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.
TenX is a payment platform that facilitates digital and physical modes of transaction for cryptocurrencies to any merchant, even if they don’t accept cryptocurrencies. Physical and digital modes of course, include bank accounts, wallets, debit cards, cash and much more. The primary agenda of the company is to make it easier and faster to use cryptocurrency and accelerate adoption for the industry. The TenX blockchain supports the PAY token, which is the fuel that runs the network and is the cryptocurrency using which transactions on the network are made. TenX came into existence in 2011 and was created by Toby Hoenisch. While at the university, he took a keen interest in cryptography though he believed that there was no success for cryptocurrencies.In 2012, Toby started trading Bitcoin when he got to know a member of bitcoin-community who was not able to open an account in bank and used TenX crypto currency instead. Toby Hoenisch and Michael Sperk started a one-bit start up in 2015 and introduced us to a debit card, through which payments with bitcoin could be done. Cryptocurrency adoption is a longstanding problem - with most cryptocurrencies remaining relegated to the realms of hype and not seeing real-world usage, not as much as the enthusiasts would like, at least. This is an important problem being solved by the TenX coin, which seeks to make it easy for the end user to use cryptocurrencies by removing the hurdles associated with keeping different wallets and using them separately. As with all other investments, it is wise to do your own research, but seeing that TenX seems to be solving unique problems, it may certainly be worth a look.