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.
WaykiChain is a blockchain-based gambling platform that supports Turing devices. Other highlights include the fact that it makes use of a DPoS (Delegated Proof-of-Stake) consensus mechanism, that it generates a new block every ten seconds, and that it uses eleven voting nodes. According to the team behind the Hong Kong-based project, the network is also capable of handling 1000+ transactions per second. The platform’s main goal is to offer users a stable and secure gambling environment. WaykiChain uses a DPoS consensus mechanism with eleven accounting nodes. The annual rate of return is 5% for the first year, with a 1% increase with every year that goes by. Each time a block is created, an accounting node is randomly associated. The accounting node gains all of the transaction fees in its accounting block. Users can earn interest by locking WaykiChain coins. The interest is automatically determined each time the votes for the corresponding user account change. The terms of betting are triggered by the initiator through smart contract transactions. Users can initiate various betting contract transactions, all of which can be searched and identified in the block browsers. Even though it’s not a very popular project in the crypto space at the current moment, WaykiChain has the potential to expand its reach and spark the interest of people due to its decentralized gambling platform. The timing is also a very fortunate one, as the team seems to have everything in place before the start of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The project has a powerful dApp associated with its name. The WaykiChain Betting provides its users with real-time betting possibilities, in a transparent and open way. All the betting data is public, searchable, well organized, and cannot be changed or affected by any third-party interests. Any potential illegal actions can be, therefore, easily discovered.