittrex, CoinEx, Livecoin, Binance and Bitrue. 

[Read more here about how to buy Bitcoin.](https://coinmarketcap.com/how-to-buy-bitcoin/)


Binance

IOST

Ledger

Trezor

Trust Wallet

Math Wallet

TokenPocket

IOST成立于2017年，得到红杉资本、经纬、甄选等全球一线美元投资机构的支持。

IOST是为在线服务商开发的企业级区块链应用平台。

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.

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

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

Holo is a peer-to-peer distributed platform for hosting decentralized applications built using Holochain, a framework for developing DApps that does not require the use of blockchain technology. The goal of Holo is to serve as a bridge between the broader internet and apps built using Holochain, offering an ecosystem and marketplace in which DApps are easily accessible, as they are hosted on the internet by Holo network participants.

The Holo network will be facilitated using a token called HoloFuel, which is actively being tested and will act as an accounting system to pay hosts for their services. In 2018, the project minted an ERC-20 token, HOT — also known as HoloToken — as an "IOU" that will be redeemable for HoloFuel upon launch.

Holo is still in development and is expected to launch for open alpha and beta testing by 2021.

Holo

Siacoin (SC) is the native utility token of Sia, a blockchain-based distributed, decentralized cloud storage platform. Sia acts as a secure, trustless marketplace for cloud storage in which users can lease access to their unused storage space. Agreements and transactions are enforced with smart contracts, and Siacoin is the medium of exchange for paying for storage on the network. The main goal of the project is to become the "backbone storage layer of the internet."

Sia was originally announced in May 2014 before being revised and re-announced a year later in May 2015. It officially launched in June 2015.

Siacoin

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

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

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

Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform is home to many decentralized applications, and as of October 2020, it also allows for staking and yield farming.

Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet.

The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts.

Zilliqa

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

Starting as an open-source project in 2017, IoTeX has built a decentralized platform whose aim is to empower the open economics for machines — an open ecosystem where people and machines can interact with guaranteed trust, free will, and under properly designed economic incentives.

With a global team of over 40 research scientists and engineers, IoTeX has built their EVM-compatible blockchain from scratch using the innovative Roll-DPoS consensus and launched in 2019 April, which has been running by 100+ delegates worldwide and has processed more than 10 million transactions already. On top of the IoTeX blockchain, the team has built the essential blocks of infrastructures to connect with Ethereum, BSC, and Heco blockchains such as ioPay wallet (https://iopay.me/) and ioTube bridge (https://iotube.org/), which serve ten thousands of users. IoTeX helps EVM-based DApps scale without concerning expensive gas fees!

Besides, middleware such as Decentralized Identity, Confidential Computing, and Secure Hardware has been built on top of the IoTeX blockchain. This has enabled the creation of self-sovereign devices such as Ucam, and real-world data oracles like Pebble. Ucam (https://ucam.iotex.io/) has been deployed to over 3000 households (http://iott.network/). Meanwhile, Pebble has been launched to more than 300 developers initially, and enables innovative Dapps to connect the physical world with the crypto world, such as real-world NFTs, weather derivatives and machine learning-as-mining.

IoTeX

Ravencoin is a digital peer-to-peer (P2P) network that aims to implement a use case specific blockchain, designed to efficiently handle one specific function: the transfer of assets from one party to another. Built on a fork of the Bitcoin code, Ravencoin was announced on Oct. 31, 2017 and released binaries for mining on Jan. 3, 2018 with what is called a fair launch: no premine, ICO or masternodes. It was named in reference to a TV show Game of Thrones.

Ravencoin

Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The network aims to innovate the way decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows creating blocks in seconds.

According to the project’s website, Harmony is expected to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 2021.

Harmony

Celer is a blockchain interoperability
protocol enabling a one-click user experience accessing tokens, DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, governance, and more across multiple chains. Developers can build inter-chain-native Dapps using the Celer Inter-chain Messaging Framework to gain access to efficient liquidity utilization, coherent application logic, and shared states. Users of Celer-enabled dApps will enjoy the benefits of a diverse multi-blockchain ecosystem with the simplicity of a single-transaction UX, all from a single chain.

Celer Network

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

Reef is a Reliable Extensible Efficient Fast Layer-1 Blockchain for DeFi, NFT & Gaming. Built using Substrate Framework, it provides high scalability, enabling almost instant low-cost transactions, and supports Solidity and EVM, allowing developers to seamlessly migrate their DApps from Ethereum without any change in the codebase.

Reef Chain is the most advanced EVM-compatible blockchain. It's self-upgradable and has on-chain governance. Its infrastructure also allows for EVM extensions which allows for native token bridge, scheduled calls (ie. recurring payments), and smart contract in-place code upgrades. In the near future, it will support additional VMs which will allow developers to write code in multiple programming languages. The network runs on a Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) consensus mechanism, which offers scalability and low fees.

REEF is the native token that is used for:

Fees for processing transactions and storing data.

Running validator nodes by staking REEF tokens.

Nominating which validator nodes should be part of the network.

Reef is backed by multiple leading funds and venture capitalists including NGC, QCP, Bitcoin.com, Kenetic Capital, LD Capital, TRG Capital, Krypital Group, Genesis Block, Woodstock Fund and others.

Reef Chain development tools include:

Remix and EVM integrated development environments for uploading and deploying smart contracts.

Reefscan blockchain explorer to assist with deploying validators, bonding and nominating validators, debugging contracts, and understanding network performance.

Reef command line tools that allow developers deploy applications from local environments.

Reef wallet for accessing and interacting with the blockchain

Reef

WINkLink

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

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

Lisk and the LSK token are widely accessible on the most popular exchanges on the market.
The top exchanges to buy the Lisk token are:

Binance

Kraken

Upbit

Huobi

Zonda

Bitflyer

It is important to consider the fact that investing in crypto carries risk, just like any other investment.

If you’re struggling to find a LSK trading pair with your local currency, check out this guide on how to convert fiat into Bitcoin - giving you a gateway to buying LSK.