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.
Tripio is the first travel marketplace based on the blockchain. It leverages the decentralized network provided by blockchain technologies to directly connect global customers and service providers. Moreover, it builds a service ecosystem based on transparent, tamper-resistant trust and incentives. The blockchain technologies Tripio leverages help reduce transactional and operational costs in travel industries, as well as improve customer experience in their respective products and services. On the Tripio platform, a service provider can publish her unique service terms and conditions using smart contracts. From the moment a purchase initiates to the end of the travel, every step along the way can be enforced and monitored by smart contracts. Should disputes arise, Tripio provides dispute resolution by means of community selfgovernment mechanisms. Tripio comprises of its dApps and a set of Tripio Protocols that forms the basis of the new ecosystem. The Tripio dApp and the Tripio Protocals are powered by the ERC-20 utility token called the TRIO token. Customers may use Tripio dApps directly. At the same, any third-party may build its own dApp by leveraging the open Ethereum protocols.