Bitcoin

The big kahuna and the obvious choice. Bitcoin is highly divisible, decentralized in the absolute sense of the word, secure as they come and obviously enjoys the highest popularity and adaption of any crypto so far.

Nonetheless, Bitcoin has an inherent characteristic which prevent it from being an ideal medium of exchange despite being a terrific store of value and unit of account.

This characteristic is the fact that Bitcoin has a fixed supply. This causes Bitcoin to be deflationary and behave a lot like gold. The result is short term volatility and long term increase in value.

I have written a pretty detailed article explaining why I don’t think lightning network and scaling is the key to Bitcoin becoming transacted with more.

While it’s certainly possible that Bitcoin will gain widespread adaption for day to day use, the cards are stacked against it due to the fact that it costs more to use Bitcoin than fiat in the most absolute sense: your Bitcoin will be worth more that your dollars in 1 year, so why not use dollars? This paradigm is called Gresham’s law.

Ryō

Ryō is designed to be a medium of exchange from the get go. Ryō utilizes a 2 token architecture. the Trust token cannot be transacted with. It increases or decreases as a function of how the account owner behaves in the ecosystem. If the owner returns loans successfully it increases and vice versa. Loans and the ability to create and track them are a key feature in the ecosystem. The more Trust in the account, the more Ryō (transaction coin) can be produced by that account through mining.

The general idea is to simulate the functionality of a central bank but in a decentralized way. When there is less Trust (equivalent to high cost of money) in the system, less money is created. Ryō seems to have all the tools needed to provide a stable, shock resistant medium of exchange which is designed to coexist side by side with BTC (which the project views as the ideal store of value).

Ryō is a clone of Nxt (with its own blockchain) and is going to be airdropped to Nxt owners in the next month or so according to the team. This was never an ICO. The anonymous team have been working on the project for about a year.

Havven

Havven also aspires to a 2 token architecture — one (Havven) which functions as a leverage mechanism and the other (Nomin) as a means of transacting. The idea is to compensate those willing to provide leverage to increase or decrease the Nomin value, with fees. In this way, the Nomin value should remain stable.

In theory, this project has the potential to be a good medium of exchange and store of value. One big downside for this proposal is the big reliance on the Havven foundation throughout it’s infancy. Additionally, the leverage mechanism requires active participation from users looking to be rewarded and is not fully automated which adds complexity.

Havven is now post ICO and have a long and detailed roadmap running over the course of years which eventually leads to an independent blockchain. We have not yet seen any real product, but the potential is there.