Launched on Dec 25, 2016, Obyte is a distributed ledger based on directed acyclic graph (DAG). Thanks to absence of blocks and miners, access to Obyte ledger is decentralized, disintermediated, free (as in freedom), equal, and open. Obyte is the first DAG based cryptocurrency platform to support dApps. Due to absence of miners and blocks, there is no risk of front-running and other miner manipulation, and dApps are safer and easier to develop than blockchain based dApps. DApps are developed in Oscript - a new language that avoids many unsafe programming patterns common in earlier dApp platforms. Thanks to its safety, Obyte is especially well suited for DeFi apps, some are already available on the platform, such as Discount Stablecoins (https://ostable.org), some are being developed. Other features include: self-sovereign identity, private untraceable currencies, sending crypto to email using textcoins, and extremely small-footprint libraries suitable for small IoT devices.
Zen is a decentralized financial platform, built from scratch with the goal of providing people with a secure, scalable and useful infrastructure for creating their own financial instruments, and trading them directly without intermediaries.The Zen blockchain is secured by multiple proof-of-work algorithms, with token-holder voting on the balance between them. Multi-hash mining creates robust incentives for miners to deliver efficient, reliable security.Zen smart contracts are written and secured by a subset of the F* functional programming language, allowing users to: A) Prove the amount of resources a contract will consume and provide the necessary fees for running the contract to miners, removing the need for a “gas” based system.B) Prove their contracts meet a given specification, meaning they can prove the contract will definitely do (or not do) something given a specific set of parameters.The Zen platform comes with a built-in solution for oracles, which provide contracts with useful real world data.Finally, Zen is integrated with the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing contracts to observe and respond to native bitcoin transactions