What Is Polymath (POLY)?
Polymath provides technology to create, issue, and manage security tokens on the blockchain. Polymath spearheaded the creation of a unified standard for security tokens on Ethereum, ERC 1400, and over 200 tokens have been deployed using Polymath’s Ethereum-based solution. Recognizing that existing blockchains were insufficient to meet regulatory requirements of capital markets, Polymath built Polymesh, an institutional-grade blockchain built specifically for regulated assets. Polymath streamlines antiquated processes and opens the door to new financial instruments by solving the inherent challenges with public infrastructure around identity, compliance, confidentiality, governance, and settlement. 

Who Founded Polymath?
Polymath was founded while searching for a solution to tokenize a private fund. During this process, it became clear that complex technical and legal challenges made it very difficult to launch securities on the blockchain. This led to a much larger vision: instead of launching just one tokenized microfund, why not make it easy for anyone to launch a security token? With this idea, Polymath was born. 
Polymath has team members and contributors worldwide and a growing list of over 50 global service providers. 

What makes Polymath unique? 
Security tokens represent a tremendous market opportunity, but there are significant barriers standing in the way of institutional adoption. Polymath addresses these barriers with Polymesh, an institutional-grade blockchain built for security tokens and the first specialized chain of this nature. The foundations of Polymesh are focused on providing through key design principles the most crucial elements that issuers and investors need, and that institutions and regulators require: identity, compliance, confidentiality, and governance. When put together, these four pillars also support more complex operations, such as settlement. 
When it comes to creating and managing digital securities, Polymesh’s specificity gives it, and the applications built on it, a distinct advantage over general-purpose blockchains. The purpose-built infrastructure addresses the gaps in standard blockchain architecture to align the functioning of the blockchain with the requirements of modern capital markets. 
In addition to engineering Polymesh, Polymath has also built a series of tools on the chain that offer non-technical users an intuitive means to access the chain’s functionality. By combining Polymesh’s deep functionality with user-friendly tools, Polymath stands to transform capital markets. 

How many POLY are there in circulation? 
After a successful Polymath platform launch, POLY was created to interact with the platform. POLY is the utility token that fuels the Polymath Token Studio on Ethereum and is used by issuers creating and managing security tokens on the platform. Almost 100,000 wallets hold POLY with 240,000,000 tokens having been distributed during launch. The max supply of POLY is 1 billion. 

Where Can I Buy POLY?
POLY is available for trading on a growing number of exchanges, with cryptocurrency, stablecoin, and fiat pairs currently available.
The largest markets are: Binance, Upbit, and Coinbase.


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REQ is listed on Coinbase, Binance, crypto.com, KuCoin and many other exchanges.

The REQ token powers the Request Network open-source protocol via a few mechanisms: anti-spam; governance; staking; discounts; independency.

The Request (REQ) utility token, launched in 2017, ensures the performance and stability of the Request Network. The Request Network itself is an Ethereum-based decentralized payment system where anyone can request a payment and receive money through secure means. It removes the requirement for third parties in order to provide a cheaper, more secure payment solution that works with all global currencies.

The original whitepaper is available here.

When a user creates a request for payment, they define to which address the payment needs to be allocated and what the amount is. The user can also define the terms and conditions of the payment, upgrading a simple request into an invoice. Once this is completed, the user can share their request to be paid by their counterparty.

Every step is documented and stored on the Request Network, allowing everyone involved to easily keep track of all the invoices and payments for accounting purposes.

Request is also integrated with legislation across the world to remain compliant with the trade laws of each individual country.

Request

Civic is a blockchain-based identity management solution that gives individuals and businesses the tools they need to control and protect personal identity information.

The platform is designed to change the way we think about identity verification by giving users more control over their personal data, while allowing them to access a wide range of services without needing to fork over excessive amounts of personal information.

Civic's identity verification solution uses distributed ledger technology to authorize identity usage in real time, and is used to sparingly share information with Civic partners after authorization by the user.

Unlike some other identity management services, Civic users store all their sensitive data on their mobile device. Users are able to authorize the sharing of specific personal data by providing a biometric signature through the Civic app.

The Civic ecosystem is enabled by a unique utility token known as the Civic token (CVC), which is used for the settlement of identity-related transactions between Civic participants — such as between a customer and service provider.

Users can earn CVC tokens for completing a variety of tasks, such as signing up for a service through the platform or introducing new users, while validators can earn CVCs for validating documents for service providers.

Civic was launched in 2018, following a sell-out initial coin offering (ICO) the year prior.

Civic

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

aelf

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

Powerledger (POWR) is a technology company that builds software for distributed and decentralised energy markets for a sustainable future. It has developed a blockchain-based platform that enables the tracking and trading of energy, flexibility services and environmental commodities. Its goal is to provide the platform for a fully modernised, market-driven grid that offers consumers a choice in their energy while driving the democratisation of power.
Headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, Powerledger operates in more than 10 countries. Powerledger operates on two blockchain layers; the POWR token is issued on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token, and the Powerledger blockchain - a native Solana based blockchain to process energy transactions on a more scalable network.

The POWR token is an ERC-20 token that acts as a licence required for businesses such as; utilities, renewable energy operators, microgrids, companies committed to 100% renewable energy and property developers to access Powerledger’s platform, and will be able to be used to pay for transactions on the Powerledger blockchain in future. In 2015, 30 countries had reached grid parity, meaning that the price of solar-generated energy was equal to or less than the cost of local retail electricity. Powerledger combines renewable energy and blockchain technology to offer energy solutions that are cheaper and more sustainable than traditional energy alternatives.

Powerledger

Ardor

Ren (REN) is an open protocol built to provide interoperability and liquidity between different blockchain platforms.

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

Formerly known as Republic Protocol, Ren launched RenVM, its virtual machine mainnet, in May 2020, having completed a $34 million initial coin offering (ICO) in 2018.

The protocol’s native token, REN, functions as a bond for those running nodes which power RenVM, known as Darknodes.

Ren aims to expand the interoperability, and hence accessibility, of decentralized finance (DeFi) by removing hurdles involved in liquidity between blockchains.

Status is categorized as a mobile and desktop operating system and decentralized browser that incorporates a messaging system. As such, Status allows you to interact with a network at any time, from anywhere. It was originally released in June in 2017.

It is a light client Ethereum node, and has the ability to give you access to all Ethereum decentralized applications (otherwise known as DApps) from an app that is installed on your mobile phone or tablet. This means that users can send encrypted messages as well as access decentralized applications, including a cryptocurrency wallet.

Status

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

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

Storj, pronounced as “storage,” is an open-source cloud storage platform. Basically, it uses a decentralized network of nodes to host user data. The platform also secures hosted data using advanced encryption.

In a white paper published in December,2014, Storj was first introduced to the world as a concept. It was to be a decentralized peer-to-peer encrypted cloud storage platform.

Two years later, an updated white paper was published. Here, a decentralized network  — connecting users who need cloud storage space with those who have hard drive space to sell — was described. The platform was launched in late 2018.

People with hard drive space and good internet connectivity can participate in the network. They become a unit in the network, called a node. Space providers are rewarded by Storj tokens.

Storj

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.

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

Orchid (OXT) is the native token of Orchid, a cryptocurrency-powered virtual private network (VPN).

Launched in December 2019, Orchid describes itself as the world’s first incentivized, peer-to-peer privacy network.

Its aim is to overcome internet freedom limitations by using cryptocurrency payments to allow anyone to purchase bandwidth from any participating provider. This is done using so-called probabilistic nanopayments, which occur using OXT, an ERC-20 standard token on Ethereum.

Regular payments to providers occur off-chain, allowing Orchid to avoid problems with congestion and gas fees on the Ethereum network.

The service is pay-per-use, meaning that users only have to contribute funds when they actually connect, instead of paying monthly or annual fees.

Orchid

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

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

SKALE, described as a modular blockchain network, is designed to bring scalability to Ethereum. SKALE is the only blockchain network capable of running an unlimited number of fast, on-demand, pooled-security Blockchains with zero gas fees to end users. These individual chains are known as SKALE chains and can be dapp-specific or shared.

The project’s website says it wants to enable people to build and run DApps in a “decentralized modular cloud built for real-world needs and configured for your requirements.” This emphasis on decentralization isn’t at the expense of security.

According to SKALE, those who build on this platform can run Solidity smart contracts “thousands of times faster at a fraction of the mainnet cost” — with games and content streaming services among the projects that already take advantage of its infrastructure.

SKALE

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.