The 12 blockchain companies to follow

These are the projects we loved in 2018 and are keeping

an excited eye on

Nate Simantov Follow

Dec 13, 2018 · 5 min read

Image by Rachel Skiba

When the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, lots of speculation
was dissolved regarding the Internet Revolution. Many feel that
shakeup however defogged our ability to predict where the internet
was going to take us in terms of innovation. This year’s collapse of
many ICOs and crypto presents a similar opportunity to better
understand which blockchain players and use cases have what it takes
to bring us to the real decentralized future.

Here are some blockchain actors we think you should be paying

attention to:

Binance
https://www.binance.com/en

This cryptocurrency trading platform announced the released the

demo for its new decentralized exchange. This comes after earlier this
year Binance purchased Trust Wallet, the open source, anonymous, and
decentralized wallet that supports over 20,000 di erent Ethereum-
based tokens. The trading platform (which has since become a
somewhat household name among crypto traders worldwide) also
joined other companies backing a new venture: The world’s rst
blockchain-based bank with tokenized ownership.

Atomic
https://www.atomic.org/

This Israeli startup has taken aim at solving solve some of blockchain’s
most infamous and signi cant pain points by o ering transaction
approvals in less than a second, TPS greater than Visa & Mastercard
combined, and support for all types of tokens. In addition to all this,
Atomic is implementing a non-custodial solution for users who seek to
maintain ownership and control of their collateral. The company has
already been seen hard at work on their alpha version this year and is
set to release the beta during Q2 2019.

StarkWare
https://www.starkware.co/

“STARK” is a zero-knowledge proof protocol developed by another

Israeli startup, Starkware. Its full proof stack is meant to improve the
scalability and privacy of existing blockchains: The protocol provides
cryptographic proofs that according to the company are said to be
“zero-knowledge, succinct, transparent and post-quantum secure”.
Starkware recently raised $30M in series A from Paradigm and Sequoia
Capital among other prominent investors.

Spacemesh
https://spacemesh.io/

Israeli blockchain infrastructure company Spacemesh is a community

of academic researchers and open-source developers collaborating on a
‘blockmesh operating system’ using a proof-of-space-time (PoST)
consensus protocol. The company has announced the closing of a $15
million Series A nancing round led by Polychain, and has certainly
gotten my attention.

BEAM
https://www.beam.mw/
BEAM is a decentralized currency promising strong privacy, fungibility,
and scalability. According to the company, its transactions are private;
there is no need to store the entire transaction history for validation,
which can improve the concept’s scalability. BEAM is based on the
“Mimblewimble” protocol which uses Pedersen Commitment scheme
for full anonymity and zero-knowledge range proofs to ensure the
validity of transaction amounts. And unlike some similar ventures,
BEAM is governed by a NFP foundation and is backed by treasury (no
ICO).

Terra
https://terra.money/

Four of the world’s largest crypto exchanges have already invested

$32M in Terra, a large-scale project developing a new stablecoin for e-
commerce: Global exchanges Binance Labs, OKEx, Huobi Capital, and
Dunamu have all poured capital into Terra (in the form of a token-
based investment), representing the rst time global exchanges have
come together on such an ambitious blockchain operation.

While stablecoins are arguably still at a theoretical stage, Terra and its
investors, believe mass adoption of its token will prove the concept, and
plan to stoke this adoption via e-commerce in the Asia market.

Banx
http://banx.one/

Banx.one is the rst physical and digital asset-backed global trading

platform that converts non-liquid assets into tradable security tokens.
By using unique smart contracts to program government regulations
into each of the tokens, Banx.one enables anyone to create and launch
asset-backed tokens compliant with local law and regulations. Their
ecosystem gives asset owners the ability to nance any project, and
global investors to access and exchange any asset in a reliable,
regulated and transparent way.

Basic Attention Token

https://basicattentiontoken.org/

Basic Attention Token (BAT) was created as a new barter means

between advertisers and audiences, so that internet users (read:
people) can decide what ads they wish to be exposed to, and get paid
doing so. Completely skirting the middleman (i.e ad platforms and
agencies who currently cut a large chunk of the deal) can solve many
major annoyances of present-day internet advertising paradigm; many
today are so fed up with data abuse and other invasive commercial
tactics that they opt for ad blocking software which hurts advertisers.
Enabling this type of fair, open ecosystem for ads makes for an exciting
and probable use case for blockchain. The team is comprised of internet
veterans of the highest caliber, spearheaded by people like Brendan
Eich, creator of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla & Firefox.

Omisego
https://omisego.network/

Omisego is a blockchain company building an open payment platform

and decentralized exchange running on the Ethereum public
blockchain. Founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin sits on the Omisego
board, and the company is a member of the Ethereum Community
Fund (EFC) which was put together to fund the growth of Ethereum
(ETH) infrastructure. The company raised over $20M during its TGE
and has reportedly turned down much more than that.

CryptoKitties
https://www.cryptokitties.co/

One of the rst blockchain based video games ever released,

CryptoKitties is a mix between Tamagotchi and selective-breeding
simulator. On the platform developed by Axiom Zen, players can
purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats which have been generated
bred by the users. While CryptoKitties is one of the earliest examples of
blockchain technology being deployed for purely recreational purposes,
it has sparked several copycat platforms and will likely inspire many
more such decentralized games.

0x
https://0xproject.com/

This San Francisco Blockchain company has one of the more quali ed
teams we’ve seen in this space: 0x, or the 0x Project, is powering
decentralized exchange by building an open, permissionless protocol to
allow for crypto tokens to be traded on the Ethereum blockchain.
Founded in 2017, the platform is already being used to trade with
ERC20 tokens, but the founders are working towards a V2 of 0X which
will allow for any asset to be freely exchanged (including at
currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, debt instruments, real estate,
video game items, digital collectibles, and even software licenses).

Last month they released Instant, a platform o ering “simple crypto

purchasing in any app or website.”

GroundX
https://groundx.xyz/

Headquartered in Japan, GroundX is the blockchain subsidiary of

Korean communications giant Kakao. They are presently building a
blockchain infrastructure with the goals of introducing blockchain to
the general public with easy to use, practical applications. CEO Jason
Han suggested that unlike Ethereum, GroundX may put pure
decentralization on hold if needed while his team build the rst real
publicly demanded use case for blockchain, to then evolve into a full
decentralized ecosystem when ready.

. . .

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