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.
TrueUSD provides its token holders regular attestations of escrowed balances, full collateral, and also the legal protection against misappropriating underlying USD. The team believes that TrueUSD will be able to come up with the stable trading instrument for the traders of cryptocurrency that has been long-awaited. This will allow the businesses and consumers to use the digital currency as a medium of an exchange. The goal of the TrueUSD team was to build a coin that is stable and which can be used and trusted by them too. TrustToken is a platform that creates the tokens backed by assets that can easily be purchased and sold all around the world. The first asset token of TrustToken is TrueUSD, which is a stable coin and can be redeemed 1-for-1 for US dollars. TrustToken have partnered with registered fiduciaries and banks for holding the funds securely backed by TrueUSD tokens. To increase the amount of security, fiduciaries, and banks directly handle all the funds. Escrowed funds do not give access to the TrueUSD system. TrueUSD works with various trust companies which already manage around billions of dollars. Just pass an AML/KYC check, send USD to a trust company with an agreement of escrow. When the funds get verified, their API tells the smart contract of TUSD to mint an equal amount of TUSD to your public Ethereum address. The USD funds are regularly verified in scheduled attestations by a very much trusted auditing firm. USD funds are kept safely in a third party account, that is escrow accounts, wherein TrustToken does not hold any direct access to the funds and cannot abscond with them even if they wish to. The token burning and minting system makes sure that every TUSD token is backed by 1 USD. A mandatory check of AML/KYC makes sure that TUSD keeps shady people away from the entire project. TUSD makes faster transactions in low transaction fees. Even though TUSD is a unique offering, it is most likely overshadowed by its bigger competitors - Tether. While TUSD arguably offers more security and features, it may be losing the marketing battle. This is not to say that the situation will remain the same. With more crypto investors joining the market every day, the good times for TUSD may be on their way.