Auroracoin is a decentralised, peer-to-peer, and secure cryptocurrency released as an alternative to the Icelandic Króna to bypass governmental restrictions associated with the national fiat currency. It was launched with the aim of becoming the ‘official’ cryptocurrency of Iceland. AUR was a pioneer in the area of country-specific cryptocurrencies. AUR was launched on the 25th of January, 2014, by an anonymous developer who went by the pseudonym of Baldur Friggjar Óðinsson. It was originally based on Litecoin, using the Scrypt algorithm with a Proof of Work mechanism, but was later updated to use a multi-algorithm architecture in 2016, forked from DigiByte. Auroracoin uses the PoW consensus mechanism, which utilises device hashing power to solve a complex mathematical problem in order to authenticate a transaction proposed to be stored in the blockchain. The difficulty of solving the problem ensures that authenticating forged transactions is very difficult unless the attacker owns an impractically large chunk of the network’s total hashing power. AUR is one of the only cryptocurrencies to use a combination of five different hashing algorithms, namely Grøstl, Qubit, scrypt, SHA-256, and Skein. While initially very popular, Auroracoin has seen little to no activity for a while, with poor marketing, and frequent dev team changes. Reasons for little growth have been various, from slow adoption in Iceland, to developers leaving and joining the project midway. However, it is expected to not go lower than the recent low, and might see a rise as AUR plans to launch a more aggressive marketing campaign in Iceland to promote the coin among the masses. Unlike most other altcoins, Auroracoin has made extensive changes to the original codebase. It has introduced security measures such as Automatic checkpointing, and protecting against known flaws present in the BTC blockchain, such as 51% block replacement attacks.
Bluzelle is a decentralized, scalable database service that aims to provide an effective data storage solution for the newly emerging blockchain ecosystem. It provides a solution to the scaling problems that developers of decentralized applications (dApps) face while using centralized infrastructure and traditional cloud-based databases. Bluzelle uses reliable ”swarm” technology, in which it stores tiny bits of data in groups of nodes or “swarms” which are distributed across the globe. Since this makes it independent of single data centres, Bluzelle’s scaling ability is limitless. Bluzelle adjusts the number of nodes and their location dynamically, reducing request time and improving overall performance. Bluzelle's swarm technology makes it extremely reliable as it redundantly stores pieces of data across the globe, eliminating a single point of failure. Since there are no data centres, Bluzelle’s resources are provided by network “producers”, who earn funds and pass on the savings to users. Bluzelle held an ICO from January to February 2018, selling 33% of its total supply of 500 million BLZ tokens and earning $19.5 million USD in the process. As of July 2018, Bluzelle has a circulating supply of about 183.02 million BLZ, with an individual price of $0.328 and consequently a market cap of around $60.25 million USD. The potential of an endlessly scalable storage service which is quick in its scaling, which is capable of storing any amount of data in a decentralized manner, is one that many investors may have an eye for. BLZ is still new and in its beginning stages, but its experienced team and excellent advisors work in its favour and are indicative of a bright future for the BLZ token. Investing in the token may not give high returns in a short period (since the cryptocurrency is so new and difficult to predict). So some more research is advised.