TrueUSD provides its token holders regular attestations of escrowed balances, full collateral, and also the legal protection against misappropriating underlying USD. The team believes that TrueUSD will be able to come up with the stable trading instrument for the traders of cryptocurrency that has been long-awaited. This will allow the businesses and consumers to use the digital currency as a medium of an exchange. The goal of the TrueUSD team was to build a coin that is stable and which can be used and trusted by them too. TrustToken is a platform that creates the tokens backed by assets that can easily be purchased and sold all around the world. The first asset token of TrustToken is TrueUSD, which is a stable coin and can be redeemed 1-for-1 for US dollars. TrustToken have partnered with registered fiduciaries and banks for holding the funds securely backed by TrueUSD tokens. To increase the amount of security, fiduciaries, and banks directly handle all the funds. Escrowed funds do not give access to the TrueUSD system. TrueUSD works with various trust companies which already manage around billions of dollars. Just pass an AML/KYC check, send USD to a trust company with an agreement of escrow. When the funds get verified, their API tells the smart contract of TUSD to mint an equal amount of TUSD to your public Ethereum address. The USD funds are regularly verified in scheduled attestations by a very much trusted auditing firm. USD funds are kept safely in a third party account, that is escrow accounts, wherein TrustToken does not hold any direct access to the funds and cannot abscond with them even if they wish to. The token burning and minting system makes sure that every TUSD token is backed by 1 USD. A mandatory check of AML/KYC makes sure that TUSD keeps shady people away from the entire project. TUSD makes faster transactions in low transaction fees. Even though TUSD is a unique offering, it is most likely overshadowed by its bigger competitors - Tether. While TUSD arguably offers more security and features, it may be losing the marketing battle. This is not to say that the situation will remain the same. With more crypto investors joining the market every day, the good times for TUSD may be on their way.
Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform similar in concept to Dropbox and other centralized storage provider where instead of renting storage space from a centralized entity, clients rent storage space from other peers. The only difference is Sia uses blockchain to facilitate transactions Nodes provide storage to clients using the Sia blockchain as contracts. Before storing the data, the data is encrypted into many pieces and uploaded to different hosts. Siacoin is created by David Vorick and Luke Champine of Nebulous Inc. As the traditional storage platforms are higher in cost, more expensive and data is not well protected. Siacoin promises to offer secured storage transactions with smart contracts which is more affordable and reliable. Moreover, it is completely open source which means many individuals have contributed to Siacoin’s software hence there will be an active community building innovative applications on top if the Sia API. In 2018, Siacoin aims to introduce file sharing and be the go-to cloud storage platform for companies. Their goal is divided into 3 time frames which are short-term, medium-term and long-term development. Short-term development focuses on file sharing between Sia users. This allows Sia users to share files in the platform without having to take it off the cloud while increasing network utilization. Medium-term development’s goal is to enhance partnerships. This means reaching out to large companies like Netflix and Dropbox to hopefully be able to be their storage and distribution framework. Lastly, long-term development aims to expand its horizon to share files with non-Sia users and support mobile wallets.