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.
IOST is building an ultra-high TPS blockchain infrastructure to meet the security and scalability needs of a decentralized economy. Led by a team of proven founders and backed by $40 million from world-class investors, including Sequoia and Matrix, IOST aims to be the underlying architecture for the future of online services. The powerful consensus algorithm “Proof-of-Believability” enables next-gen transaction throughput speeds while ensuring nodes stay compliant, using factors including IOST token balance, reputation-based token balance, network contributions and user behaviors. A faster grade Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism, microstate blocks, Atomic Commit protocol and a dynamic sharding protocol (Efficient Distributed Sharding) all ensure transactions are safeguarded, consistent and lightning fast while reducing storage, configuration costs and processing power for validators. Anyone is able to participate in every layer of our system, from using services on our blockchain to running a node and validating transactions. Our rules and code are open for all to see and no preconditions will limit participation. IOST aims to fundamentally disrupt previous methods of business by creating a self-operated, trustless network that maximizes network value for all parties. The project places great emphasis on decentralized and secure ways of storing information. It also provides for Dapps and smart contracts, and anyone who is familiar with blockchain technology knows just how integral these two concepts have become. Adhering to the quintessential egalitarian values of blockchain technology, IOST is creating a censorship-resistant and trustless network that is open to all, using blockchain technology to cut out middlemen and maximize network value for all parties. Terrace Wang, Kimmy Zhong, and Ray Xiao, who are extremely brilliant, have co-founded the project. In addition to these original three, the project has 12 employees and 4 advisors. It is also worth noting that Ryan Bubiski, a co-founder of CodeAcademy and a winner of Times Most Influential People award plays a major role in the advisory board of the project. The team has partnered with about sixteen blockchain and cryptocurrency oriented companies such as Sequoia, Nirvana Capital, and DFund. The project, therefore, has strong investors.'