5 Upcoming ICOs to look at

How did we pick the projects?

Basically, we researched and ranked a very long upcoming ICO lists against key criteria. This research was done to select the best platforms with innovative ideas, and that added value to the blockchain ecosystem. But most importantly, we only selected projects that had a high chance of succeeding in the real world once they go live.

We considered the credentials of the team’s founders, including their previous experience in building distributed applications. We wanted to make sure that the team was competent and dedicated enough to see the project through to completion. This due diligence extended to their board of advisers and their partnerships as well, as they are equal determinants to a project’s success.

We assessed how innovative the platform’s technology was, and if there was an existing solution already. If there were existing competitors, then we broke down how the chosen ICO’s solution was different – and in some cases better – than what’s already on the market. In other words, the platform needed to solve a big problem for its users while being underserved by the current or future solutions being developed.

Economic factors were also taken into account, including market size, the cost of the problem, and the market’s future outlook. This was to ensure that the platform is solving a big enough issue for users to justify raising funds. It also means that the project is likely to evolve into a long-term business for the founders that will be continually improved and maintained.

To wrap up our assessments, we considered how the founders intend to deliver their solutions, and the technology used. Most projects chosen for this list have at least a working prototype, if not an already established platform, and are on-track to deliver the milestones outlined in their roadmap.

Overall, we chose sustainable, innovative, and trustworthy platforms by credible teams and founders. These projects are likely to be here to stay, with a long-term view of contributing value to the blockchain ecosystem and doing real business with customers of their own.

ViewChain

ViewChain is a blockchain content distribution platform and is as a result of a strategic collaboration between Elastos and Zapya. Elastos is a decentralized internet and operating system, while Zapya is a peer-to-peer file sharing application. The partnership will leverage Zapya’s 576 million users for the speedy adoption of ViewChain’s platform, whilst leveraging Elastos’s distributed architecture.

In addition to blockchain technology, ViewChain also uses what’s called IPFS, or InterPlanetary File System. This protocol allows for the creation of a secure and decentralized marketplace for content distribution.

The end goal of ViewChain is to lower the barrier to entry for content creators to a wider marketplace. The platform eliminates the additional expense of a website or marketing, as everything is kept on the same platform.

To power its tokenized economy, ViewChain will mint 2500000000 VIEW ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The tokens will be used for the purchase and sale of content on its distributed network.

ViewChain has its offices located in Singapore and features Frank Wang, Shangpin Chang, and Steve Gu as its co-founders.

More details about ViewChain can be found at the link below:

https://viewchain.org/

RSK Labs (RootStock)

RSK Labs (RootStock) was established in 2015 and claims to be the first smart contract platform built as a sidechain to Bitcoin that rewards miners via merge-mining. The sidechain allows people to obtain fees from every transaction that takes place without the need for more expensive equipment. Other benefits of the platform are that it will enable the use of smart contracts, faster payments, and solve Bitcoin’s severe scaling issues.

RootStock attempts to resolve Bitcoin’s weaknesses: namely the lack of a smart contract functionality, and the problems with its proof-of-work algorithm. The computational power required to mine Bitcoins gets progressively higher as more coins come into circulation, which presents a dilemma for miners as well as the network. Also, high power costs have an adverse effect on the environment through pollution and wasted energy.

RSK Lab’s sidechain will help lower the costs and scaling problems associated with Bitcoin mining without competing with the network itself. RSK merely provides the technical tools needed for Bitcoin to reach its full potential through extended functions and easier scaling. RSK does not mint its own coins, nor does it pre-mine.

Rootstock also has some important security features in place to prevent double-spending and settlement finality, utilized through a 2way peg to Bitcoin. The peg will first employ a federation custody holding of Bitcoins and will switch to an automatic peg in the near future.

The platform will hold a private token sale for its RIF tokens in future. Finally, RSK is backed by a long list of blockchain industry leaders, including, Anthony Di Iorio, CEO of Decentral and Jaxx, and Bitcoin mining firms such as Bitfury and Bitmain.

https://www.rsk.co/

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Certik

With the rapid rise in the price of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin, there has also been a breathtaking amount of money lost to hackers and glitches. Certik is offering a solution to end those hacks and glitches by offering a formal verification framework designed to mathematically prove the security and correctness of both smart contracts and blockchain ecosystems.

The team behind the project have employed modular verification features to break down the proof task into granular ones so that they can be solved automatically using distributed technology. The proofed objects can then be encoded into Certik’s platform transactions, and then verified by other entities in the ecosystem.

The end result is that Certik was designed to work as a trusted certificate for smart contracts and to verify transactions. It also works with decentralized application libraries and blockchain implementations.

Certik is based on the continuous research of the Co-founders, Professors Zhong Shao, Chair of the Computer Science Department at Yale University, and Ronghui Gu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University.

The token sale information for Certik is yet to be published, but it’s expected to be 100,000,000 CTK tokens in total.

https://certik.org/

Algorand

Algorand is an innovative blockchain led by Silvio Micali, the recipient of the Turing Award for his innovative research in cryptography, the Goedel Prize in theoretical computer science and the RSA prize in cryptography. It offers a new approach of adding a new block to the ledger that allows instant transaction approval and immense scalability in a highly secured and trustless manner. Algorand is also backed by USV, a highly respected venture capital in the crypto ecosystem.

Algorand works to confirm transactions with a minute’s worth of latency while scaling to an immense number of users. The platform ensures that users never have different records of confirmed transactions, including in the event of an attack or attempted fork.

To reach consensus, Algorand uses a Byzantine Agreement (BA) protocol for each transaction. The issue of scaling the network is also addressed by BA with its Verifiable Random Functions. These two mechanisms work together so that users can see if they have been chosen to confirm the next set of transactions.

So far, the results of using Algorand have been impressive. It has achieved 125x of Bitcoin’s throughput and does not incur penalties as the network grows. This study was conducted on 500,000 EC2 virtual machines.

It’s claimed that Algorand can scale up to billions of users whilst being computationally efficient, as it doesn’t need to solve cryptographic puzzles to generate a new block on its ledger.

https://www.algorand.com/

Aergo

Aergo is a 4th generation blockchain that is supported and developed by Blocko.

Blocko, established in 2014, is a Korean startup that has built a blockchain platform called Coinstack for businesses. It enables firms to easily build enterprise applications using blockchain technology. Applications include secured log-in systems, digital contracts, and employee management systems.

Blocko has successfully established blockchain-based services in partnership with many companies and institutions in Korea, including the JB Bank, Korea Exchange, Hyundai Motor, Lotte Card, and others.

The platform was designed for both public and private blockchain networks. This gives businesses the flexibility they need to develop and deploy blockchain applications with superior speed, scalability, and performance.

At the technical layer, Aergo was designed as a plugin-based smart contract infrastructure. This allows clients to execute smart contracts written for the Ethereum Virtual Machine or AgroSQL.

Finally, the network will be supported by public and permissioned repositories and distributed directories to allow for easy collaboration between developers.

During the token sale, 500,000,000 tokens will be available for purchase, representing 30% of the platform’s total supply.

http://aergo.io/

This article was written by Yuval Gov from CryptoPotato.com