Released to the public in 2014, Reddcoin is a decentralized social cryptocurrency that allows anyone to instantly send & receive RDD (its native cryptocurrency) payments on social networks with no transaction fees. It’s essentially the blockchain version of Venmo, Facebook Money, or Snapchat's Snapcash, all of which allow you to easily transfer money to friends and family via their respective social media platforms. However, unlike these major social media networks that require you to use their native platform to send and receive money, Reddcoin allows you to seamlessly integrate its payment features on multiple platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Reddcoin is a social cryptocurrency that can be integrated with many different social media platforms for sending/receiving money with zero fees. It’s a peer-to-peer open-source cryptocurrency forked from Litecoin. It dedicates much of its efforts to facilitate the “tipping” of small amounts of RDD on social networks, done in a similar fashion to “liking” a post on FB. The PoSV algorithm is a new take on PoS which encourages both ownership (stake) and activity (velocity). Its tipping system has already been enabled on Twitter, Reddit, Twitch, and Justin.TV. Reddcoin was created on January 20, 2014, as a PoW cryptocurrency. On February 2, 2014, after raising $100,000 through their Initial Public Coin Offering (IPCO), Reddcoin was released to the public. On April 29, 2014, they announced that Reddcoin would transition from PoW to PoSV. In 2017, Reddcoin made an official announcement listing their team members, including developers John Nash and Leonard Simonse. In subsequent Tweets, they’ve publicly announced the additions of developers such as Bradley Ploof and James Tweeg. They’ve been active in updating the community via Twitter, but if you’d like to keep informed directly on the teams project progress, check out their GitHub or Trello (which includes the project roadmap).
Counterparty is a platform for user-created assets on Bitcoin. It’s a protocol, set of specifications, and an API. Taken together, it allows users to create and trade assets on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain. In this way, Counterparty is similar to platforms like Waves or Ethereum. Of course, the difference is Counterparty integrates directly with Bitcoin. Therefore, it comes will all the security and reliability (and issues) that are part of the Bitcoin blockchain. This is a fairly old project. In fact, it pre-dates Ethereum with its launch in 2014. It was the original asset creation mechanism. As you’re probably aware, Counterparty has faded from prominence over the years. This is largely due to the rise of the ERC-20 token standard on Ethereum. While we’ve become used to calling blockchain assets, tokens, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. An asset can represent anything that has value or is rare. As a result, Counterparty steers clear of the word “token” in their marketing and documentation. They’re much more interested in digital assets of all kinds, not just currencies, securities, and utility tokens. Digital assets can be a digital marker of a physical object, an easy way to manage shares in your company, or reputation karma for a website. These are all types of assets you could create on Counterparty (or Ethereum or Waves, for that matter). Counterparty creates the set of rules, requirements, integrations, etc that are necessary for assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s the infrastructure behind user-created assets in much the same way that the ERC-20 protocol sets up guidelines and standards for asset creation on Ethereum. One useful function of digital assets is as a marker of ownership or voting rights. Imagine a scenario where you issued a digital asset to each of your company’s board members in proportion to the amount of voting power held. Or if you gave your stockholders a digital asset as a marker of the amount of stock they owned. If you issued your stock asset, you could then use Counterparty’s distribution function to pay out dividends in BTC based on the amount of digital stock asset each person owned. Counterparty addresses many of the same issues as Ethereum or Waves, but on the Bitcoin blockchain. While that does come with some advantages, ultimately it is not as strong a platform for development as its competitors. It’s best suited for applications that need to interface with Bitcoin or assets that have a specific connection to the Bitcoin ecosystem.