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.
The 2016 economic report “On the Value of Virtual Currencies” commissioned by the Bank of Canada, found three contributing components dictating a cryptocurrency’s exchange rate: The actual use of virtual currency to execute real payments. The decision of forward-looking investors to buy virtual currency (thereby effectively regulating its supply). The elements that jointly drive future consumer adoption and merchant acceptance of virtual currency. XAC Attention Addresses Attention Addresses are linked to AMARK consumer data and have specific rules enforced by the XAC protocol. There are two key functions of attention addresses: XAC-LOCK XAC-Lock is a feature that encourages continued consumer engagement with AMARK. The XAC sent to Attention Addresses is initially locked and becomes available after a maturation period. The XAC attention awards paid to consumers continually matures into availability as new XAC is earned from ongoing attention marketing. This process encourages engagement with AMARK as attention wallets will rarely have a zero XAC balance, giving consumers a consistent flow of value to spend within the ecosystem. XAC-BURN XAC-Burn is enforced at the protocol level. All transfers to Attention Addresses require 5% of the XAC transferred to be burned. The XAC -Burn feature is designed to align interests between merchants and consumers in the AMARK ecosystem. Anytime merchants use the AMARK platform for marketing, they are supporting the value of the XAC currency as protocol rules enforces a 5% burn. As such, merchants are effectively scaling the supply of XAC to match the demand from the ecosystem. This supply-side scaling mechanism will offset new coins introduced through block rewards and pressure the price of XAC to an equilibrium reflective of demand from the ecosystem.