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.
VeriCoin (VRC) is a Proof of Stake-Time cryptocurrency. It was previously a Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency with Proof of Work used to mine coins in the early stage. VeriCoin began work on PoST after the MintPal VRC hack and the subsequent roll back. More information on Proof of Stake-Time can be obtained by reading the whitepaper here. There is no Pre-mine or IPO for VeriCoin. The minimum stake time is at least 8 hours. The one highlight feature of VeriCoin is VeriFund. VeriFund is the answer to ensure stability and growth of VeriCoin. It is used to counter the inflationary effect of the proof of stake. When the supply increases, VeriFund will purchase liquid supply of VeriCoin to ensure growth and stability of the coin's value. More info about VeriFund can be found at http://vericoin.info/verifund.html Another key feature of VeriCoin is VeriSMS. VeriSMS is an SMS wallet system that gives your phone capability to access the VeriCoin network. Some of the available commands include 'Balance', 'setpassword', and 'SEND'. More information about VeriSMS can be found at http://vericoin.info/text.html