5. MSP: e-Residency Integration

Mothership is perhaps the best kept secret in the blockchain exchange space. Although it addresses no unique technological issues, Mothership offers a different form of sociological innovation with its e-Residency integration. Over 27,000 individuals have opted to become e-Residents of Estonia. This government-backed program offers a new means of launching a global business with banking within the legal framework of the European Union. In a stroke of genius, MSP has coordinated with the e-Residency program to offer a fully integrated suite of consulting, fundraising and exchange services. Want to host an ICO? Become an e-Resident and leverage Mothership’s regulation compliant token market Genesis. From initial consultation to exchange listing with access to a Euro fiat ramp, Mothership will empower global entrepreneurs and digital nomads to create digital businesses from anywhere in the world. As the e-Residency program grows — one estimate putting total count at 10 million individuals by 2025 — Mothership’s e-Resident business community will come to play an increasingly important global role in all things blockchain. Mothership’s success as a sociological experiment is represented by the successful partnership of private industry with the government. With this, Mothership’s exchange and token market is poised to be the emergent dark horse of European crypto trading and investment.

4. KMD: JUMBLR/BarterDEX

The Komodo open-source project is another under-the-radar candidate that is making huge strides in blockchain technology. Its BarterDEX technology will create a trustless decentralized exchange (DEX) powered by atomic swaps for Bitcoin, bitcoin-protocol, and other SPV Electrum-based coins. While Ethereum and Waves may have already pioneered the decentralized exchange, no decentralized market has emerged yet to support these types of coins. Additionally, the BarterDEX enhances decentralized exchange by utilizing JUMBLR. JUMBLR is an anonymizer which allows individuals to mask their trades. With so much dark money sloshing around in cryptocurrency, an anonymous, decentralized exchange is a game changer for traders who would prefer to transact privately. While privacy coins have enabled this type of discretion for many years, never has an anonymous DEX existed before. As Komodo is the default trading pair for this new secretive DEX, it is likely to emerge as one of the most liquid privacy coins in 2018.

3. MKR + DAI: Trustless Collatoralized Loans / Stablecoin

Although many P2P loan and decentralized loan applications have begun to emerge — such as SALT, Ethlend, and Elix, only one can claim to be truly trustless. Introducing the MakerDAO: a loan dApp that recently launched on the Ethereum blockchain. Utilizing a complex library of smart contracts, you can collateralize a loan with ETH at 150% your collateral. In return, you receive DAI: a pegged stablecoin that trades 1::1 against the dollar. The interest rate on your loan is a mere .5%, burned in MKR tokens. The implications here are staggering: you can get one of the lowest interest rates in the world, without any intermediaries, by borrowing against yourself.

Although the global debt ceiling is currently set at $50 million worth of DAI, MakerDAO will certainly improve and expand. The DAI is a superior, low risk alternative to USDT — a stablecoin with huge counterparty risk. Will DAI become the next de facto stablecoin? Exchanges have voiced a strong interest in listing DAI pairs. In the future, MakerDAO will expand the types of assets used for collateralization, including additional cryptocurrencies, and one day, more traditional financial instruments such as securities. Its current implementation has already proven itself to be financially lucrative, however, as people have successfully taken mortgages at one of the most competitive interest rates in the world.

2. AION / ICON / WAN — Interoperability

Interoperability has become a key buzzword for blockchains — but what does it mean? Interoperability is the ability for chains to share information (such as transactions), communicate, and even leverage each other’s virtual machines. AION, ICON, and Wanchain recently announced the formation of an alliance to help shape global standards for connecting blockchains. While they may have pioneered a formal organization, other chains are busy developing their own solutions. Cosmos wants to create zones where different chain assets can be trustlessly traded. The Ethereum Virtual Machine has been experimenting with permitting use of its virtual machine by other chains via abstraction. Ark will leverage smartbridges; Polkadot will create parachains. Yet, perhaps the most unique form of interoperability will come from decentralized oracle networks bringing off-chain data onto the blockchain — such as Chainlink with SWIFT, the interbank messaging network. While not classically thought of as “interoperability,” the integration of centralized data into decentralized blockchains is crucial to the enterprise development of the space. Altogether, we are looking more and more at an emergence of an internet of blockchains, with permissioned and public ledgers communicating with each other through cryptographically secured bridges, harnessing the power of oraclized data from non-blockchain sources. 2018 will be the year interoperability transcends its buzzword status to become simple reality.

1. ETH — Casper, The Friendly Finality Gadget

Ethereum’s Casper represents a leap forward for decentralizing proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains. As Vitalik has written in his article about weak subjectivity, most PoS chains rely on social information — such as delegates and masternodes — to reach consensus. Casper will allow proof-of-stake consensus without relying on socially designated actors. This will maintain the key decentralized aspects of a blockchain — namely, political and architectural decentralization. However, it’s important not to count chickens before they hatch: Casper will be rolled out in multiple stages. The first stage will be a hybrid system, retaining Ethereum’s current proof-of-work consensus in addition to proof-of-stake. A full implementation is expected to be released much later when Ethereum transitions to sharding — a scaling technique that breaks the blockchain into many component parts. Regardless, the economic implications of staking are important to consider, as staked Ethereum will represent a negative supply shock for both the initial hybrid implementation and even more so for the full implementation. As the Casper testnet was publicly launched on December 31st, 2017, it’s clear that this revolutionary consensus algorithm is moving forward rapidly and will be a major disruptor in 2018.