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.
Pundi X is the project that wants to make spending crypto as easy as a credit card. Creators of the NPXS token hope that it will one day be used on their Ethereum-based Point-of-Sale devices. This approach could give basic banking services to underdeveloped regions like Latin America and Indonesia. One of the most notorious pain points in crypto is the ability to actually make purchases. Pundi X cryptocurrency plans to change all that by distributing hundreds to thousands of point-of-sale smart devices to retailers so they can accept payment in the form of NPXS, the network’s proprietary crypto token. If it can distribute the devices for free and with lower transaction fees than current card and mobile payment solutions provide, it’s a grand-slam idea. Pundi X raised $35 million during its ICO from September 2017 through January 21, 2018. 35,000,000,000 NPXS (at the time known as PXS) were sold during the ICO presale and crowd sale. The team retained 15,750,000 and another 1,750,000,000 was distributed to early investors and the rest was held by Pundi X for further development and marketing. It also set aside 2 percent of sold tokens to fund bounty programs across social media and online platforms. The Pundi X team are a talented group of technologists and entrepreneurs, which seems to be exactly what this project will need for success. In general the management team is comprised of computer engineers turned serial entrepreneur. The glaring exception to this is CEO and founder Zac Cheah, who was formerly an HTML games developer, but perhaps this is why he surrounded himself with such a strong team. The President of Pundi X, Constantin Papadimitrou, has a long history of founding successful fintech companies, and scaling them, which makes him an ideal fit for a project that will need rapid growth and adoption. The CTO/COO Pitt Huang created and sold his first business by the age of 25 and went on to create and sell several more business, including one that had over 200 employees. The company is working on developing a card, which they are naming the XPASS card, which will work together with the mobile app and wallet, enabling payments and deposits by card (a familiar medium for most) that are pulled from the mobile wallet. In addition, users should be able to see the current market price of each cryptocurrency before paying for goods and services, allowing them to pay with the cryptocurrency that brings the best value at the time. This ability to pay for things easily with cryptocurrencies is what will finally give them real value in a widespread sense. Pundi X has taken on an impressive and ambitious task in tackling what could amount to everyday adoption of cryptocurrencies by the masses, if their vision is realized. The technology seems appropriate for what they’re attempting, and the delivery of the first 500 POS devices shows that there is substance behind their efforts.'