Basic Attention Token (BAT) is an open-source, decentralized ad exchange platform built on Ethereum platform. Basic Attention Token held an initial coin offering on May 31, 2017 for its eponymous ERC-20 utility token, raising approximately $35M USD at the time in less than 30 seconds. The Basic Attention Token aims to fix digital advertising, which is broken, fraudulent and opaque. Basic Attention Token work by having advertisers pay BAT to website publishers for the attention of users. The BAT token is designed to correctly value and price user attention within the platform. The Basic Attention Token comprises various components, including attention measurement systems, analytics dashboards and machine learning algorithms. Integration of BAT into a given host application involves implementing BAT Ads, a system that matches and displays ads to users based on locally stored data. Ad targeting is performed wholly on-device, removing the need for third-party tracking. BAT is focused on the Brave browser. Brave is an open-source, privacy-centered browser designed to block trackers and malware. It utilizes blockchain technology to anonymously and securely track user attention, which translates into rewards for publishers. A user's attention, meaning his or her focused mental engagement on digital content like advertisements, is logged through Brave. The makers of BAT indicate that the user's private data and tracking information is stored only on the user's device, ensuring that it is anonymous and private. Created back in 2016, the Basic Attention Token has one of the biggest names behind it, that of Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and the legendary co-founder of Mozilla. Other noteworthy team members include Brian Bondy, lead developer and co-founder of Brave and Scott Locklin, senior engineer, and co-founder of Kerf Software.' Basic Attention Token is created by the team that built the Brave browser, an open-source, privacy-focused browser that blocks ads and trackers. The browser measures user attention and rewards publishers for users attention. Use the Brave browser to protect your privacy and support CoinGecko at the same time: https://brave.com/coi600
Nxt uses the blockchain to create an entire ecosystem of decentralized features, all of which require the Nxt currency. Instead of modifying the original Bitcoin source code, as many altcoins have done, Nxt developers wrote their own code in Java from scratch. While Nxt is a public blockchain, licenses for private blockchains based on its software are also available for purchase. The developers refer to Nxt as Blockchain 2.0, providing numerous applications beyond simply keeping a public ledger of transactions. Jelurida BV took over the originally anonymously developed Nxt and now own the IP rights. Kristina Kalcheva, co-founder and legal expert of Jelurida, focuses on how to “explore the different open source licensing models and their enforceability in practice.” Currently, the main developer is an anonymous Star Trek fan, going by the name Jean-Luc Picard. While there is still the active development of Nxt, the parent company Jelurida is also working on a Nxt 2.0, known as Ardor, designed specifically to deal with scalability. Ardor will use the same blockchain technology as Nxt, combined with the idea of ‘child chains.’ According to Travin Keith, Nxt foundation Web and Marketing manager, Ardor allows for a “manageable blockchain size, which solves the problem of scalability by separating transactions and data that do not affect security from those that do, and moving all of those that don’t affect security onto child chains.” The core infrastructure of Nxt is complex. This adds risks as compared to the more lean bitcoin, but makes it easier for external services to be built on top of the blockchain. A peer-peer exchange allowing decentralized trading of shares, crypto assets. Since the blockchain is an unalterable public ledger of transactions, the Asset Exchange provides a trading record for items other than Nxt. To do this, Nxt allows the designation or ''coloring'' of a particular coin, which builds a bridge from the virtual crypto-currency world to the physical world. The ''colored coin'' can represent property, stocks/bonds, commodities, or even concepts. Arbitrary Messages enable the sending of encrypted or plain text, which can also function to send and store up to 1000 bytes of data permanently, or 42 kilobytes of data for a limited amount of time. As a result, it can be used to build file-sharing services, decentralized applications, and higher-level Nxt services. Nxt had no mining phase, all initial units were released to 73 people through a one-time fundraiser via bitcoins, after the announcement of the NXT project in the bitcointalk-forums by BCnext. Combine this with a PoS approach, and you have a situation where the big guys run the table. At one point, the Nxt community had a very public spat with Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik. Garzik took issue with the Nxt marketing approach, its anonymous developers, and their responses to constructive criticism. Nxt responded to some of these claims, of course, but it remains one of the more controversial moments in its history. Another key problem the Nxt network ran into (like so many others) was blockchain bloat. Nodes get weighed down by the onerous task of having to store every transaction on the Nxt blockchain. This was one reason (among others) why Ardor/Ignis came into existence.'