Continuing my previous two posts (here and here), this time we are going to look at Xmax (XMX), Factom (FCT) and Tezos (XTZ). These were the best performers in some of the last 15 weeks, when the market was moving up or sideways.

Xmax (XMX)

Xmas is rank 77 in market cap (53 million dollars), and has a circulating supply of 27,000,000,000 out of 30,000,000,000 maximum. Each token is valued at $0.00196089. XMX is an ERC-20 token in the Ethereum blockchain.

There is not a lot of information on XMX in the mainstream media. In this old interview with the CEO of XMax, Hughes Ching, we see that the company is not constituted by big names. These are their partners so far, according to their website (which, by the way, is not very informative):

Again looking at the interview, we learn that the Xmax network is a blockchain project with the aim of helping the creation of decentralized games and apps, where items can be tokenized. It seems, however, that the project took a turn recently:

The XMAX Foundation recently decided to change the strategy of XMX to become the world's first computing power token. More information can be found on our new website: http://xmx.com/en

Despite the tweet, there is not a lot of information on their website. That is also the last tweet by them before the week ending in September 7th, which saw an XMX growth of 91%. There is also this subreddit apparently related to XMX, but it is abandoned. So, making a quick judgement, it doesn't seem to be a very reliable investment.

Factom (FCT)

Factom is rank 95 in market cap (35.6 million dollars), and has a circulating supply of 9,826,057 coins, each worth $3.63 currently.

The Factom protocol is used by the US Department of Homeland Security and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Their white paper was reviewed by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. There, as in many other blockchain white papers, they start mentioning some of the flaws of the Bitcoin blockchain, in this case: transaction speed, throughtput and cost. From the paper: "Factom is a protocol designed to address these three core constraints". They also want to make the blockchain usable for things beyond currency -- for example, as a store of information. While Bitcoin's blockchain records transactions of values between addresses, Factom wants to generalise these records to any sort of data. The following quote summarises what is Factom and how their special nodes are rewarded:

Factom is a general purpose data protocol and tokenization platform that extends blockchain’s immutability and security to any form of data. To decentralize the protocol, there will eventually be 65 Authority Node Servers run by 65 Authority Node Operator (ANO) companies. To incentivize the companies to decentralize the protocol and enable them to pay their bills and profit, the protocol rewards them with 1,123 FCT per month, per server, minus efficiency*. With the increasing popularity of the protocol and thus the potential for appreciation in value of the Factoid (FCT – the native token of the protocol), becoming an ANO is becoming increasingly popular and competitive.

In summary, 73,000 FCT per month are split between the ANOs. Since the application process to become an ANO is complicated and only allowed for companies, we can say that Factom is not very decentralized.

One use case of Factom is the Pegnet network, which is discussed in this recent post.

Tezos (XTZ)

Tezos is a more or less well known cryptocurrency, with the 18th largest market cap (732 million dollars), 810,580,043 coins in circulation, each worth $0.901910.

There is a very good explanation of what the Tezos Project is here, so I will only say that it is a smart contract platform, similar to Ethereum, but they incorporate an on-chain governance model that allows for updates in the protocol, thereby avoiding the infamous problem of hard forks. Moreover, its smart contract language is a functional programming language, allowing for easier use of formal verification -- a logical technique to certify that a program has certain properties, in other words, a mathematically-proven way of avoiding certain bugs. These are some of the Tezos partners:

Tezos has peaked in the crazy bullrun of the end of 2017, but has since lost 90% of its value. The 41% rise in the seven days preceeding August 3rd has not been so remarkable, as the coin has been experiencing a good appreciation since the middle of March, with many ups and downs.

Conclusion

Of these three coins that we saw today, closing my series about the best weekly performers of the last 15 weeks, I am mostly surprised and intrigued by Tezos. It seems to be a very promising project and I will certainly take a look at it later. Factom is not so decentralized, and Xmax has scarce information about it, so I won't be interested in these for the coming months. Let me know if you find any of these coins interesting.