Harmony’s open, decentralized network is enabled through the use of the native protocol token - Harmony ONE. The token incentivizes and rewards a variety of participants including developers, validators/stakers, investors, and community members who develop, secure and govern the network. In order to use the network, users pay a small transaction fee denominated in the native Harmony token. Harmony’s scalable, high-throughput protocol is powered by a native token which is used for various forms of payment and participation in the protocol (staking, transaction fees, voting & governance). Harmony uses blockchain to align incentives of different stakeholders, developers and businesses while allowing them to build open marketplaces of fungible and non-fungible tokens and assets. Furthermore, the upcoming application of zero-knowledge proofs will allow Harmony to become a data sharing platform that can overcome the conflicting problem plaguing many information and data markets: that individual market participants’ have mutual distrust to share data but strong desire to acquire data themselves. The Harmony token will function in the following aspects of the protocol: The token is used for staking, which is necessary to participate in the POS consensus & earn block rewards and transaction fees. The token is used to pay for transaction fees, gas and storage fees. The token is used in voting for on-chain governance of the protocol.
Paxos Standard (PAX) was created by Paxos, a financial technology company on a mission to modernize finance by mobilizing assets at the speed of the internet. Paxos was the first virtual currency company to receive a charter from the New York State Department of Financial Services. As a chartered limited purpose trust company with fiduciary powers under the Banking Law, Paxos is able to offer regulated services in the crypto-asset and virtual commodities space. The Paxos team comes from a wide variety of backgrounds with a diverse array of experiences ranging from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. It’s led by CEO and co-founder Charles Cascarilla, who has spent his career as a customer, analyst, investor and now creator of financial technology. Paxos describes itself as “the first regulated Trust company with blockchain expertise”, and it is using that expertise to create a modern settlement solution that can eliminate risk and simplify settlements. What many people may not know about Paxos is that it was actually founded in 2012 as Paxos Trust Company, and that for most of its life it ran the cryptocurrency exchange itBit, which is still operates. The creation of Paxos was a pivot from an exchange platform to a company focused on creating a modern settlement platform using blockchain technology. Paxos has become the most widely adopted cryptocurrency in the fastest time frame, with support from over 20 exchanges and OTC desks in the first five weeks of its existence. It’s been picked up and listed by six of the top ten cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, OKEx, Gate.io, ZB, KuCoin and DigiFinex. These exchanges are offering PAX as an alternative to the controversial Tether. Unlike the controversy surrounding the people who control Tether, there is no such obscurity when it comes to the people behind Paxos. The CEO and co-founder is Charles Cascarilla. He has over 15 years in financial services and has co-founded Cedar Hill asset management back in 2005. He has also worked and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs prior to that. The Paxos Standard (PAX) is the first digital asset to be issued by a financial institution and to be fully secured by the U.S. dollar. While other similar stablecoins have existed, there has been no proof of full U.S. dollar reserves, nor have these earlier assets been issued by a financial institution. The Paxos team has been fairly clear in declaring the different base that PAX is working from.