Digix makes it possible to buy gold in an efficient manner via cryptocurrency by providing investors with a tokenized version of gold so you don’t have to physically own or store it. Digix has two cryptocurrencies, Digix Gold (DGX) and DigixDAO (DGD), each of which serves a key role in the structure. The company proudly gets 99.99 percent of its gold from LBMA-approved refiners, with zero percent from fractional reserves, delivering confidence. With Digix, investors can take advantage of the stability and value of gold as well as the ease of cryptocurrency. Digix essentially tokenizes gold within Ethereum. It takes advantage of the Distributed Ledger’s immutability, auditability, and transparency, applying all these benefits to the precious physical asset of gold. Additionally, Digix has developed multiple technologies, such as the DGX tokens and introduced a new Proof of Asset protocol (POA). A key feature of Digix is its physical gold bullion. By investing, users buy bullion from the LBMA refineries, including the Assay Certificates from refiners like Nadir Bullion, PAMP Suisse, Valcambi, and others. For security, Digix includes third-party auditing from Bureau Veritas. Every quarter, it audits each gold asset within the safehouse vaults. This auditor has been in business since 1828 and is a world leader in certification, inspection, and testing services. With such a long track record, investors should be able to trust Bureau Veritas for their auditing services. Finally, Digix involves recast, which means customers can take their DGX delivery at the partnering custodial vault. Digix incorporated in Singapore in December 2014 and the DGD crowdsale took place on March 30th, 2016. It was the first ever crowdsale and major Distributed Autonomous Organization hosted on the Ethereum network. The sale intended to run for 30 days but met its 5.5 million dollars hard cap in just 12 hours, selling 1.7 million DGD tokens and reserving 300,000 for the Digix team. Pledges who sent over 15,000 USD worth of Ether received a special badge which will allow them to submit proposals to the DigixDAO. For better or worse, when you see the word DAO, you might think of hacking. In July 2017, over 4000 DGD were indeed stolen due to a vulnerability in the crowdsale smart contract. The bug was eventually fixed and the tokens reimbursed to the 35 affected addresses. In January 2018, the vast majority of the cryptocurrency market crashed. DGD was the only coin in the top 100 to rise in value in that time. Perhaps this is an early indicator that people will seek gold as a safe haven during times of market uncertainty. The ICO price of DGD was about 3 dollars, but in 2018, DGD reached an all-time high of over 400 dollars. When Digix finally delivers the DGX tokens and the rewards to DGD participants start rolling in, we might see an even higher demand for DigixDAO. When DGX goes live, it will be available for purchase with Ether on the Digix marketplace.
The Raiden Network is an off-chain scaling solution, enabling near-instant, low-fee and scalable payments. It’s complementary to the Ethereum blockchain and works with any ERC20 compatible token. The Raiden project is work in progress. Its goal is to research state channel technology, define protocols and develop reference implementations. The introduction of payment channels, specifically the type first described by the Lightning Whitepaper (which introduced the Lightning Network), seeks to fix the scalability and congestion issues that currently plague blockchain technology. While the Lightning Network operates on the Bitcoin blockchain, Raiden introduces a comparable solution for the Ethereum network. There are several key features of the Raiden Network Token. Expedited transfer confirmations (<1 second ). Current transfers on the Ethereum blockchain can take a few seconds to minutes. Private transfers that are not viewable on the global ledger. Solve scalability issues so that Ethereum can create mass adoption, allowing Ethereum to become the peer-to-peer, global payments infrastructure with electronic cash that it was initially designed for. Low fee transactions. Micropayment capability that works in union with any ERC-20 token. The Raiden Network project is being developed by Germany’s Brainbot Technologies AG, a software company devoted to blockchain protocol development. Founded in the year 2000 by Heiko Hees, it currently has between 11 to 50 employees in offices among Berlin, Mainz, and Copenhagen. Also the founder of PediaPress, Hees has been a core developer of Ethereum since March 2014. Being a core developer for Ethereum, it is evident on how the founder sees the flaws in the current its present protocol with ways to improve it. Interestingly enough, the website does not include RDN as one of their main blockchain developments, which could be attributed to the difficulty of highlighting a wide variety of projects they are currently undertaking on one page. However, there are no updates on the status of the Raiden Network Project on either Twitter nor Medium since December 1st, 2017. Raiden can be used for a wide variety of applications and purposes such as Micropayments For Content Distribution, Decentralized M2M Markets, API Access and Fast Decentralized Exchanges.'