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.
Ulord is a peer-to-peer value transfer public blockchain. Through building its blockchain underlying architecture and digital resource distribution protocols, it enables third-party developers to explore their own applications over open-source agreements to form a complete ecology of blockchain technology and applications. Based on various rules and protocols created by Ulord, it loads various types of digital resource application scenarios including text, pictures, music, video and software, providing a direct docking platform for information creators and consumers. Ulord Foundation, registered in Singapore, is the main operator of the Ulord project. It is determined to use the blockchain technology to create a new digital resource interaction platform. Ulord Foundation will standardize and manage the technology development, application docking, promotion and other related work of the Ulord Project. Ulord team brings together a large number of high-level R & D personnel led by more than 10 PhDs, with comprehensive blockchain technology application development capabilities. More than 50 excellent programmers and algorithm engineers in the technology development team have backgrounds in areas such as blockchain, cryptography, Internet information security, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, finance, and management. There are senior scientists in cryptography and blockchain, and specialized blockchain project investors. In addition, Ulord team also maintains close cooperation with research institutes such as Windsor University in Canada, National University of Defense Technology, Wuhan University, Beihang University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and South China University of Technology, etc.