In Part 1 I looked at Tron, Pirl, and Horizen. In part 2 I'll be looking at Dash, Callisto, and Ethergem.

I'm going to start off with Ethergem, which I will refer to for the rest of the article as egem.

EGEM

Egem is a community coin with a small, but dedicated team that has been looking for ways to innovate and improve upon the ethereum blockchain. One of their first goals was to create a sidechain for implement new technologies and token mining.

From their ANN:

An "applied technologies peernet" is where the EtherGem blockchain grows on a mineable token sidechain. Dual mining ethergem and a token on claymore is something new. The EGEM sidechain is designed to be very much an integral part of ongoing mainchain development where peers can implement new technology while continuing to rely on a solid foundation. The sidechain and token will be available shortly after the mainnet release.

Out of that initial idea came 'Sapphire' which is an integrated substructure which has a decentralized exchange and can be used to enhance the main ethergem chain. Sapphire was airdropped to existing egem holders late last year, and should be released soon.

Sapphire is it's own mineable coin, and can be mined by itself, but even better, it can actually be daul-mined with egem! It is slated to use the blake2s algorithm and have a custom miner. That's a truly unique concept, and should help make egem a top-tier altcoin in the near future. They are also currently testing dex functions, and from what I've read, it's going to have some unique abilities that could be game changing. We'll have to wait and see.



Egem also has Quarrynodes. Quarrynodes are similar to masternodes. They come in two tiers of Quarrynodes. Tier one requires 10,000 egem, and a Tier 2 QNode requires 30,000. A discord bot controls payouts. You can also get updates on the status of your Quarrynodes, balances, etc-by querying the egem bot.There is already at least one dapp-like project in the works, called 'egem monsters', an ERC721 collectible token monsters video game that come in an incredibly large number of possible iterations. These monsters can also wear different 'gems' on their chest. Each non-fungible ERC721 token is it's own contract, so each gem and monster are completely unique. You can own several of these tokens, and they are able to be exchanged, auctioned , or traded.

Egem monsters can also be paired with each other to reproduce, and create new, unique monsters. The gems that can be put into their chests give them certain powers and allow them to fight other gemmed monsters. There is possibly going to be a premium service available to 'customize on demand' your monsters. Currently the game is set to be released toward the end of Q1 2019, with gem implementation slated for Q4 of 2019.The team behind egem are really dedicated, and transparent. Their gitlab is constantly being updated, they are very active on discord and are keeping everyone abreast of every step they make to improve egem, and working hard on expanding the platform greatly. They have a very happening discord channel, their channel bot can give you detailed information about the status of your Quarrynodes, your egem wallet balance, and rewards wallet balance.



You can play games to get more egems from the bot, and recently an independent, separate discord channel came into being that has gambling games that payout in egem. You send your egem to the contract address, then give the channel bot your txid, and it adds that to your wallet balance so you can play.Their Opal desktop wallet is in development, with an alpha having been released last year, and new beta set to be released soon that should have sapphire integration and possibly dex functionality. With active development, unique innovations, a dedicated team, and a fervent fan base, it's impossible not to put this coin as one of my top investments. I absolutely recommend you check out egem.

Egem is currently sitting at #1029 on coinmarketcap.com with a price of $0.012451

(Note:Before the cryptowinter hit, this coin was actively trading in high volume at $0.05-0.06, so it won't be surprising for it to hit those levels again soon. Now is a perfect time to buy some while it's cheap.)

Disclosure: I DO NOT work for egem, nor am I being paid to write this, I just really love this project.





Callisto



Callisto is another ethereum blockchain based project with a rather broad and ambitious goal.

According to their homepage Callisto is:

The main goal of Callisto is to research and develop a reference implementation of a self-sustaining, self-governed and self-funded blockchain ecosystem and development environment.

From that sentence we can infer that mean to create a template for a fully self-regulated development environment.

One of the key features of this idea is how the reference design works. The goal is to create a standardized protocol for implementing built-in cold-staking, a governance system, and development funding mechanism based on smart-contracts.Part of this system is their official smart contract auditing department. This department is tasked with performing security audits of smart contracts for both the CLO and ETC networks, and mitigate the costs of smart contract audits, paying the auditors in CLO.



The audits themselves, for smart contract developers are free, and if they pass security checks, will get an officially audited status, those that fail will not. This feature could be a life saver for smart contract developers who don't want to get crushed by a critical error like flawed or buggy contracts. Another feature of Callisto that I think is a very strong selling point is 'Cold Staking'. Cold staking allows you to send an amount of CLO to a smart contract address, where it will earn a percentage of the total amount of staked coins based on the amount you put in. This stake reward can be retrieved after 30 days, or you can continue to stake.



Cold staking is unique as it allows you to stake your coins without the need to have a dedicated wallet open at all times. Given the amount of crypto people invest in and hold, having a number of staking wallets open on a machine could render it unusable, necessitating a dedicated machine for such tasks. Eliminating this saves electricity and is an environmentally friendly way to earn crypto.From their paper, it appears that part of the function of cold staking will also be to govern the Callisto File System. The file system will a decentralized storage system for hosting smart contract reports and custom files from users utilizing IPFS Host-Nodes.



The number of host nodes and amount of storage will be directly related to the amount of coins held in cold stake. Elected host nodes are paid a monthly salary for their service, and if they fail to provide quality service, a new IPFS Host-Node can be chosen to replace it.The salary of the host node is determined by a number of factors. Quality, amount of storage, and the statistics of processed requests. How all of this operates is through the Bancor algorithm. Below is the basic idea from the Callisto whitepaper here.

The amount of storage available per CLO is determined using the Bancor algorithm that maintains a Constant Reserve Ratio (CRR) of 10. A CRR means that the storage will never be completely consumed, as the price (locked CLO per megabyte) will rise as free capacity shrinks.Price = Balance / (Supply * CRR)

Callisto is setting itself up as provider of smart contract auditing and secure, decentralized file storage. Because of their size and active mining community (Callisto is currently the third highest ETHASH coin in terms of nethash and difficulty, just behind ETH and ETC) they should have very little trouble maintaining this infrastructure. Given these factors, I think this coin is a pretty safe bet for long term investors. Plus, with the added benefit of Cold Staking, you can earn while you HODL.



Currently CLO is ranked #390 on Coinmarketcap.com with a price of $0.003927





Dash

When you think of masternodes, what's he first thing that comes to mind? It's probably 'exit scam' but, the answer should be Dash. When it began it's life in 2014 as Xcoin, it was pretty novel. Now the idea is everywhere, and I guess we have Evan Duffield to thank for that.

What makes Dash special now? Instead of waiting for people to find the coin, they've taken the coin to the people-so to speak.When the crisis in Venezuela reached epic proportions, the people turned to cryptocurrency. Dash was seeing usage in other Latin American countries like Brazil.

The adoption rate of cryptocurrencies in Latin America and Africa is skyrocketing. Crypto gives people a store of value to hold on to that can make a big difference in places like Venezuela, where inflation is unbearable, and banks are unable to keep up, crypto is becoming a more preferred method of payment.Dash has a dedicated team for Latin America, and they are growing the brand there every day.

In January of 2018, Dash announced their partnership with bitINKA, Latin Americas largest exchange. bitINKA also works with 35 banks across 12 countries. This broadened Dashes reach immensely.In August of 2018, they announced a partnership with KriptoMobile, to provide Latin Americans with a phone with the complete Dash ecosystem preloaded on it. Dash is being accepted in many places, with more partnerships appearing daily.

There are over 2,500 merchants accepting Dash in just Venezuela, and nearly as much in New Hampshire. I don't have an exact figure, but Dash appears to be poised for a retail revolution.Dash has an incredibly large network, 200+ Terahash of mining and over 5,000 Masternodes, Dash is massive, and with no signs of slowing down, could eventually surpass all other major blockchain projects. Bitcoin will probably always have more hash, but I think Dash might surpass bitcoin in terms of mass adoption and retail acceptance.

If you want to see just how widespread Dash is? Check out https://discoverdash.com/ and look at the map, and maybe search for a place near you that is accepting Dash.

Dash is currently at #15 on coinmarketcap.com with a price of $80.87

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EGEM: 0x40E791e1913bd6F308CDAfd769894f54eD14E983

VERGE: DSfrhCH9r6LfvzQEzj4nAkjhQ6TVdx6LwP

TRON: TBmqG6Fn7EJbTpJuWst48FfvdoGUfs7WA8

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ERC-20: 0x47eECEeCb8893A91Bb856979994eeA57ceF528EC

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