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.
Odyssey is primarily a decentralized sharing economy and peer-to-peer ecosystem, aiming to compete with and replace the likes of Airbnb and Uber. Odyssey dreams big - aiming to completely replace the concept of private ownership with an economy in which everything is shared and little is owned. It’s a long way from its goals, of course, but making peer-to-peer sharing more efficient with smart contracts is certainly a step in the right direction. The Odyssey website lists 9 advisors, with its primary two being Yi Shi, the CEO of Shanghai’s Avazu Holding, a leading global advertising platform, and Justin Sun, the backbone of the TRON cryptocurrency. The advisory team also includes Goh Jian Kai, founder and CEO of Southeast Asia’s cross-border payment solution system RateX. Odyssey has lofty goals, aiming to create a world where sharing is the norm and ownership or sharing monopoly doesn’t come in the way of people’s lives. A decentralized sharing platform where all service providers and customers are connected definitely sounds attractive. It’s a new currency, so it needs development to reach its goals. Of course, the fact that buying a large number of OCN tokens will not put a major dent in your pocket is a definite point in its favour.