As the market continues to go through a prolonged bear run, a good number of projects continue to develop their platforms and the following week’s projects are set to benefit from a number of upgrades and developments that should result in an increased amount of attention and community engagement, and help to strengthen their position during the current downturn.

Komodo (KMD)

Komodo is a cryptocurrency and platform designed for maximum security and privacy. The Komodo platform provides smart contracts and supports the BarterDEX decentralized exchange which allows traders via atomic swaps. Komodo is linked to Bitcoin, and uses a consensus mechanism that is backed by the Bitcoin hashrate, and anonymous transactions can be sent via Komodo using zk-snarks technology.

Why Komodo?

The team have announced a hard fork set to take place on December 15. They state that: "This update is a hard fork and is therefore a mandatory wallet update which should be completed before 01:00 UTC December 15, 2018." Updates to system include Sapling integration, and the VerusHash algorithm which brings equality between CPUs and GPU miners. While the VerusPoS algorithm, allows for a 50/50 hybrid blockchain, which can be combined with either 50% VerusHash or 50% Equihash for the proof of work component. In addition, time locking allows mined rewards to be time locked for random release, within a set of parameters.

TomoChain (TOMO)

TomoChain is based on the Ethereum codebase and supports all EVM-compatible smart-contracts, protocols, and atomic cross-chain token transfers. The team also aim to incorporate sharding, EVM parallelisation, and private-chain generation. TomoChain also includes a 150-Masternode architecture with a Proof of Stake Voting (POSV) consensus for almost zero fee, instant transactions.

Why TomoChain?

TomoChain is set to launch its mainnet on December 14 and ERC20 TOMO tokens will migrate from the Ethereum blockchain to the TomoChain mainnet and become native TOMO in a one-to-one ratio. In addition, all ERC20 TOMO will be permanently frozen on December 18th, 2pm Singapore time. A snapshot will be taken at this time, and native TOMO will be distributed according to this snapshot. The team aim to complete the migration by December 20. TOMO holders are advised to follow the steps laid out in the team’s blog post.

Zcoin (XZC)

ZCoin implements the Zerocoin protocol which is based on zero-knowledge proofs and helps to ensure transaction privacy. Zero-knowledge proofs enable an individual to prove ownership without having to specify exactly which coin is theirs and ZCoin is one of the primary anonymity-focused cryptocurrencies, together with the likes of Monero and Zcash.

Why Zcoin?

Zcoin will undergo the MTP hard fork on December 10, 12:00 UTC. This hard fork sees Zcoin's new Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm MTP come into effect while also decreasing block time to 5 minutes. The fork also enables the ability to do multiple Zerocoin mints from a single input after hard fork date, and adds a 2 factor authentication for dumpwallet and dumpprivkey commands to prevent malicious actors from obtaining private keys.

How did last week's coins perform?

Last week’s coins experienced mixed results as QRC fell by 3.5% and is currently trading at around $0.43. WAVES responded extremely positively to the mobile app launch and grew by 11.5% and is currently trading at $1.67. MCO was unable to resist the overall downturn and fell by 19% and is currently trading at $2.04. Over the course of the week, the total cap dropped from around $135B on Monday to $110B on Sunday.