Ardor is the latest in the growing field of contenders for blockchain as a service (BaaS) providers. Ardor provides the blockchain infrastructure for businesses and institutions to leverage the strengths of blockchain technology without having to invest in developing custom blockchain solutions. Instead, Ardor offers a main chain that handles blockchain security and decentralization plus customizable child chains that come ready to use, right out of the box, for various business applications. The developers of Ardor are the same company behind the open source Ethereum’s ERC20 protocol to build on top of the Ethereum blockchain. They pay fees in Ether. To test Ardor’s capabilities and serve as an example of an operating child chain, the Ardor developers have created Ignis. Ignis will implement all of the customizable features that come from the Nxt code base. Essentially, Ignis will be a proof of concept and could be the first of many more child chains on the Ardor platform. The Ignis ICO recently raised $15 million in funding for development. In the future, Ardor child chains could be used to create equity trading platforms, digital file transfer services, private enterprise blockchain applications, and many more use cases. Ardor’s strengths are quick time to setup and wide customizability, making it a great option for companies looking to leverage blockchain without the resources to dedicate to custom development. Ardor has many architectural advantages. One of them and perhaps the most influential one is that it has been created using Java; one of the most widespread programming languages in the world today. This is definitely a step in the right direction seeing as it becomes ten times easier for a commercial application to succeed if the development language is one which most programmers can relate to.
Fetch.AI ('the Project') brings together machine learning ('ML'), artificial intelligence ('AI'), multi-agent systems and decentralized ledger technology to create an economic internet — an environment where digital representatives of the economy's moving parts (such as data, hardware, services, people and infrastructure) can get useful work done through effective introductions and predictions These agents can be thought of as digital entities: life-forms that are able to make decisions on their own behalf as well as on behalf of their stakeholders (individuals, private enterprises and governments for example). Fetch.AI's digital world is exposed to agents via its Open Economic Framework (OEF) and is underpinned by unique smart ledger technology to deliver high performance, low cost transactions. The ledger delivers useful proof-of-work that builds market intelligence and trust over time — growing the value of the network as it is used. Fetch.AI can be neatly interfaced to existing systems with minimal effort, allowing it to take advantage of the old economy whilst building the new: plug existing data in to Fetch.AI and watch markets spontaneously form from the bottom up.