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.
Shift is cryptocurrency that was launched in August 2015 based on Ethereum by a group of cryptocurrency enthusiast. Shift Storage Cluster - The default state of the IPFS infrastructure is represented as a globally shared network. This can lead to problems when it comes to verifying data integrity, availability, and custom implementation details such as earning token rewards for running a storage node. For this reason, Shift runs a private swarm. The storage nodes use a custom swarm key to ensure that they can only talk to other nodes using the same key. This also prevents Shift nodes being used to host and deliver content that was added outside of the Shift network which should improve reliability and performance. In order to store data permanently, IPFS implements a concept called pinning. Pinning content means that the content will be available permanently (or until it is unpinned). By default the pinning only applies to a single peer that it is pinned to, but that means if that machine goes offline, the content can be lost. The way around this is by using an IPFS cluster: a subnet (or private net) running the IPFS daemon, containing only Shift peers. The Shift cluster runs as a wrapper around the IPFS daemon. It allows the end user to connect a group of IPFS nodes together so that content can be stored and replicated within the group. The cluster elects a leader to be in charge of keeping track of which content is available in which locations. Shift is meant to disrupt the web hosting industry. The company has created Phantom which is a decentralized app to host websites. It does so through the Shift IPFS rather than the normal way a website is hosted. By using this ‘killer dApp’, the company is of the opinion that a business gets a chance of succeeding in the current competitive world. Because Shift is an open-source platform, developers of dApps are free to use the company’s script. This is made even easier by the fact that Shift Company has used Javascript which is popular language among dApp developers. According to the company, every dApp created using the Shift script can access the IPFS cluster to store data. This will be made possible by the use of a P2P hypermedia distribution protocol, an interplanetary file system which the company created. Even though the Shift has been around since 2015, the team only released the whitepaper on March the 5th 2018. The whitepaper is a bit technical but well detailed. Remember that the crypto is built with dApps developers in mind. It might not be a very good investment opportunity for a person who doesn’t understand dApps and Javascript. But at the end of the day, it is a volatile crypto which is one of the most important features to look for as a trader.