The Peercoin network activated in 2012 and is one of the first cryptocurrencies to ever be released. It is responsible for inventing proof-of-stake consensus, which makes it the first efficient and sustainable public blockchain technology. Peercoin was inspired by bitcoin, and it shares much of the source code and technical implementation of bitcoin. The Peercoin source code is distributed under the MIT/X11 software license. Unlike bitcoin, Namecoin, and Litecoin, Peercoin does not have a hard limit on the number of possible coins, but is designed to eventually attain an annual inflation rate of 1%. There is a deflationary aspect to Peercoin as the transaction fee of 0.01 PPC/kb paid to the network is destroyed. This feature, along with increased energy efficiency, aim to allow for greater long-term scalability. With the same encryption algorithm as Bitcoin (SHA-256), Peercoin is 100 times more energy efficient. Transactions in the Peercoin network are faster and cheaper. If there were not fierce competition on the cryptocurrency market, Peercoin would probably have long since become one of the most important cryptocurrencies. But in 2014 and 2015, however, there were many other interesting innovations in the cryptocurrency market that outperformed peercoin in a number of important properties. In contrast to DASH, Peercoin could not offer anonymity and the transactions in Dogecoin were even faster and cheaper than those of Peercoin. PoS technology ceased to be an advantage of peercoin and PoS continued to spread to other cryptocurrencies. The interest of the users drew it to the side of the minings on the CPUs and GPUs, then to the side of the Smart Contracts and PPC began to get a little forgotten. The Peercoin Team believes that adapting blockchains for wide scale use only through on-chain transactions will negatively affect the decentralization level and security of the network over time, therefore we choose to develop the Peercoin blockchain as a base layer settlement network with a sole focus on securing all forms of value recorded into the chain. This can be accomplished through Peercoin's philosophy of preserving and maximizing decentralization (which increases security) by developing the majority of features and technologies on top of the blockchain, rather than directly into the blockchain protocol itself. Thus the Peercoin Team focuses on developing second layer protocols and sub-networks that can interact with the base layer blockchain to adapt it for wide scale use and improve functionality such as tokens, smart contracts and high speed low cost transaction processing. In this way, Peercoin will act as a secure and censorship resistant base layer for the future blockchain connected world.
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.