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.
Electroneum has coined the phrase 'enablement currency' as it is going to enable a new 3 trillion dollar market (Price Waterhouse Coopers predicts this market to be as large as USD 3 trillion in their 2017 Global Fintech Report) by allowing over 350m smartphone users in the developing world to enter the digital market for the first time. With immediate benefits to the mobile operators in those regions, including meaningful transactional cost savings, there are operators who could take us to well over 100 million users and many more operators in negotiation. Our unique mobile miner puts a small amount of ETN into the hands of users every day, providing market liquidity and driving viral growth. With 2,341,445 million registered users, we have a faster viral growth than both Facebook and Twitter over the same time period. The Electroneum manage to raise 40 million dollars through ICO. Their Github release was November 1st. However, before the launch of the mobile app, they were hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The team had to shut down their servers and work over 26 hours straight to deal with the attack. Eventually, after some delay, ICO investors were distributed their coins and Electroneum continued working towards their goal of spreading ETN to the masses. Over 690 million ETN were transferring during the first 24 hours, requiring only 430 ETN in fees. Electroneum calls itself the first British based cryptocurrency. The team of 12, based in Kent, is led by Richard Ells, the co-founder of SiteWizard and Retortal.com. James Atkinson is the head of the Electroneum Development Team with over 10 years of experience in development. He’s leading the charge on the Electroneum App. Great respect is given to Dean Cole, the “member of the team with the least sleep… consuming giant quantities of caffeine.” He maintains and develops the servers required for mining and transacting in Electroneum. There are several gambling websites already accepting Bitcoin, but the problem is that it’s hard for most people to obtain it. The majority of online gambling takes place outside of America, where it’s especially hard to acquire Bitcoin. Most countries do not have access to Coinbase or Gemini and their local exchanges often have 7% fees or higher. Electroneum once again hopes to reduce friction and encouraging gambling sites to accept the currency. As mentioned previously, due to the ASIC resistant nature of the Electroneum mining algorithm, it’s still feasible to mine coins with just your CPU. You can complete a quick download and join a mining pool right away here. The average block reward is about 7000 ETN. Electroneum has also increased its palatability to the average consumer by capping the total number of coins at 21 billion, moving the decimal point two places to the right when compared to Bitcoin, which is capped at 21 million. Whereas a pizza in Bitcoin might cost 0.005 BTC, with Electroneum it would be a much more ‘real money’ figure. Richard Ells, founder of Electroneum and experienced tech entrepreneur, said: “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried buying any Bitcoin, but it’s really hard to do! I realized that what the world needs is a cryptocurrency that is genuinely easy to access and use. We’ve developed Electroneum with the ordinary mobile user in mind.”