Synthetix is based in Australia, Synthetix launched a seed funding round in September, 2017 to develop the concept of a self-contained stablecoin payment network. They then kicked off their public ICO on February 28, 2018 and by the end of the ICO on March 7, 2018, they had met their goal of $30,000,000 USD. Synthetix was rebranded from Havven on November 30, 2018. Synthetix is led by a multidisciplinary team of 13 individuals. The project was founded by Kain Warwick, who previously co-founded blueshyft, one of the largest digital payment networks in Australia. The CTO is Justin Moses, who also serves as the Director of Engineering at MongoDB. Synthetix aims to address the problem that companies running centralized payment networks such as PayPal, credit card networks, or the SWIFT banking network have “absolute control over the value within the network, so any transaction conducted within them may be blocked or reversed at any time.” According to the Synthetix white paper, “Although this is ostensibly designed to protect users, it introduces systemic risk for all participants. If the network is compromised or its owners cease to behave benevolently, no party can trust that the value in their account is secure or accessible.” This is theorized to work because anyone who holds SNX tokens in escrow will be incentivized by Synthetix rewards derived from network transaction fees that will be distributed “in proportion with how well each issuer maintains the correct Synths supply.” When a Synthetix escrow user puts their SNX in escrow, USD-stabilized Synths will be automatically put up for sale on a decentralized exchange at a price of $1 USD. To release escrowed SNX, the user must buy back the Synths issued (also at a price of $1 USD) at which point the Synths will be burned. The Synthetix system uses an algorithm to adjust network fees, and therefore dividends, to SNX holders to incentivize (or disincentivize) the holding of SNX in escrow smart contracts, and thus, the creation of Synths. The theory is that this will cause users to mint and burn Synths in the appropriate amount based solely on supply and demand.
Holochain enables a distributed web with user autonomy built directly into its architecture and protocols. Data is about remembering our lived and shared experiences. Distributing the storage and processing of that data can change how we coordinate and interact. With digital integration under user control, Holochain liberates our online lives from corporate control over our choices and information. Holochain is an energy efficient post-blockchain ledger system and decentralized application platform that uses peer-to-peer networking for processing agent centric agreement and consensus systems between users. Holochain enables any device to have its own chain based ledger system. By using a holographic model for data storage and transfer developers can now create decentralized applications that can scale in multiple dimensions across a network ensuring they are truly distributed. This enables every device on a network to function independently, and only requires the synchronization of data when necessary, or agreed upon by users. This means every user is in control of their own data, and never has to risk their data being sold or exposed to 3rd parties like what just happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Holochain provides a framework for developers to build decentralized applications and aims to change the paradigm of data-centric blockchains to an agent-centric system. In Holochain’s fledgling system, no true global consensus is maintained. Instead, each agent in the public blockchain maintains a private fork, essentially, that is managed and stored in a limited way on the public blockchain with a distributed hash table. This means there are no scalability limits and dapps hosted on Holochain can do much more with less of nearly everything than traditional blockchains. This system however has some inherent weaknesses. Because the entire blockchain must be verified by each member of the network, scalability problems quickly develop. The larger the amount of data being handled, the more restrictive the limit of transactions per second that can occur on the blockchain at any one time.Holochain itself is open source and written in Go. Go was selected for its ease of use and similarity to C. Dapps written specifically for Holochain can be developed with JavaScript or Lisp, with support for front-end systems using CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. The developers added that Holochain is relatively flexible when it comes to handling new languages, so there is potential for growth on that front. Holochain bills itself as an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional blockchains. Because there is no need for each individual agent to store and validate the global blockchain, Holochain only consumes a fraction of the bandwidth of traditional chains. Holochain also does not have a mining component, so there’s no electricity or processing power spent on proof-of-work calculations. Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun are the co-founders of Holochain and creators of Holochain. They have been designing alternatives currencies since the 80’s and have been working on Holu since before the Bitcoin whitepaper was written. To protect the incentives of users, founders and developers, Holochain is owned by a non-profit foundation. he company’s advisory team also includes Ryan Bubinski, the co-founder of CodeAcademy. In June, Holochain announced a new strategic partnership with Promether, an Adaptive Symbiotic Platform (ASP) that implements all the networking, security and anonymization code applications need to protect their data.