'Kin is money for the digital world. It is an open micro-transaction platform used by millions of users across more than 50 consumer applications and services, making Kin the most used cryptocurrency by mainstream consumers. Kin can be sent anywhere in the world, instantly, and for free. Kin enters circulation via the Kin Rewards Engine, or ''KRE'', which rewards developers for getting their consumers to use Kin. Today people are using Kin to purchase a variety of digital goods and services and to support content creators. This offers developers a new business model that rewards the adoption of engaging experiences and free exchange of value between users, not harvesting their data and attention. That means users and developers are finally re-aligned, around a new economy in which those who generate value online are the focus, not big-data monopolies.'
Ardor is the latest in the growing field of contenders for blockchain as a service (BaaS) providers. Ardor provides the blockchain infrastructure for businesses and institutions to leverage the strengths of blockchain technology without having to invest in developing custom blockchain solutions. Instead, Ardor offers a main chain that handles blockchain security and decentralization plus customizable child chains that come ready to use, right out of the box, for various business applications. The developers of Ardor are the same company behind the open source Ethereum’s ERC20 protocol to build on top of the Ethereum blockchain. They pay fees in Ether. To test Ardor’s capabilities and serve as an example of an operating child chain, the Ardor developers have created Ignis. Ignis will implement all of the customizable features that come from the Nxt code base. Essentially, Ignis will be a proof of concept and could be the first of many more child chains on the Ardor platform. The Ignis ICO recently raised $15 million in funding for development. In the future, Ardor child chains could be used to create equity trading platforms, digital file transfer services, private enterprise blockchain applications, and many more use cases. Ardor’s strengths are quick time to setup and wide customizability, making it a great option for companies looking to leverage blockchain without the resources to dedicate to custom development. Ardor has many architectural advantages. One of them and perhaps the most influential one is that it has been created using Java; one of the most widespread programming languages in the world today. This is definitely a step in the right direction seeing as it becomes ten times easier for a commercial application to succeed if the development language is one which most programmers can relate to.