NEO is a blockchain platform and cryptocurrency which enables the development of digital assets and smart contracts. The project was founded by Da Hongfei in 2014 in China. The project was initially under the name of AntShares, but later it was renamed to NEO.

Interesting facts:

NEO is often called “Chinese Ethereum”;
NEO is partnered with a company called OnChain which has extensive experience in integrating blockchain to businesses;
While Ethereum only supports their own programming language – Solidity; NEO supports most of the common programming languages around, like C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Java and Python;
NEO is essentially developing their platform to be quantum computer proof;
The fact that China acts quite independently from the West shows that Chinese companies like Alibaba, WeChat and NEO can become hugely successful even if there are already more successful and established counterparts from the West;
NEO is currently not a distributed blockchain, which means that, while it is decentralized, it is only operated on a few nodes, which are all controlled by NEO itself. But during 2018 they have promised to start distributing the network;
The cost of launching a smart contract on NEO is quite expensive – over $10,000USD.

Whitepaper: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/

Website: https://neo.org/

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo

Stellar [XLM]

Stellar is an open-source protocol for exchanging money founded by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim in early 2014. Stellar was initially based on Ripple systems, with the aim of redesigning the global economy for more inclusiveness. But citing the complexity of the system, Stellar later redesigned itself with a brand new system of its own.

Interesting facts:

The native asset of Stellar is called Lumens [XLM];
One of the major partners with Stellar is IBM;
While Ripple is developed by ex-bankers and financial professionals, Stellar is built by start-up veterans, like WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Y-Combinator President Sam Altman;
Jeb McCaleb, co-founder of Stellar, and also a co-founder of Ripple, was banished from Ripple before creating Stellar, but he still receives payments from the company;

Whitepaper: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf

Website: https://stellar.org

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar

Monero [XMR]

Monero is an open-source cryptocurrency created in April 2014 that focuses on privacy and decentralization. Monero aims to improve on existing cryptocurrency design by obscuring sender, recipient and amount of every transaction made as well as making the mining process more equal.

Interesting facts:

Monero’s focus on privacy has attracted many people who are interested in evading the law. Its egalitarian mining process is also used by hackers who embed mining code into websites and apps.
Monero uses Ring Signatures, Stealth Addresses and Ring Confidential Transactions to provide its users with maximum privacy.
Monero is often associated with Darknet and illegal activities because of its enhanced anonymity and privacy.

Whitepaper: https://getmonero.org/resources/research-lab/

Website: https://getmonero.org

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero

EOS [EOS]

EOS is a blockchain-based, decentralized operating system, designed to support commercial-scale decentralized applications by providing all of the necessary core functionality, enabling businesses to build blockchain applications in a way similar to web-based applications.

Interesting facts:

“EOS” is not an officially defined acronym, but the community has given it many different names like, “Ethereum On Steroids”, “End Of Silence”, “Endless Online Scaling”, and even “EOS Operating System”.
EOS distributes its tokens during a 341-day ICO, which has an entirely novel structure. The ICO is divided into 350 23-hour long windows, in every window 2,000,000EOS tokens will be distributed amongst investors at market price.
The first 5 days of EOS’s ICO were done “traditionally”, during which EOS raised around $185M in ETH.
Running an EOS node requires Linux/OS X operating system.

Whitepaper: https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/TechnicalWhitePaper.md

Website: https://eos.io

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/eos

Dash [DASH]

Dash is a peer-to-peer open-source cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, acting as digital cash that can be sent without the need for middlemen like the bank. Dash was created by Evan Duffield and launched on the 18th of January, 2014 as a fork of Litecoin. The coin started off under the name XCoin, later to be renamed to Darkcoin, and was finally rebranded to Dash (derivative of “Digital” and “Cash”).

Interesting facts:

Dash is classified as a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) because of its self-governance practice;
Within the first 48 hours from the creation of the coin around 1.9 million or approximately 10% of the total supply of the coins were mined. This mishap happened because of a bug in the difficulty parameters in the code when Litecoin was forked to create Dash. The problem was quickly fixed.
Dash uses two-tier The first tier consists of regular miners who confirm the transactions, and the second tier consists of MasterNodes that perform InstantSend, PrivateSend and governance functions.
Running a MasterNode costs an initial payment of 1000 DASH;
Dash’s partnership with Coinapult makes it possible to buy Dash with over 20 different fiat currencies.

Whitepaper: https://github.com/dashpay/dash/wiki/Whitepaper

Website: https://www.dash.org/

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dash

IOTA [MIOTA]

IOTA is a next generation public distributed ledger that, unlike other cryptocurrencies that utilize blockchain, utilizes a novel technological approach, called the “Tangle”. The Tangle is a new data structure based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).

Interesting facts:

IOTA was founded in 2014 as a German non-profit organization;
IoT devices have been regarded as the 4th industrial revolution, as it opens up never before seen opportunities, and IOTA is positioning itself as a critical factor to make IoT revolution happen;
In November 2017, Microsoft's Blockchain specialist, Omkar Naik was quoted saying that Microsoft will partner with IOTA, which was later proven to not be the case;
In December of 2017 the price of IOTA skyrocketed from around $1 to $5 in a matter of a week, as IOTA announced partnerships with Samsung and Fujitsu.

Whitepaper: https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf

Website: https://iota.org/

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/iota

NEM [XEM]

New Economy Movement (NEM) is an enterprise-grade solution to power the impending blockchain economy, focusing on creating a smart asset blockchain which could effectively work under heavy workloads. Originally NEM was intended to be a fork of NXT, but the community decided to go with a completely new code. The alpha release was launched on June 25, 2014 and the full version was launched on March 31, 2015.

Interesting facts:

The idea behind NEM was started by a Bitcointalk forum user called UtopianFuture, and the developers of NEM are keeping themselves pseudonymous.
The launch of the currency was not a smooth road. People who held the NEMstake asset or signed up to Bitcointalk forum to receive their coins did not receive them, instead the coins;
To run a booted and synchronized node a harvester must hold at least 10,000 NEM;
At the start of 2018, over $500 million in NEM was stolen from a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck.

Whitepapers and documents: https://docs.nem.io/en

Website: https://nem.io/

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nem

More info: http://cryptoandblockchaintalk.com/

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