Five blockchains you (probably) don’t know yet

We write December 2017. The crypto market is reaching its (preliminary) zenith. The euphoria knows no bounds. Many crypto and blockchain enthusiasts, but also speculators have joined in the past few weeks. They all want to participate in the digital gold rush and are therefore also eagerly exploring the Bitcoin alternatives – altcoins. Hodlers from NEO, Dash, Lisk, EOS or NEM hope that their coins will soon make it into the top five cryptos by market capitalization. But for her everything turns out very differently. If you look at today’s Best rankingthe newer blockchains such as Polygon, Polkadot, Avalanche or Cardano will dominate the crypto landscape of 2022. However, the past also shows that these are not necessarily future guarantors.

It is therefore worthwhile for crypto fans to think outside the box and to discover the potential blockchains of tomorrow.

1. Be Network (SEI)

First stop of our crypto exploration: this Be network. The project should not be confused with the Sui blockchain, founded by ex-employees of the deprecated Facebook stablecoin Libra (Diem). Sei bills itself as the first “sector-specific layer 1 blockchain” designed specifically for trading activities. “Every aspect of the blockchain is optimized for performance and user experience of an exchange,” the statement said documentation to the project.

Sei presents itself as “Decentralized NASDAQ” on its homepage and claims to be the fastest blockchain on the market. In just 600 milliseconds, the platform built on Cosmos is expected to reach finality, processing 22,000 “orders per second”. For comparison: Ethereum reaches finality in six minutes and manages 20 transactions per second. The project is currently in the third of four acts of the Incentivised testnet. Users can be rewarded here for their active participation in the trial network. However, a period for the mainnet launch has not yet been given.

2. Shardeum (SHM)

Let’s continue with Shardeum. The blockchain was founded by Nischal Shetty, CEO of India’s largest crypto exchange Wazir-X. As you can probably guess from the name, sharding is in the foreground here. What Ethereum is supposed to implement in the course of further updates in the coming months, Shardeum wants to be able to do right from the start. By dividing the network into various sub-networks and outsourcing the transaction archive, linear scaling should be possible. Means high speeds and fees in the low cent range.

Shardeum is also currently in the testnet phase, in which users are invited to request test tokens and use them on participating platforms. Its compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) means the chain works with Ethereum applications like the Metamask wallet. This would probably be the case in the first quarter of 2023, i.e. at the start of the mainnet.

3. ZetaChain (ZETA)

With Cosmos, Polkadot and Thor, the multi-chain narrative came to the fore in the crypto sector. Blockchains should therefore not only be separate networks, but interoperable. ZetaChain now wants to go one step further and relies on Omichain Smart Contracts. In other words, developers can use ZetaChain to program applications that can be executed on different blockchains. That would mean, for example, that Bitcoin Smart Contracts would also be possible!

In addition, ZetaChain is EVM-compatible and uses its specially developed omnichain standard zEVM/ZRC-20. Thus, it is possible to have only one smart contract for all possible chains. By the time it is launched in the first quarter of 2023, users will also have to register with a test net content But as already known from Arbitrum, users can use the ZetaChain Guild embark on a crypto scavenger hunt to qualify for future rewards.

4. CANTO (CANTO)

The fourth in the bunch: Canto. This layer 1 blockchain sees itself as “free, public infrastructure” and can be understood as an “anti-establishment” blockchain. According to the company, the blockchain is being built by a “loosely organized collective of native on-chain builders”. There is no foundation, nor is there a token pre-sale or venture capitalist. They want to stay true to the original credo of cryptocurrencies and design the platform as a public good that only serves the user. For example, DeFi projects on Canto cannot create a governance token that extracts value.

The blockchain-owned token CANTO will be around GRADE added, the “unit of account” of the project. NOTE should act similar to an algorithmic stablecoin and always hover around the one dollar mark. It is secured by deposits in other stablecoins, ETH, ATOM or CANTO. The still very young project started in August and has been integrated with the Blockchain Bridge Synapse surfaced on the broader crypto radar.

5. Regen Network (RAIN)

Regenerative finance has emerged as a new use case for blockchain in recent months. This also allows the ESG trend to enter the crypto world and should serve as a counter-argument to the antiquated environmental criticism of cryptocurrencies. Rain is an application-specific blockchain for digital CO₂ certificates, built on Cosmos. The network recently launched its own Marketplace for eco-certificates on the blockchain to create more transparency and monitoring in the still quite inefficient carbon credit market.

Apart from the specific use case, the blockchain offers common features such as staking or on-chain governance. With the Nature carbon clay tokens (NCT), Regen also created a CO₂ token that can now also be traded interoperably in the Cosmos ecosystem. Environmental protection meets DeFi, if you will.