The amount of incredible projects being built in the crypto ecosystem is astounding. Talent is flooding into the space at a breakneck pace and the brightest minds from all over the world are busy creating the infrastructure for our decentralized and tokenized future.

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https://orchidprotocol.com/

What?

The Orchid Protool is a peer-to-peer tokenized bandwidth exchange. Essentially the Orchid Protocol is a decentralized Tor network that utilizes a token incentive to maintain the network.

Why?

VPNs can be blocked, Tor users can apparently be tracked by nation states, Orchid Protocol aims to achieve an internet that is totally free from surveillance and censorship by going peer-to-peer. Orchid achieves this by randomly routing the web traffic through users acting as nodes that essentially “sell” their bandwidth to users looking to buy the bandwidth in order to browse anonymously.

Who?

Team

Steve Waterhouse — Cambridge PhD — Pantera Capital, Fortress

Stephen Bell — Georgia Tech — Trilogy Ventures

Brian Fox — MIT — 15 patents

Jay Freeman — USCB — Jailbroken iOS

Gustav Simonsson — Ethereum Core Dev

Investors

MetaStable Capital

Blockchain Capital

Polychain Capital

Andreessen Horowitz

Sequoia Capital

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https://www.nucypher.com/

What?

NuCypher is a security and encryption platform for distributed systems, including blockchain, big data, cloud, and internet of things. NuCypher provides delegated third-parties access to manipulate and interact with sensitive data without the need for a centralized entity.

Why?

Currently, all data on blockchain is completely transparent and open for all to see. NuCypher enables dapps to keep specified data private and allows specified parties to have access to that data.

Who?

Team

MacLane Wilkison — UNC Chapel Hill — Morgan Stanley

Michael Egorov — Swinburne University of Technology PhD — Linkedin

Investors

Polychain Capital

Galaxy Digital Assets Fund

FBG Capital

Satoshi Fund

Compound VC

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http://kadena.io

What?

Kadena is a highly scalable smart contract platform with an optional privacy functionality to maintain the integrity of the platform’s data. The team has created an innovative system called a parallel-chain protocol which is capable of a reported 10,000 transactions per second. Another feature is Kadena’s smart contracting language, that is purposely built to be as easy to learn, write and read as possible. The focus is simple, safe and concise smart contracts to attract developers.

Why?

Blockchains currently suffer from scalability and privacy issues, Kadena’s smart contract protocol is built from the ground up in order to solve these two major issues. Also with so many smart contract platforms out there, an easy to use programming language will encourage development.

Who?

Team

Stuart Popejoy — Berkley — JP Morgan Emerging Tech Blockchain group

Will Martino — Yale — Juno (JP Morgan blockchain prototype)

Investors

MetaStable Capital

Multicoin Capital

CoinFund

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http://www.getbasecoin.com/

What?

Basecoin is a price stable cryptocurrency with an algorithmic central bank. Basecoin intends to peg their cryptoasset to a specified value and will stabilize that peg via the selling of base bonds. The actual stablecoin, called basecoins, will be created from an algorithmic central bank which will disperse the basecoins to the holders of base shares. Base shares have a fixed supply and are not pegged to anything.

Why?

The crypto world has been in dire need of a reliable and stable cryptocurrency for quite some time. Having a reliable stable coin in the crypto ecosystem will open an extremely wide range of possibilities for other applications to utilize and will vastly increase adoption into the industry.

Who?

Team

Nader Al-Naji — Princeton — Google, D.E. Shaw

Lawrence Diao — Princeton — Google, NASA

Josh Chen — Princeton — D.E. Shaw

Investors

Andreessen Horowitz

Bain Capital Ventures

PolyChain Capital

Pantera Capital

Digital Currency Group

1confirmation

MetaStable Capital.

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https://www.truebit.io/

What?

TrueBit is a protocol that is able to offload computation on the Ethereum network which effectively removes the gas limit on smart contracts.

Why?

Ethereum, and blockchains as a whole, suffer from scalability issues and TrueBit has developed a method to essentially remove the gas limit on ethereum transactions. The removal of this limit will enable much more computation per smart contract thus giving Ethereum’s scalability a massive boost.

Who?

Team

Jason Teutsch — Indiana University PhD — Teaching assistant @ U of Chicago, associate staff John Hopkins

Christian Reitwiessner — Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg PhD — Creator of Solidity, Ethereum smart contract language

Investors

Polychain Capital

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https://dfinity.org/

What?

Dfinity is a extremely scalable smart contract platform that has the added feature of governance built into its protocol.

Why?

We continue to see scalability being the number one issue for blockchains so Dfinity is using a new type of consensus mechanism called threshold relay. Threshold relay shares traits with a Proof-of-Stake type consensus mechanism but uses non manipulable source of randomness to swiftly achieve finality of transactions. This unique method of consensus allows for an exceptionally fast and scalable blockchain.

Who?

Team

Dominic Williams — King Collegel London — String Labs

Tino Hanke — University of Potsdam PhD — Creator of Asic Boost

Ben Lynn — Stanford PhD — Google

Investors

Andreessen Horowitz

Polychain Capital

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https://keep.network/

What?

Keep is an off-chain privacy container for the Ethereum network. Keep allows all the advantages of a public blockchain with the ability to store sensitive data off-chain.

Why?

The fact that blockchains are so transparent has been a major hurdle for adoption because companies and people do not want to place sensitive data on the blockchain for everyone to see. Keep solves this problem with their secure off-chain data storage solution.

Who?

Team

Matt Luongo — Georgia Tech — Co-founder, Fold

Corbin Pon — Georgia Tech — Co-founder, Fold

Antonio Salazar Cardozo — Georgia Tech — Software Developer

Investors

Polychain Capital

DHVC

Distributed Capital Partners

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https://constellationlabs.io/

What?

Constellation labs is a DAG (directed acyclic graph) protocol that offers smart contracts, high transaction throughput and zero transactions fees.

Why?

Scalability issues have plagued blockchain since its inception and DAG protocols aim to massively increase transaction throughput. Also transaction fees vary depending on network congestion and Constellation eliminates those transaction fees. Traditionally the major downside of DAG protocols have been difficulty creating smart contracts but Constellation is creating a smart contract platform on their protocol.

Who?

Team

Brendan Playford — University College of London — Entrepreneur

Wyatt Meldman-Floch — College of William and Mary — Developer for 4+ companies

Investors

Game Theory Group

Connect Capital

TLDR Capital

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All of these projects are bringing massive advancements into the crypto industry and while the price action is currently moving sideways, the developers and great minds continue to build our decentralized future.

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