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.
MATRIX AI Network (MAN) is a global open-source, public, intelligent blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. MATRIX was created to make blockchains faster, more flexible, more secure, and more intelligent. Besides boasting an impressive 50.000 transactions per second, there are a couple of features which makes Matrix AI Network stand out from its competitors. Matrix adopts a Hybrid PoS + PoW consensus mechanism instead of the traditional Hash computations. The mechanism makes use of value-added computation through the use of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) computations. This computation set is to be used as the Proof-of-Work protocol. This allows the mining process to not only generate MAN tokens but to also be used to power real-world applications. Currently being used in collaboration with Beijing cancer Research hospital to improve speed and accuracy of a cancer diagnosis. While the project seems ambitious with the integration of a working AI in so many areas, the AI-part is already done. Matrix now only has to deliver a working blockchain solution. MATRIX will be launching several community activities after its testnet launch, including a Bug Bounty Program and a Dapp competition, as well as introducing the MATRIX Blockchain Browser and Online Wallet Prototype. Details and instructions will be shared over the coming weeks. Full manner is set to launch December 2018. The MATRIX mining machine is set to launch for sale end of the year 2018.