With the rapid development of the blockchain industry, various innovative projects emerge in an endless stream, presenting a trend of contention among a hundred schools of thought. On the one hand, we are proud of the inclusiveness of the entire industry, but it cannot be denied that these projects have gradually lost our way. We're always looking for things that take off from the sky and turn into dragons. The road is dangerous, but never stops looking.

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Kadena

What is impressive about Kadena is that it chose to use PoW at Layer 1 in an attempt to scale. This is unprecedented in the history of cryptocurrencies. Most public chains use PoS as Layer 1 expansion, or use Nervos' layered thinking, Layer 1 uses Pow to ensure security, and Layer 2 performs expansion.

In Kyle's trustless computing model, Kadena is listed as the most balanced project to solve the scalability triangle dilemma. That is to actively improve scalability while ensuring security and decentralization. Equilibrium refers to reaching an equilibrium state among the three indicators, rather than resolving the triangular dilemma.

Kadena's core technology is called ChainWeb. In terms of design philosophy, you can see the shadow of sharding technology and DAG, but it also has its own originality. Kadena's visual graph on the block browser is that several PoW public chains are running and entangled with each other into one.

The premium brought about by technological innovation in the cryptocurrency industry is unbelievably huge, regardless of whether this innovation can be realized in the end. But it is a pity that Kadena's publicity is not good enough, and the community is relatively weak. I even think that the technical concept proposed by this project is far ahead of the entire era. Being too advanced is often not understood by everyone, and will only be corrected by later generations. I personally think that the best time for Kadena to come out is when sharding, PoS, and layering have all proven to fail.

Although this technology is innovative, it also has many problems. First of all, PoW requires a lot of computing power and financial support. The early cold start of a PoW public chain is still difficult. Kadena claims to have hundreds of PoW public chains, which makes the project have high technical risks before the mainnet goes live. Secondly, the technical development of PoW in layer1 expansion is quite difficult and requires a lot of financial support.

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Harmony

Grassroots spirit is always the soul of a cryptocurrency project and is an important factor in promoting the project to its ultimate success. The Harmony project party just happens to own it. Their down-to-earth barbecue culture is an advantage that other Silicon Valley projects do not have. The live broadcast meal left a deep impression on investors. I hope that this culture can be carried forward in the future.

The overall fundamentals of the project are good. Most of the team comes from senior engineers such as Google, the code base development is very diligent, and the news updates are progressing frequently. Foreign communities are relatively active, but Chinese communities are not good and still need to be improved. Without the support of top capital, Harmony was listed on Binance. In addition to luck, it also shows the unique vision of those institutions that invested in Harmony.

At that time, Binance’s IEO was being questioned by word of mouth, and both Fet and Celer encountered Waterloo. If Binance does not create an IEO star project, then IEO may not be able to continue. Harmony has participated in the BinanceX developer meeting, and guessed that he had a good chat with the Binance team. In addition, Harmony has good fundamentals, so it was selected by Binance as an IEO project. Binance has also used PR resources very vigorously. The number of followers on Harmony’s Twitter has reached 70,000, far exceeding the two cross-chain star projects Cosmos and Polkadot. (but also consumes too much attention in the first place)

Harmony has made interesting innovations in the decentralization of PoS. Their PoS design scheme also served as a reference for later projects such as Solana. At the same time, they also interacted with a number of Silicon Valley star projects such as Near, Solana, and Coda.

After the failures of Zilliqa and Quarkchain, Harmony once attracted a lot of attention and was seen as the future of sharding projects. However, since Near Protocol has gradually entered the public's field of vision, everyone's attention to sharding has turned to Near. Near has received many top-level capital blessings and was born with a halo. No matter in terms of organization, team, technology, or community, it does not lose half a point to Harmony, which has caused great competition and threats to Harmony.

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Zcash

Those who want to understand the current situation of Zcash are recommended to read an article "Zcash's October Siege". Born with a halo, the price once reached 2 million US dollars. Once Zcash was very popular, but its development in the past three years has not been ideal.

Market positioning and specific application scenarios are still vague. Zcash's optional privacy transactions virtually reduce the desire of users on the dark web. After all, complete privacy and anonymity are the pursuit and necessary basis for this market. This may also be the reason why Zcash’s privacy technology utilization rate is still not high after the Zcash technology upgrade (the proportion of private transactions is less than one-fifth of the total transactions).

Community governance is extremely chaotic. Under the benefit of 20% miners tax, the company's finances still suffered a loss of US$3 million in the Q2 quarter of 2018. Ex-employees’ equity dispute lawsuits, wallet maintenance personnel threatening the community, trademark disputes between the foundation and the company, the rationality of the miner’s tax distribution ratio, etc. Faced with a series of difficult governance and funding issues, the community urgently needs to find new ways to maintain operations. But so far, the team has not found a suitable mechanism for members to reach consensus.

It was mediocre in the last bull market. There are many reasons. At the beginning, my expectations were too high. When I came out, all the members were full of milk, even more terrifying than Grin. The opening price was too high, and the high inflation led to the continuous selling pressure of miners. Zcash has the largest inflation among mainstream mining coins besides Grin.

Anonymity is the strongest of all privacy coins, but this is because it has several centralized validators. This is why Zcash is criticized by many people. Many people would rather use decentralized Monero than centralized Zcash.

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Grin and Beam

Grin is a fully decentralized community-driven project: no ICO, no pre-mining, no capital investment, and anonymous founders. Funding for project development is entirely dependent on community donations. A project that perfectly embodies the spirit of Satoshi Nakamoto after Bitcoin. The community atmosphere at home and abroad is good, and the discussion content is mainly related to technology and mining. In the case of relying on community donations, it still maintains relatively frequent development.

Of course, Mimblewimble also has disadvantages, and its anonymity is weaker than Zcash and Monero. Recently, a researcher from DragonFly Capital broke the news that Mimblewimble has a privacy loophole, which also illustrates this problem. The authenticity of its privacy loophole is still divided in the industry, and further research is yet to be done.

The design of Grin's extreme linear inflation model makes it produce 31.53 million GRINs every year. In the long run, the price of Grin will gradually be diluted over time, and the overall market value will become larger and larger. Grin may stabilize in the long run, and in the process of stabilizing, there will be many fluctuations and variables, such as the cost of miners, changes to the inflation model, and the possibility of becoming a world-class universal anonymous currency. It may not be profitable to intervene in the secondary market in the short term, but because the overall fundamentals of the project are excellent, there are still opportunities to intervene in the long run.

The advantage of Beam is that it has capital support and a clear roadmap, so the development progress will be faster than Grin. Beam's community is heavily attached to Grin. Although Beam's technology is not limited to Mimblewimble, it will be overwhelmed by Mimblewimble's eldest son Grin in terms of status.

The Beam team has a strong background in development and management, and is more reasonable in the positioning and distribution design of tokens. Secondly, when privacy coins are used from a business perspective, they need to be auditable, such as Zcash and Monero, and third-party auditing has always been a potential problem. However, Beam is a token that can be "selectively" audited. We believe that it can not only achieve a positive privacy value storage function, but also realize the usability of transactions in large-scale commerce.

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Solana

Solana is known as a time magician, using the original PoH (Proof of History) consensus, and seven innovative technologies. Although it has great technical features, it still cannot escape the essence of high-performance chain homogeneity.

They dislike sharding as too annoying and difficult, and feel that the PoH history proof mechanism is a better solution than sharding. Of course, sharding is not completely rejected. They often communicate with sharding projects such as Near Protocol.

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Coda

The state explosion problem of the blockchain is already very serious. State explosion, simply put, means that the full node needs to store more and more data, which exceeds its own load. At present, Bitcoin and Ethereum are suffering from state explosion problems all the time. And we must admit that we have neglected this issue for a long time.

And that's just until blockchain solves the scalability problem. What if future scalability issues are resolved. It is conceivable that the problem of state explosion will grow exponentially. If this problem cannot be solved well, the operation of the blockchain system will be seriously affected.

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Near Protocol

Regarding the evaluation of Near Protocol, directly follow the evaluation of a group of friends in the Satoshi Mamoto community:

Near's learning ability is really fast. At this time, the Ethereum community is still arguing about EIP-1559, and the two "hidden validator" concepts launched by Near Economics have already borrowed and adapted EIP-1559 , The strong learning ability I said is an absolute compliment, not the copy-and-paste learning of many domestic projects.

Many projects have a strong learning ability, because one thing is popular, they learn it, and Near is a good thing, so they learn it, and they learn it at a very early stage, and they still learn it thoughtfully and to improve. (But, maybe it is because it is not a cryptocurrency native team, so it can be so unburdened?). The Whiteboard Lesson they have been doing before is also a program that invites many outstanding developers to share and learn.

Near has always wanted to choose a Chinese name. There are a bunch of names called Neil Agreement, Ni Er Agreement, Nie Er Agreement and so on. Near's English is actually very good. I can think of many excellent copywriting, such as "ETH2.0 is Near" and "Future is Near". The meaning of Near (close) in it is actually a good pun. So for the follow-up marketing copy, perhaps the very rustic "Near Agreement" is the most suitable name for Near.

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Ftt

Ftx is a comprehensive derivatives exchange that has emerged recently, and what people talk about is its variety of gameplay. For example, the representative domestic public chain projects are packaged into the "Shenlong Index", as well as various derivatives instruments (CBBCs, perpetual contracts, etc.).

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TON

TON raised US$1.7 billion, and I heard that they had a benchmark for Messager when they raised money. When Facebook acquired Messager, it spent more than 12 billion U.S. dollars, and there were only more than 20 employees. Therefore, this valuation is reasonable to a certain extent, and it cannot be viewed from the perspective of the currency circle. It will go straight to No. 10 on the list after it goes on the market, but it still feels too expensive. Coupled with the fact that the profits of private equity investors are out, if there is a super bull market from time to time, there is a high probability that there will be a long period of price decline in the short term.

The latest news is that the launch of TON has been postponed to April next year, and most investors in the two rounds of financing have agreed to choose to postpone the launch instead of returning the funds. The SEC's continuous disputes and the news of the postponement of the launch have greatly diminished the confidence and expectations of potential investors.

The TON white paper shows great ambitions, covering almost all the things that the current public chain wants to do. Other public chains are more or less focused: sharding, PoS, layering, etc. This is a collision of ideas: focus on a single point VS large and comprehensive. Many projects that believed in the philosophy of "big and comprehensive" died prematurely. Fortunately, TON has strong funds, holding 1.7 billion US dollars, which is 2.5 times that of Tezos. The huge amount of funds allows TON to fight in the long run to accomplish the grand goal of its white paper.

Dovey, the founding partner of Primitive Ventures, expressed a point of view: Telegram's focus and priority are not on the currency business line at all. Fundraising is more like a financial bailout of the Telegram app itself. After consulting some information specifically, Telegram is indeed a powerful social communication software, but it has not been profitable, and it has been burning huge amounts of money to maintain its operation for many years. Coupled with the fact that Telegram chose to issue coins at the time of the 2017 bull market, Dovey's guess is not unreasonable.

Many social software chain reform projects have not achieved much success, whether it is Kin who was named and fined by the SEC, or Props hanging in the air, and the future Line and Klytan. The number of users of social software and the community of corresponding cryptocurrency projects seem to be two different things, and the network effect between them seems to be very difficult to migrate smoothly. As a communication software with 200 million daily active users worldwide, Telegram can successfully transfer its huge network effect to TON, and what is the conversion rate. And whether the existing users of Telegram really need TON, and whether the addition of tokens will cause friction in use. These are issues we need to consider.

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Arweave

Arweave has the title of small IPFS, and the project is backward compatible with IFPS, that is, developers on IPFS can transition to Arweave. At present, more than 100 ecological Dapps have been developed and used on Arweave, but the number of users is bleak.

The new data structure Blockweave and the consensus mechanism Proof of Access make the burden on all nodes to store files smaller. The concept of charging a one-time fee for permanent storage is the main concept, hoping to solve the impact of false information on the real world. Recently, it has received US$5 million in investment from A16Z, USV and Multcoin Capital.

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Blockstack

Blockstack has a grand vision, aiming to become the "new Internet" of blockchain browser portals and distributed applications, equipped with a complete set of open source development tools to allow users to create their own applications. At present, there are more than 200 DApp platforms on the platform, but there are very few users.

The team has a strong technical background, the support of top institutions, frequent code base updates, and strong performance capabilities. As the first project to issue tokens approved by the US sec, the risk in the policy is relatively small. Community operations are relatively weak. A total of US$86.75 million was raised in the three rounds. Private equity investors have a longer unlock period, and there may be greater selling pressure in the short term.

Different from other blockchains, there are not many game DApps on Blockstack, and more are decentralized versions of some traditional Internet services, such as decentralized versions of online documents, picture backup, file storage and sharing, etc. . This does allow us to see a possibility in the future Web 3.0 era, that is, to use a decentralized version of traditional Internet applications in a centralized experience.

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Celo

The reason why I am interested in this project is the blessing of both A16Z and Polychain. Now it seems that this reason is too superficial, mixed with excessive deification and blind belief in foreign capital institutions. But we cannot deny that projects with excellent capital support are inherently attractive.

In a closed-door meeting held by DragonFly Capital not long ago, the host asked Olaf which project he was most optimistic about in a Panel, and Olaf answered Celo. Polychain is very concerned about this project, and has also established an ecological fund for it. Polychain values ​​a project so much, which is why I want to delve into the Celo project.

The two main tracks of Celo are stable currency and mobile payment. But the two tracks are already very crowded. In the stablecoin track, various centralized USDX schemes occupied the minds of the market before, and then Ethereum financial infrastructure MakerDAO pursued it bravely. The mobile payment track, let alone Square, Paypal and other traditional rivals, and projects that focus on cryptocurrency payment business have encountered growth bottlenecks. Generally speaking, it is a highly competitive red ocean industry, and it is very difficult to stand out.

Celo's vision is to enable everyone in the third world, including those in the third world, to use mobile phones to transfer cryptocurrencies like sending text messages, and enjoy convenient peer-to-peer lending, insurance and other financial applications. I'm reminded of past projects with similar themes, such as Omisego which claims to be "Banked the unbanked". Now it is already a chicken feather. A common feature of this type of theme is that the ideal is too beautiful but the reality is too skinny.

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Orchid

The Orchid orchid agreement has been ridiculed as "one of the ten kings of the project", I think of the similar theme project Mysterium. We affectionately call it the Secret Chain. Because there were rewards for participating in the test network nodes at that time, it caused a big wave. Surprisingly, on the second day after Mysterium completed financing, the CEO generously announced that he had left the team. Although this project is a small footnote in the long history of encryption, it also vaguely reveals the problems caused by ICO.

The Orchid Agreement has always been rumored to run away, but this pot of Orchid really can't be memorized. In fact, Lanhua’s proxy voter disappeared, and people who didn’t know the truth mistakenly thought that the project party ran away. In fact, the Orchid Agreement is at best delayed indefinitely like Dfinity. Progress has also been delayed. The latest news is that its application will be launched in December, and OXT tokens will be generated when the network is launched.

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NuCypher

NuCypher is a low-key and pragmatic project. Although it is favored by top institutions in the primary market, there are few public reports. What is more impressive is the evaluation of it in the Bloomberg column. NuCypher is one of the four projects that the entire industry should focus on. The other three are: Cosmos, Polkadot, and Nervos. But I personally think that NuCypher is still one level behind the other three projects.

The fat protocol theory was all the rage in the last wave of bull market, and 0x Protocol, as the decentralized exchange infrastructure of Ethereum, is naturally called a "protocol-level investment product". If there is a project that can be called "0x protocol level", then it is an honor for this project. NuCypher received this honor at the time.

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Oasis Labs

A small episode was that a foreign media said that Professor Song Xiaodong did not want to do the Oasis project, but later Professor Song refuted the rumor and said it was fake news. When I heard this fake news, I really believed it. Because there were too many projects in the series of professors who set a bad example and had a bad influence. Thanks to Professor Song for dispelling the rumors, which made me have the last thought about the Professor series project.

In July last year, it received 45 million US dollars in financing, with investment from top institutions. The academic strength of Oasis cannot be questioned, what matters is the persistence of the professor and the engineering ability of the recruited team. The overall strength of the project should be the strongest among the faculty projects.

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Skale

Skale Labs is a start-up company developing Ethereum scaling infrastructure within the Plasma framework, co-founded by Silicon Valley engineers Jack O'Holleran and Stan Kladko. A total of $17.1 million was raised, with Multicoin Capital leading the round. Skale said that they can provide more than 750 nodes when the main network is launched, and support up to 6000 independent Skale chains.

ETH has tried various Layer 2 solutions in the past few years: from the beginning of Plasma, State Channel to the current Rollups, the progress of Layer 2 has not been smooth. We also know in our hearts that we already have too many martyrs on the road of Layer2: Raiden/POA/Loom/Celer... and Skale is the next Layer2 challenger.

Roll-up is a type of Layer 2 scheme that is very popular on Ethereum this year. The main advantages of Roll-up are: instant security and cheapness, no waiting time, and no need for heavy calculation of zkSNARKS / STARKS. And Skale decided to incorporate Bls-Rollup into the Skale production network. But some people also explained that Rollup is a compromise method, but it is like a panacea. Because even those who proposed Rollup didn't think about it.

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Keep

The Ethereum ecological project has been researching ways to connect Bitcoin and Ethereum so that Bitcoin can be included in the ecology of Ethereum. From Kyber's Wbtc to Keep's Tbtc and recently Imtoken's mbtc. But the bitcoin ecosystem seems to be very repulsive, because they certainly don't want bitcoin to be part of ethereum, which is almost an insult to them. Therefore, the interoperability between Bitcoin and other public chains is very difficult. This is destined to make the heterogeneous cross-chain between Polakdot and Cosmos not easy. At worst, it will always be a beautiful pie.

Keep has also established a cross-chain team with projects such as Summa and Cosmos, focusing on cross-chain research. Friends who are not familiar with the Keep project will definitely think that it is a cross-chain project. In fact, its subject matter is similar to NuCypher. Positioned on the privacy protocol layer on the Ethereum chain, it tries to build the privacy data layer of Ethereum through the private data container under the chain, and provides private data interaction capabilities for smart contracts.

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Spacemesh and Chia Network

The feature of Spacemesh is that everyone can use a computer to participate in mining. In the case of most new chains adopting PoS, it adopts hard disk mining. DAG topology, PoST consensus protocol plus anti-ASIC mechanism. Funding $15 million, led by Polychain.

The greener Chia Network project launched by Bram Cohen uses hard disk storage space to verify its blockchain. $3.4 million has been raised. However, the project update is slow and almost stagnant. It belongs to the PoC hard disk mining theme project, and it is a competitive product with Spacemesh.

Bram Cohen is also the inventor of Torrent technology. He built a new protocol for P2P video transmission in BitTorrent. Unfortunately, the company encountered business problems caused by poor management. After that, Justin Sun acquired BitTorrent and issued Btt tokens, and Btt also opened the first shot of the 19-year IEO boom.

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Handshake

Handshake focuses on decentralized domain name registration, authentication, transaction and resolution. Adopts a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol compatible with DNS, where each peer is validating and responsible for managing the root zone, with the goal of creating an alternative to existing certificate authorities.

What is impressive is the number of investment institutions and investors with as many as 76, financing 10.2 million US dollars, and a valuation of 136 million US dollars. However, the development progress of the project is slow and almost stagnant, while the ecology of its competitor, Ethereum ENS, is developing rapidly, and it may be difficult for Handshake to compete with it.

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Algorand and Hashgraph

DAG was once all the rage in the last era, but after the carnival, everyone found that its centralization problem was serious. The number of nodes is so small that it is difficult to reach a minimum consensus in the currency circle: that is, everyone thinks that there are too few nodes to make things happen. Hashgraph currently has 29 nodes, all of which are authoritative institutions, and the node participation of ordinary investors is almost zero. This reminds me of POA, another consensus algorithm, as well as IOTA and Byteball.

Algorand is working hard, but in the short term it is still trapped in the game between foundations, private equity investors and ordinary investors. The news keeps coming, but most of it is about the chips themselves. The term for self-marketing is borderless finance, but the current trend of DeFi on Ethereum is a bit embarrassing. But compared to other professors running road chains, Algorand is still okay on the whole.

There are many similarities between Hashgraph and Algorand: launched this year, a star public chain, focusing on high performance, with a financing amount of more than 100 million US dollars, centralized nodes, less circulation, and continuous selling pressure on the secondary market.

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Dfinity, Avalanche, and Mobilecoin

Dfinity released the SDK recently, but it also exposed many problems. This SDK release is only an Alpha version and can only support one local node. The release was not careless, more like a hastily delivered homework, in order to deal with investors and institutions. The problem with Dfinity is that the roadmap has been delayed for too long, so that the best time to go online has been missed. The story of the world computer was very attractive in 2017, but it is really boring now. Plus the narrative of Ethereum has shifted from a world calculator to a global financial settlement layer. At the same time, it has the common problems of new high-performance public chains: serious homogenization, and it is difficult to form a developer ecology.

AVA Labs introduced Athereum at this year's Devcon conference. Directly moved the entire Ethereum to its own project Avalanche. Other high-performance public chains have also chosen to migrate the Ethereum virtual machine. Homogenization is a serious problem.

MobileCoin is an anonymous cryptocurrency that is convenient for payment and DApp transaction circulation. It uses Intel SGX technology to ensure security and privacy. Unlike Zcash and Monero, it is mainly aimed at mobile phone users. The team includes Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal, which is currently used by 300 million people. The project update progress has almost stagnated, which is the most worrying point.

So far the full text has ended, we all say "sailing against the current, if you don't advance, you will retreat". I think this sentence is perfect for the currency circle. The cognitive iteration speed of this industry is very fast, and if you are not careful, you may be abandoned by the times. May we always encourage ourselves to continue learning and self-iteration while maintaining a sense of awe.

People on the mountain, don't look down on the people down the mountain, because maybe one day they will come up the mountain to replace you. People who go up the mountain, don't look down on those who go down the mountain, because you are still wandering down the mountain when they are beautiful.