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.
OriginTrail provides a helpful protocol solution to the problem of maintaining trust among all players involved in bringing a product to market by making the “chain” in “supply chain” more literal. Using blockchain technology, OriginTrail can append immutable data to products as they take each step along the supply route. Thus, each participant not only verifies that their conditions are being met but that at every previous stage, the right conditions were also met by everyone else. This is achieved by making an application layer that allows data to be collected in the real world, and then stored on the blockchain. OriginTrail started out by testing their tracking with organic beef products in 2014, and they are still mostly involved in the tracking of food products in general. It wasn’t until 2016 that they introduced a blockchain into their system. In January 2018, they raised US$22.5 million in their ICO. Since their ICO they’ve successfully launched their testnet, implemented privacy features, and achieved compliance with the GS1 standards that are integral to their business model. Their roadmap is robust and full of details, citing certifications with international bodies, alliances with companies, and entering new markets. Their mainnet is scheduled for launch in Q3 2018, and thereafter they appear to be on track to having all their services fully operational by 2020. OriginTrail is not the first or only company to recognize that supply chains could benefit a great deal from blockchain technology. Ambrosus is also going for the same market, though they seem to be focused on food and pharmaceuticals specifically. It should be noted that most supply chains have their own specific quirks, and so specialization might be be a good option. Another potential competitor of OriginTrail is Waltonchain, a company based in China that puts heavy emphasis on RFID chip scanning as part of their business model. In other words, where OriginTrail wants to leverage existing systems for their infrastructure, Waltonchain wants to try and establish new standards and methods. OriginTrail’s token is called TRAC, and it’s an ERC-20 token, making it storable on any ERC-20 compatible wallet. The total supply is capped at 500 million tokens. The value in TRACE tokens comes from their utility on the OriginTrail network. Tokens are spent to store, retrieve, and send data about supply chains. Since TRACE can be bought and sold in a speculative market, that creates the potential for the price to go up, which would be counter to the needs of people on the network looking for stable prices for setting and getting data. However, prices for data saving and retrieval will be determined by auction, which should counter increasing token value for those using OriginTrail as a service. The Internet of Things is a topic that gets a lot of press, and the general consensus is that it will be standard practice in the future for almost everything in the world to be tracked and traced for a wide variety of purposes. OriginTrail is one company that is demonstrating a concrete plan for exactly how that will be manifest. There really isn’t much to criticize in terms of the overall intention of the project. OriginTrail has identified a weak point in the very important world of supply chain management, that of reliable transfer of information all the way up and down the chain, and aims to provide a workable and clearly understood solution.