Dragonchain is one of the newly launched cryptocurrencies that is attracting crypto enthusiasts following its relaunch. The coin seems to be leading on the technology front irrespective of its market capitalisation trends, which is why it's also being anticipated to be Ethereum’s competitor. Dragonchain is a hybrid blockchain platform, where sensitive business logic and smart contract functionality is held by the owner. Its cryptocurrency is denoted by the symbol DGRN & has a total supply of 433,494,437 coins. Dragonchain uses serverless smart contracts from its pre-built library. This feature is unique to this cryptocurrency, as it can create smart contracts, with or without cryptocurrencies. Dragonchain was developed by Joe Roets who is its CEO and Chief Architect with a team of 4 core developers. The team is backed by a strong advisory board with Jeff Garzik on board who is established icon in the Bitcoin network. It was developed after exploration of 20 use cases and applications. It was released under the Apache 2 license in October 2016 to integrate real business applications onto a blockchain, protect business data and operations, currency agnosticism and multi-currency support. The launch of Dragonchain Foundation, a non profit corporation, in January’17 maintains the ownership and responsibility of Dragonchain’s open source code. Enterprises can easily design smart contracts in a variety of languages like Python, Node, C# & Java. The contracts can be specific to their business needs to include both private internal and public blockchain interactions. The Currency Smart Contracts help organizations to retrieve and transfer specified currency amounts between wallet addresses and check balances which can be run on schemas like ERC20, ERC223, etc. Dragonchain helps enterprises to leverage their models using blockchain by allowing development and integration before the economic model is known. Monetization can be applied after sufficient real data is available & system is functioning. DragonChain’s platform is establishing a niche in the crypto world with its layered security feature. The 5-layer security model adds great credibility to their overall goal of facilitating business integration into the blockchain. Additionally, DragonChain is seen as a strong rival to Ethereum because of the platform’s ability to scale; an issue that Ethereum has been notorious for. As of January 2018, the DragonChain team is raising funds and finishing development of the platform. Although the exact date is currently unannounced, the DRGN platform is expected to fully launch sometime this year.
Achain is a public blockchain platform that enables developers of all levels to issue tokens and create smart contracts, decentralized applications, and blockchain systems. Achain is committed to building a global blockchain network for information exchange and value transactions. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, Achain utilizes a modified version of DPoS — RDPoS (Result-delegated Proof of Stake) to establish node consensus. Shortly, DPoS suggests that all coin holders vote for the validator nodes that will produce the next blocks. On the project website, only info about CEO Tony Cui is listed. Cui has a few significant accomplishments, including winning the Future Star award from the Zhongguancun Alliance and being listed in the 30 under 30 on CYZONE, a famous venture capital magazine. On LinkedIn, 51 people are listed as employees at Achain. Most of the team is based in Beijing. Achain also has a few key industry partners. It has even co-organized a “Blockchain Technology Open Course” with Tsinghua University, which is widely recognized as one of the world’s top universities. The roadmap for Achain development is fairly detailed. However, most goals listed are development-oriented rather than marketing or design. Still, it’s important to note that focusing on making the protocol interoperable and building a technology that is more accessible to mainstream adoption could also be considered a marketing-oriented part of this project. There are three major phases with projected completion dates listed. These include Singularity (completed Q1), Galaxy (ongoing), and Cosmos (complete at the end of Q4). One thing to note is that dates for these phases are not consistent between the homepage and the whitepaper. This could be simply due to a scenario in which phase names remain the same while new goals and timeline dates within those phases continue to change. In January 2019, the project will update the website to reflect roadmap goals for the new year. Looking at the current landscape of blockchain projects, Achain certainly offers the possibility of much-needed technical innovations. The ability to easily create an Achain fork, as well as, the protocol’s unique RDPoS consensus algorithm make this a promising project. It will be interesting to see how Achain builds upon its accomplishments, and how the project team continues to develop a long-term strategy for improving the protocol’s technical capabilities and increasing participation in its ecosystem.