Gulden is a second-generation peer-to-peer cryptocurrency which was created to provide a secure, simple and fast method of performing financial transactions between private individuals, customers & service providers and also corporate entities. Like many recent cryptocurrencies, the primary design criteria were to improve the security and usability of the currency and its underlying transaction authorisation technology (when compared to the original cryptocurrency - Bitcoin). The purpose of these changes was to simplify use and increase its adoption as a convenient, cheap and safe form of payment. The original initiative for this currency came from Rijk Plasman with the first working implementation released on the 4th April 2014. Initially called the “Gulden coin”, this was subsequently abbreviated in October 2015 to “Gulden”. The name Gulden comes from the German and Dutch term for “gold coin” and is the Dutch name of the Dutch guilder, the pre-euro currency of the Netherlands. Gulden Coin is the currency that enables the user to pay safely, conveniently and quickly. Moreover, it is a lucrative investment opportunity at the moment, considering that since entering the market in 2016 the developers have increased to a market capital of 39,883,259 USD with about 800,000 USD. The model of making cryptocurrencies accessible to ordinary consumers in the future holds enormous potential in the fintech sector.
Stratis is a powerful and flexible Blockchain Development Platform designed for the needs of the real world financial services businesses and other organisations that want to develop, test and deploy apps on the blockchain. Stratis significantly simplifies the development process for creating Blockchain applications and accelerates the lifecycle for Blockchain development projects. Stratis private chain allows businesses to deploy their own customise blockchain without the costs of running their own blockchain network infrastructure. The vision of the Stratis platform is to become a one-stop shop for all blockchain things, mostly becoming a blockchain-as-a-service (BAAS) platform. Technology-wise, it is a clone of Bitcoin’s core code, with a few enhanced features and written in C# language instead of C++. The team is based in the United Kingdom but has a decentralized structure with members spreading across the world. Several people on their management team are well-versed in enterprise software development using .NET and C# – a positive sign considering those are the project’s two primary languages. Chris Trew, the founder and CEO, has over 10 years of experience in enterprise IT and was a volunteer developer for the Blitz project. Stratis is competing against other BaaS projects in an increasingly saturated but gigantic space. Lisk may be the largest direct competitor in offering sidechains for businesses. However, Lisk is written in Javascript (not C#) and has sidechains that are more publicly available. The decreased privacy may be a turnoff to corporations looking to keep their code proprietary. The company held an ICO in June 2016 and manage to raised 915 Bitcoin.