QASH (pronounced “cash”) is the native currency for the Quoine (pronounced “coin”) which is now rebranded to Liquid. Liquid is a global cryptocurrency firm looking to solve the liquidity problems that have surfaced with crypto investments. Liquid brings liquidity to the cryptocurrency space by providing a means for you to easily buy cryptocurrency with and cash-out to fiat. Currently, each crypto exchange has its own level of liquidity that differs between the trading pairs it offers. This creates individual silos that may have great liquidity on one exchange but not on another. The Liquid platform connects these silos into one combined pool to give you the greatest liquidity possible. The Liquid World Book compiles the orders and prices from exchanges around the world into one order book for you to use. This gives any trader, no matter their location, the ability to use the fiat currency of their choice when purchasing or selling crypto. It removes the liquidity silos of separate exchanges and gives more trading power to previously underserved markets. The Prime Brokerage half of the Quoine Liquid platform basically gives you access to the features outlined in the previous World Book section. With Prime Brokerage, you have direct market access to all exchanges in the World Book without having to create an account on each individual exchange. Furthermore, Quoine has been building partnerships with a network of banks over the last several years to ensure the quick transfer of your fiat funds. QASH is an ERC20 token you use to pay for services on the Liquid platform. Beyond that, QASH holders may also receive discounts, promotional products, and ICO investment opportunities with coins that Quoine helps to launch. The team also emphasizes in their whitepaper that other organizations may use it for their own purposes similar to how some financial institutions use the Ripple XRP token. Because Quoine enters a few different financial sectors, the company has quite a few competitors. As a credit facility, the company competes with SALT. On the exchange side, there are numerous other businesses like Binance specializing in alternative coins or Gemini and Coinbase focusing on fiat to crypto conversions. Mike Kayamori (CEO) and Mario Gomez Lozada (President and CTO) founded Quoine in 2014. Kayamori was previously a Senior Vice President at SoftBank Group and was the Chief Investment Officer of Gungho Asia. Lozada was the CTO of Merrill Lynch in Japan for 11 years before taking the Chief Information Officer role at Credit Suisse Japan. Quoine is the first cryptocurrency firm in the world to be officially licensed by the Japan Financial Services Agency (FSA). The Liquid platform is actually the result of combining two previous platforms, Quoinex and Qryptos. At one time, those two trading platforms were performing over $12 billion of transactions each year.
Bluzelle is a decentralized, scalable database service that aims to provide an effective data storage solution for the newly emerging blockchain ecosystem. It provides a solution to the scaling problems that developers of decentralized applications (dApps) face while using centralized infrastructure and traditional cloud-based databases. Bluzelle uses reliable ”swarm” technology, in which it stores tiny bits of data in groups of nodes or “swarms” which are distributed across the globe. Since this makes it independent of single data centres, Bluzelle’s scaling ability is limitless. Bluzelle adjusts the number of nodes and their location dynamically, reducing request time and improving overall performance. Bluzelle's swarm technology makes it extremely reliable as it redundantly stores pieces of data across the globe, eliminating a single point of failure. Since there are no data centres, Bluzelle’s resources are provided by network “producers”, who earn funds and pass on the savings to users. Bluzelle held an ICO from January to February 2018, selling 33% of its total supply of 500 million BLZ tokens and earning $19.5 million USD in the process. As of July 2018, Bluzelle has a circulating supply of about 183.02 million BLZ, with an individual price of $0.328 and consequently a market cap of around $60.25 million USD. The potential of an endlessly scalable storage service which is quick in its scaling, which is capable of storing any amount of data in a decentralized manner, is one that many investors may have an eye for. BLZ is still new and in its beginning stages, but its experienced team and excellent advisors work in its favour and are indicative of a bright future for the BLZ token. Investing in the token may not give high returns in a short period (since the cryptocurrency is so new and difficult to predict). So some more research is advised.