Zen is a decentralized financial platform, built from scratch with the goal of providing people with a secure, scalable and useful infrastructure for creating their own financial instruments, and trading them directly without intermediaries.The Zen blockchain is secured by multiple proof-of-work algorithms, with token-holder voting on the balance between them. Multi-hash mining creates robust incentives for miners to deliver efficient, reliable security.Zen smart contracts are written and secured by a subset of the F* functional programming language, allowing users to: A) Prove the amount of resources a contract will consume and provide the necessary fees for running the contract to miners, removing the need for a “gas” based system.B) Prove their contracts meet a given specification, meaning they can prove the contract will definitely do (or not do) something given a specific set of parameters.The Zen platform comes with a built-in solution for oracles, which provide contracts with useful real world data.Finally, Zen is integrated with the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing contracts to observe and respond to native bitcoin transactions
Akropolis is building a domain-specific financial protocol dedicated to the needs of the informal economy. It is designed to: - Enable anybody regardless of geography to quickly set up, operate and grow informal autonomous financial organisations (AFOs), e.g. digital co-ops, guilds, mutuals - Enable a previously impossible interoperable scalable network between them and external third parties, whereby value can be exchanged freely in a trust-minimised way (e.g. co-invest, lend/borrow, trade). - Reduce instances of fraud and misuse of funds