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
Wanchain seeks to link the present to the future, through the exploration and implementation of blockchain technology. Wanchain aims to build a distributed “bank”. Just as traditional banks are the infrastructure of the current financial framework, Wanchain seeks to build a new, distributed infrastructure of digital assets to form an improved, modern framework - an ambitious goal indeed. Wanchain connects and exchanges value between different blockchain ledgers in a distributed manner. It uses the latest cryptographic theories to build a non-proprietary cross-chain protocol and a distributed ledger that records both cross-chain and intra-chain transactions. Any blockchain network, whether a public, private or consortium chain, can integrate with Wanchain to establish connections between different ledgers and perform low cost inter-ledger asset transfers. The Wanchain ledger supports not only smart contracts, but also token exchange privacy protection. With Wanchain, any institution or individual can set up their own virtual teller window in the “bank” and provide services such as loan origination, asset exchanges, credit payments and transaction settlements based on digital assets. Under the guarantee of “banks” based on the blockchain infrastructure, more people can participate in financial services based on digital assets. To describe it more accurately, Wanchain is a distributed super-financial market based on blockchain. Wanchain uses the Locked Account Generation Scheme to secure funds and keys when there are multiple parties involved. Based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme, it effectively breaks up a key into shares and distributes it to all included participants. The Storemen are responsible for maintaining and managing the appropriate key shares of the locked accounts for transactions. This method of key share distribution has a few benefits. Because Wanchain generates locked accounts through multi-party computations, there’s increased decentralization. And there’s more stability because you don’t need every key share to produce a signature for a locked account. If some of the Validators are offline, transactions can still be executed with a minimum number of shares. Finally, any transaction with a locked account is done via the original chain. This means that any chain can easily integrate and interact with Wanchain without the need for new transaction types or validators. The Wanchain Foundation is a non-profit organization primarily operating out of Singapore but also has a significant presence in Austin, TX. Wanchain was founded by Jack Lu, a respected player in the blockchain space. Before his current role, Lu co-founded Factom and started Wanglu Tech, a blockchain application development company. Wanglu Tech has been a primary contributor to the open-source Wanchain project. Dustin Byington serves as the Wanchain President. Byington is a blockchain veteran having founded Bitcoin College in 2014 as well as co-founding Tendermint, a software mechanism to securely and consistently replicate applications across machines. Byington also co-founded Satoshi Talent, a platform to connect blockchain entrepreneurs with developers. WAN tokens were initially distributed as ERC-20 tokens to ICO participants, but it’s now possible to exchange these for tokens on the Wanchain mainnet or buy them directly. It’s a common misconception that WAN is an ERC-20 coin. Wanchain is a pioneering and potentially disruptive project with its sights set on becoming a super financial market of the world. Although achieving its lofty goal(s) is going to require a lot more work, Wanchain is further along its roadmap than some projects. But there’s still a good bit of “in theory” going on here. As Wanchain is addressing the whole financial market, it has a number of competitors. Most notably Fusion, Pantos, Ark, and Qash; some may even consider big players the likes of Ripple, Stellar and Ethereum competitors. On the positive side, Wanchain has strong fundamentals, they’ve got a functional mainnet, the vitality of their use case is indisputable, the huge interest in their ICO showed a powerful vein of investor confidence, and the team has a track record of success.