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.
Emercoin (EMC) is an open-source cryptocurrency which originated from Bitcoin, Peercoin and Namecoin. Other than being a cryptocurrency, it is also a platform for secure distributed blockchain business services. The EMC coin is used for accessing the blockchain-based services provided by Emercoin. Emercoin inherits the reliability and security of Bitcoin, while at the same time adding more features to its own blockchain by leveraging several innovative technologies. The Emercoin blockchain has been specially designed to provide businesses with the secure blockchain services and also allow them to create their own decentralized apps. Emercoin was founded in the year 2013 by Eugene Shumilov who also serves as the chief executive officer of Emercoin. The Emercoin team also consists chief technical officer Oleg Khovayko, a cryptocurrency & financial expert and Stan Polozov a Blockchain Implementation Specialist. Emercoin is also backed by a decentralized team of nine advisors from across the world. Emercoin has been in the market since 2014, and its past trend in the cryptocurrency market shows that it has followed a steady and stable growth. Emercoin has scored many partnerships. Two of its major partners are Coca Cola and Microsoft. Some other partners are RedHat, LLoyd’s, Bitfury, Aspanta, Deloitte, Authorizers, Foundico, Anteko, etc. Emercoin has also been featured on some prominent media platforms such as Forbes, Digital Trends, Engadget, The Business Times, Aljazeera, Gadgets Now and others. With the sheer variety of services that the Emercoin platform makes available to its users, it would not be surprising to see this currency be viewed as a lucrative investment option by many novice as well as experienced investors in the near future. With the currency’s value currently hitting new highs, it can be said that many people are now beginning to see the true power and potential of this emerging blockchain. However, as is the case with all crypto assets, past performance should not be used to predict the future value of EMC.