Burst is an open-source decentralized platform that connects people, companies, and financial institutions. It allows you to move value – according to your own rules – within a scalable, green and customizable ledger. The special proof of capacity method means “you just have to plug in your drive, plot it, and leave your computer mining and earning you coins periodically. The more space you allocate to mining, the higher the reward.” The mining will not hurt your hard drive or cause a noticeable change in your electricity bill. If you ever decide to stop mining, you can delete the information that Burstcoin plots onto the hard drive and use the space for its originally intended purpose. It also offers several other decentralized features such as asset trading and crowdfunding. You can sell digital goods in a peer-to-peer marketplace or even auction off your items. With all of the transactions you engage in on the Burst network, there’s the option of attaching messages as well. An anonymous user introduced Burstcoin on bitcointalk.org in 2014. The coin was developed off of the Nxt platform and thus offers many of the same features. Following in the footsteps of Satoshi Nakamoto, the Burstcoin creator never revealed his identity. After the creator disappeared, the cryptocurrency community organized to continue developing the coin. A team called the Proof of Capacity Consortium is currently developing Burstcoin. Burstcoin is not just famous for its proof of capacity mining. It was the first blockchain to implement “Turing complete” smart contracts. The most famous application of the smart contracts was a completely decentralized lottery. Estimates towards the end of 2017 calculated for each terabyte of hard drive space you commit to the network, you would mine an average of 21 Burstcoins per week. At the time, there were over 150,000 terabytes of storage devoted to the network. Estimates towards the end of 2017 calculated for each terabyte of hard drive space you commit to the network, you would mine an average of 21 Burstcoins per week. At the time, there were over 150,000 terabytes of storage devoted to the network. The online Burstcoin wallet will also walk you through how to start plotting your hard drive so that you can begin mining right away. Burst is designed to be a miner-friendly coin to ensure decentralization of the blockchain. With Bitcoin receiving criticism over wasted energy, Burst offers a more environmentally friendly way to mine and run a decentralized blockchain. If you are looking to mine cryptocurrency but were intimidated by the loud and expensive machines, you might want to check out proof of capacity and consider mining Burstcoin. Or if you simply want a fairly distributed decentralized cryptocurrency with an active development team, then keep your eye on Burstcoin.
OriginTrail provides a helpful protocol solution to the problem of maintaining trust among all players involved in bringing a product to market by making the “chain” in “supply chain” more literal. Using blockchain technology, OriginTrail can append immutable data to products as they take each step along the supply route. Thus, each participant not only verifies that their conditions are being met but that at every previous stage, the right conditions were also met by everyone else. This is achieved by making an application layer that allows data to be collected in the real world, and then stored on the blockchain. OriginTrail started out by testing their tracking with organic beef products in 2014, and they are still mostly involved in the tracking of food products in general. It wasn’t until 2016 that they introduced a blockchain into their system. In January 2018, they raised US$22.5 million in their ICO. Since their ICO they’ve successfully launched their testnet, implemented privacy features, and achieved compliance with the GS1 standards that are integral to their business model. Their roadmap is robust and full of details, citing certifications with international bodies, alliances with companies, and entering new markets. Their mainnet is scheduled for launch in Q3 2018, and thereafter they appear to be on track to having all their services fully operational by 2020. OriginTrail is not the first or only company to recognize that supply chains could benefit a great deal from blockchain technology. Ambrosus is also going for the same market, though they seem to be focused on food and pharmaceuticals specifically. It should be noted that most supply chains have their own specific quirks, and so specialization might be be a good option. Another potential competitor of OriginTrail is Waltonchain, a company based in China that puts heavy emphasis on RFID chip scanning as part of their business model. In other words, where OriginTrail wants to leverage existing systems for their infrastructure, Waltonchain wants to try and establish new standards and methods. OriginTrail’s token is called TRAC, and it’s an ERC-20 token, making it storable on any ERC-20 compatible wallet. The total supply is capped at 500 million tokens. The value in TRACE tokens comes from their utility on the OriginTrail network. Tokens are spent to store, retrieve, and send data about supply chains. Since TRACE can be bought and sold in a speculative market, that creates the potential for the price to go up, which would be counter to the needs of people on the network looking for stable prices for setting and getting data. However, prices for data saving and retrieval will be determined by auction, which should counter increasing token value for those using OriginTrail as a service. The Internet of Things is a topic that gets a lot of press, and the general consensus is that it will be standard practice in the future for almost everything in the world to be tracked and traced for a wide variety of purposes. OriginTrail is one company that is demonstrating a concrete plan for exactly how that will be manifest. There really isn’t much to criticize in terms of the overall intention of the project. OriginTrail has identified a weak point in the very important world of supply chain management, that of reliable transfer of information all the way up and down the chain, and aims to provide a workable and clearly understood solution.