Since it was created Ethereum has been an inspiration for many developers. Created by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s purpose was to be a comprehensive platform that allows developers to build NEO blockchain apps.

Today there are a lot of projects based on the Ethereum blockchain. But it is not the only existing technology NEO that offers the possibility to host applications.

Buterin stated that he invented Ethereum because of the lack of options bitcoin was offering when he tried to create applications. But he also opened a door for other developers which are constantly raising the bar.

The Ethereum Foundation held an initial coin offering (ICO) in July 2014 during which they sold 60 million tokens. Shortly after other developers started to create technologies inspired by the immense success of Ethereum.

Here are some of the existing blockchains similar to Ethereum that are aiming to surpass it or improve the blockchain industry:

It is an open source Chinese blockchain similar to Ethereum that can provide the users with smart contracts and assets. The NEO coins cannot be divided. NEO provides digital certificates for legal protection for the digital assets from the NEO network

The smart contracts can be programmed using C++ Csharp, GO, Java and other programming languages. This is a huge bonus for NEO when compared with Ethereum. On the Ethereum network developers can use a single programing language (Solidity).

Neo uses a Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DBFT) consensus, in other words, the consensus is met by voting. The shareholders electing nodes who have staked a certain amount of coins. Each node has equal voting value.

The NEO GAS

NEOGas is the fuel that creates the NEO network. The maximum amount is 100 mil tokens. The network is charging GAS for the transactions, storage of networks and smart contracts. By doing the abuse on the network is avoided.

The maximum amount of GAS will be reached in 22 years from now through a decay algorithm. Its applications are similar to ethereum’s gas but it is also similar to bitcoin and it’s designed to release less and fewer coins as time goes on until the maximum supply is reached.

Waves were created for mainly for crowdfunding. Waves is similar to Ethereum and allows any user to create their own token and blockchain on their network. Waves is a blockchain network that provides all the features necessary for creating projects, and the platform already has a number of powerful tools and services that make NEO building user applications straightforward.

Fully compliant, licensed gateways into and out of the blockchain

EUR blockchain tokens, with USD and other currencies on the way

Tokens fully backed by fiat deposits

Bitcoin gateway and tokens also available

Easy token operations

Launch a new crypto token in under a minute

Tools for mass token distribution

Ideal for crowdfunding

Decentralised exchange (DEX)

Peer-to-peer trading from within the client

Trade any pair of Waves tokens

Near-real-time order matching

Blockchain settlement for security

Smart contracts

Non-Turing complete

Powerful but secure

Although the smart contracts are not featured yet on the network, the developing team has set the implementation of it at the end of 2017.

This year waves price has increased a lot, from a couple of cents in January to $5 today. The users are still waiting to see if the price will jump after the smart contracts will be added to the platform.

NXT is a blockchain platform with multiple features that has been published in late 2013. It is coded in Java first of its kind at the time of launch. It uses a NEO Proof-of-Stake consensus.

The more NXT a person has the processing of the next block grows higher. It is not dependent on computational power and a full node can run on “something as light as a Raspberry PI”?.

The existing amount of tokens is 1 billion and the supply will never change. Thus when a new block is mined the transactions fees are given as a reward.

NXT has a lot of features and the potential to issue assets. The assets are tokens based on NXT’s transactional fees. It also features

a decentralized exchange;

voting;

shuffling for anonymity;

an alias system;

a decentralized marketplace;

multisig capabilities;

a monetary system.

At the moment it is speculated that a lot of project teams have started to develop their businesses on Nxt platform but because nobody controls the platform the info is not available. An important factor is that is available for everyone without permission.

Nxt is built with your freedom in mind. Nxt does not force you to use your property or funds as we would like it, it gives you the freedom to be in complete control over what is yours.

Nxt Assets, Currencies and NXT itself can be traded freely, and access to the Nxt system cannot be denied: Nxt is being run on servers all around the globe.

Bitshares has the world record of transactions in a single day with almost 1 million.

Bitshares is a decentralized blockchain with a decentralized exchange where businesses can start their activity. Bitshares has the longest blockchain for the moment with over 20 million blocks.

Bitshares was designed to be easy to fork (update) hence the ability to add codes off the top of the blockchain instead on top of it.

Bitshares uses also a proof of stake algorithm which allows it to process transactions faster than Ethereum.

In the past Bitshares had problems with the voting system and the developers are taking into consideration changing the consensus to proof of work.

BitShares was built to be autonomous in funding and employing its own workers.

Bitshare’s Proof of Stake:

The technology underlying BitShares allows shareholders to vote for three distinct types of employees:

witnesses

delegates and

workers. The witnesses are paid to process transactions and secure the network.

The markets built-in to BitShares are:

CFD (contract for difference);

Prediction Markets;

P2P lending;

Some people are calling NEM “the sleeping giant”?. It was launched in 2015, as a New Economy Movement (NEM).

It is a platform designed to bring new features to the blockchain ecosystem. In its beginning days, NEM had a proof of concept algorithm which was changed to proof of importance after it was picked up by Mijin Blockchain.

It was designed to create private chains that communicate with the public chains.

Proof of Importance

POI or Proof of Importance helps to determine the user who is going to calculate the next block. The nodes do not need to be expensive machines that consume large amounts of NEO energy, especially since a part can function independently of the portfolio.

Like Ethereum NEM allows the creation of new virtual assets. The average time of block generation is 1 minute.

Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency.