Vertcoin is a decentralized currency owned by its users, a P2P cryptocurrency in the same vein as Bitcoin and Litecoin. Like its two predecessors, Vertcoin exists solely as a currency, and it uses proof of work to reach distributed consensus. Unlike its two predecessors, however, Vertcoin is dedicated to keeping its mining functions decentralized, so contrary to most PoW coins, it’s ASIC resistant. Branding their project as “The people’s coin,” Vertcoin’s team believes that ASIC resistance invites a fairer, more democratized currency for both users and miners. Along these lines, Vertcoin sports its very own 1-click miner, a program meant to make mining more accessible to the general public. The motivation of Vertcoin was the fact that Scrypt-based ASIC mining chip that is used to mine Scrypt derivative coins such as Litecoin and Dogecoin is entering the mass market. That coupled with strong mining pool causes the strength of a cryptocoin to drop as it becomes easier for a specific party to pull a 51% attack and even monopolize the network. Scrypt-Adaptive-Nfactor was created to address that issue. Vertcoin is zero premined and as of the current design, only 84 million coins would ever be created. Vertcoin is said to be the next generation of coins due to its unique hashing algorithm. There may be more altcoins created based on this hashing algorithm in order to defend their network against ASIC miners. Like most all pre-2015 coins, Vertcoin took a deathblow after Mt. Gox was hacked, throwing the entire market into a crypto winter. As such, it was relatively inactive until the revival last spring/summer. Since then, it has had steady climb up the market cap ladder. A 2014 International Business Times article mentions Vertcoin as a potential Bitcoin successor. The article notes that it ''hopes to offer an alternative. By taking the foundations of Bitcoin and making some adjustments, Vertcoin punishes miners who use powerful machines and work together in 'pools' to monopolise the mining market.'' On July 1, 2014, Vertcoin released a wallet supporting Stealth Address transactions. On December 13, 2014 (block 208301), Vertcoin forked from Scrypt-Adaptive-N proof-of-work function to Lyra2RE as a proactive defense against emerging Scrypt-Adaptive-N capable ASICs. On August 10, 2015 (block 347000), Vertcoin forked from Lyra2RE to Lyra2REv2 because a botnet was controlling more than 50% of the hashing power of Vertcoin network. On May 7, 2017, Segregated Witness (SegWit) feature was activated in the main network. SegWit update includes the Lightning Network technology that was also demonstrated in action during the same day.'
SingularityNET is a decentralized marketplace for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The business value of AI is becoming clearer each day; however, there’s a significant gap between the people developing AI tools (researchers and academics) and the businesses that want to use them. Most organizations need a more customized solution than what a single AI project can offer, and research projects oftentimes have trouble accessing a large enough data set to build effective machine learning. SingularityNET closes these gaps. The long-term vision of the SingulairtyNET team is to build a network of complex AI Agent interactions primarily using resources from the OpenCog Foundation. To look at this further, let’s check out their in-house built humanoid robot, Sophia. Sophia uses a combination of AI Agents that range from natural language processing to physical motor controls to operate. You tell Sophia to summarize a video that’s embedded in a webpage. To do this, Sophia sends a request to Agent A. Through its AI, Agent A knows that Agent B specializes in analyzing and transcribing video while Agent C specializes in summarizing text. Agent A pays Agent B and Agent C to perform these tasks while Sophia pays Agent A to coordinate. All the while, each Agent has updated their own AI with the network information gained from these tasks and combines it with their previous experiences and knowledge. Therefore, the collective AI of the system grows at a faster rate than any individual Agent. SingularityNET wants to build a decentralized protocol for creators and users of AI to interact with each other, to not only help individual projects benefit by leveraging the strengths of other AI systems that might handle certain tasks better, but ultimately to develop SingularityNET into a functioning AI system itself, with nodes on the network making their own decisions about how to connect services and proactively provide solutions to academic and business problems. Tokenizing the network creates an AI marketplace where AI developers and sellers can not only link with others who might assist in building more robust AI solutions, but also allow AI services and products to be bought and sold, creating revenue and establishing price points where none have existed before. The SingularityNET team boasts 50+ AI developers and 10+ PhDs. Dr. Ben Goertzel leads the group as CEO and Chief Scientist. He’s also the Chairman of the OpenCog Foundation and the Artificial General Intelligence Society, as well as the Chief Scientist at Hanson Robotics, the partner company helping bring SingularityNET to life. Dr. David Hanson, founder of Hanson Robotics, serves as the Robotics Lead. Most famously, Hanson Robotics built Sophia, the most expressive humanoid robot to date. Sophia is also a proud member of the SingularityNET team. The team recently released the alpha version of the platform and is planning on launching a public beta sometime in the middle of 2018.