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.
MATRIX AI Network (MAN) is a global open-source, public, intelligent blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. MATRIX was created to make blockchains faster, more flexible, more secure, and more intelligent. Besides boasting an impressive 50.000 transactions per second, there are a couple of features which makes Matrix AI Network stand out from its competitors. Matrix adopts a Hybrid PoS + PoW consensus mechanism instead of the traditional Hash computations. The mechanism makes use of value-added computation through the use of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) computations. This computation set is to be used as the Proof-of-Work protocol. This allows the mining process to not only generate MAN tokens but to also be used to power real-world applications. Currently being used in collaboration with Beijing cancer Research hospital to improve speed and accuracy of a cancer diagnosis. While the project seems ambitious with the integration of a working AI in so many areas, the AI-part is already done. Matrix now only has to deliver a working blockchain solution. MATRIX will be launching several community activities after its testnet launch, including a Bug Bounty Program and a Dapp competition, as well as introducing the MATRIX Blockchain Browser and Online Wallet Prototype. Details and instructions will be shared over the coming weeks. Full manner is set to launch December 2018. The MATRIX mining machine is set to launch for sale end of the year 2018.