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.
What is Tron? Tron's mission is to build a truly decentralized internet and aims to be the largest blockchain-based operating system in the world, known as the TRON protocol. The TRON protocol will offer high scalability, high availability, and high throughput computing to serve decentralized applications via smart contracts. Ethereum EVM-based smart contracts will be compatible and deployable on the TRON network as such Solidity developers do not have to rewrite their applications. Why Tron? Since TRON protocol does not rely on proof of work or mining, instead governed by nodes located around the world, it is decentralized while providing high throughput for transactions on the blockchain. This is suitable for dapps that require high speed transactions especially games. There are a number of tokens already issued on the TRON network and the decentralized exchanges TRX.market has launched. On July 24th 2018, TRON acquired BitTorrent, one of the largest P2P file sharing protocol. As a result of the acquisition, BitTorrent Token (BTT) was launched as the cryptocurrency to power the economics on the BitTorrent network. The Token will be used to inceltivize file sharing and storage within the network.