Counterparty is a platform for user-created assets on Bitcoin. It’s a protocol, set of specifications, and an API. Taken together, it allows users to create and trade assets on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain. In this way, Counterparty is similar to platforms like Waves or Ethereum. Of course, the difference is Counterparty integrates directly with Bitcoin. Therefore, it comes will all the security and reliability (and issues) that are part of the Bitcoin blockchain. This is a fairly old project. In fact, it pre-dates Ethereum with its launch in 2014. It was the original asset creation mechanism. As you’re probably aware, Counterparty has faded from prominence over the years. This is largely due to the rise of the ERC-20 token standard on Ethereum. While we’ve become used to calling blockchain assets, tokens, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. An asset can represent anything that has value or is rare. As a result, Counterparty steers clear of the word “token” in their marketing and documentation. They’re much more interested in digital assets of all kinds, not just currencies, securities, and utility tokens. Digital assets can be a digital marker of a physical object, an easy way to manage shares in your company, or reputation karma for a website. These are all types of assets you could create on Counterparty (or Ethereum or Waves, for that matter). Counterparty creates the set of rules, requirements, integrations, etc that are necessary for assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s the infrastructure behind user-created assets in much the same way that the ERC-20 protocol sets up guidelines and standards for asset creation on Ethereum. One useful function of digital assets is as a marker of ownership or voting rights. Imagine a scenario where you issued a digital asset to each of your company’s board members in proportion to the amount of voting power held. Or if you gave your stockholders a digital asset as a marker of the amount of stock they owned. If you issued your stock asset, you could then use Counterparty’s distribution function to pay out dividends in BTC based on the amount of digital stock asset each person owned. Counterparty addresses many of the same issues as Ethereum or Waves, but on the Bitcoin blockchain. While that does come with some advantages, ultimately it is not as strong a platform for development as its competitors. It’s best suited for applications that need to interface with Bitcoin or assets that have a specific connection to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Aion is a revolutionary multi-tier blockchain platform that has been created to solve the pressing issue of limited operability between existing blockchains while still remaining capable of handling its own applications. It supports custom blockchain architectures, and it provides cross-chain interoperability. The Aion project comes at a very appropriate period, in a time where there’s an ever-growing number of blockchains.Thus, interoperability is more important now that it ever has been. Interoperability will expand the horizons of multiple other blockchain platforms, not to mention those of enterprise-oriented companies. The project is led by Matthew Spoke, the CEO of Nuco and board member on the EEA. Other big names include Jin Tu, Nuco’s CTO, who has more than 15 years of experience in enterprise engineering and more than four years in the blockchain industry, and Peter Vessenes who has co-founded the Bitcoin Foundation. The token is the blockchain’s power-source. It’s used for securing the network, for creating new blockchains, as well as for monetizing inter-chain bridges. AION token is actually an ERC-20 token. In fact, the token is first offered as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, and only then it can be changed to the official AION network token. When that happens, the token can freely stream between two blockchains. The best thing about this is that investors are not required to change their Aion Ethereum token (ERC-20) for the Aion-1 token, as they will always be interchangeable. In order to buy AION, you will need to first purchase another cryptocurrency, preferably Bitcoin or Ethereum. Fortunately, AION is supported by some very popular crypto exchanges out there such as BitForex, Binance, Ethfinex, Liqui, and Bancor Network. There's a good chance that Aion, with its unique approach of solving interoperability issues, will become somewhat of a necessity for the cryptosphere in the following period.