VeriBlock and its novel Proof-of-Proof (“PoP”) consensus protocol is the first and only technology in the world to allow any blockchain to inherit Bitcoin’s unprecedented thermodynamic Proof-of-Work security in an entirely Decentralized, Trustless, Transparent, and Permissionless (“DTTP”) manner. Since September of 2018, thousands of PoP miners in over 50 countries have successfully done more than 6,000,000 PoP transactions to Bitcoin, accounting for nearly half of all Bitcoin transactions at peak. Over the past four years, the VeriBlock project has attracted strategic investors, partners, and advisors including Bittrex CEO Bill Shihara, Bloq Co-Founder and Chairman Matthew Roszak, Bloq Co-Founder and Former Bitcoin Core Developer Jeff Garzik, Ethereum and Decentral Co-Founder Anthony Di Iorio, and Fenbushi Capital General Partner Bo Shen.
Ardor is the latest in the growing field of contenders for blockchain as a service (BaaS) providers. Ardor provides the blockchain infrastructure for businesses and institutions to leverage the strengths of blockchain technology without having to invest in developing custom blockchain solutions. Instead, Ardor offers a main chain that handles blockchain security and decentralization plus customizable child chains that come ready to use, right out of the box, for various business applications. The developers of Ardor are the same company behind the open source Ethereum’s ERC20 protocol to build on top of the Ethereum blockchain. They pay fees in Ether. To test Ardor’s capabilities and serve as an example of an operating child chain, the Ardor developers have created Ignis. Ignis will implement all of the customizable features that come from the Nxt code base. Essentially, Ignis will be a proof of concept and could be the first of many more child chains on the Ardor platform. The Ignis ICO recently raised $15 million in funding for development. In the future, Ardor child chains could be used to create equity trading platforms, digital file transfer services, private enterprise blockchain applications, and many more use cases. Ardor’s strengths are quick time to setup and wide customizability, making it a great option for companies looking to leverage blockchain without the resources to dedicate to custom development. Ardor has many architectural advantages. One of them and perhaps the most influential one is that it has been created using Java; one of the most widespread programming languages in the world today. This is definitely a step in the right direction seeing as it becomes ten times easier for a commercial application to succeed if the development language is one which most programmers can relate to.