SONM is a global operating system that is also a decentralized worldwide fog supercomputer. With SONM, users have access to general-purpose computing services of a cloud-like nature, including IaaS and PaaS, all of which have fog computing as the backend. Hosts around the world can contribute computing power as part of the SONM marketplace. The leaders of SONM are co-founder Sergey Ponomarev and CTO Igor Lebedev. SONM uses the agile development framework with a self-organizing cross-functional team. The Product Management Board defines the market needs to confirm that products meet business requirements. These include Node (Core), Smart Contracts, Wallet (Client), and Distributed Entity and Integration. Each of these teams has multiple developers, including a lead. Other teams include the Product & Analytics and QA teams.SONM always makes customer satisfaction its top priority. SONM studies the rental resource market to figure out exactly what customers need, delivering the advantages like scalability already mentioned. Additionally, customers will benefit from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform that supports all types of hardware resources, making it possible to find the exact resource you need. With SONM, consumers can instantly release and grow resources within the computing fog. In addition, security is always maintained regarding the supplier’s reputation. For added security, SONM is working toward hardware-enforced security, as well. Finally, consumers benefit from high market liquidity in purchasing resources and the ability to scale out their application. SONM’s ICO was held on June 15, 2017 and successfully raised $42,000,000. Paolo Tasca, a digital economist and blockchain expert, joined the SONM Advisory Board. Tasca is the Executive Director of the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London, as well as a blockchain consultant to the United Nations and EU Parliament, and the co-editor of “Banking Beyond Banks and Money: A Guide to Banking Services in the Twenty-First Century.”'
What is Monero? Monero (XMR) is the top privacy-centric cryptocurrency based on the CryptoNote protocol, a secure, private and untraceable currency system. Monero uses a special kind of cryptography to ensure that all of its transactions are remain 100% unlinkable and untraceable. In an increasingly transparent world, you can see why something like Monero can become so desirable. Origins of Monero In July of 2012, Bytecoin, the first real life implementation of CryptoNote, was launched. While Bytecoin had promise, people noticed that 80% of the coins were already published. So, it was decided that the bytecoin blockchain will be forked and the new coins in the new chain will be called Bitmonero, which is was then renamed Monero, meaning “coin” in Esperanto language. In this new blockchain, a block will be mined and added every two minutes. Why Monero? #1: Unlinkability - Your identity is completely private You have complete control over your transactions. You are responsible for your money. Because your identity is private no one will be able to see what you are spending your money on. When you send funds to someone’s public address, what happens is that you actually send the funds to a randomly created brand new one-time destination address. This means that the public record does not contain any mention that funds were received to the recipient’s public address. In Monero, your public address will never appear in the public record of transactions. Instead, a 'stealth address' is recorded in a way that only you, the recipient, can recognize the incoming funds. #2: Fungibility Fungibility is interchangeability between one asset and another asset of the same type. Suppose you borrowed $50 from your friend, you can even return the money in the form of 1 $50 bill or 5 $10 bill, It is still fine. This shows that the dollar has fungible properties. However, if you were to borrow someone’s car for the weekend and come back and give them some other car in return, then that person will probably punch on the face. Cars, in this example, are a nonfungible asset. What is CryptoNote? CryptoNote is the application layer protocol that fuels various decentralized currencies. While it is similar to the application layer which runs bitcoin in many aspects, there a lot of areas where the two differ from each other. CryptoNote features an entirely new code base and is not a fork of Bitcoin. More info about CryptoNote can be found at their website. CryptoNote uses Ring Signatures to conceal sender identities via mixing and it also has unlinkable transactions that is achieved using 1-time keys for each individual payments. Ring signatures enable ‘transaction mixing’ to occur. Transaction mixing means that when funds are sent, the sender randomly chooses several other users’ funds to also appear in the transaction as a possible source of the funds being sent. The cryptographical nature of the ring signature means that no one can tell which of the funds were really the source of the transaction – not even the person that gave the funds to the sender in the first place. A system of ‘key images’ associated with each ring signature ensures that although no one can tell the true source of the funds, it can be easily detected if the sender attempts to anonymously send their funds twice.