Which coins is Coinbase exploring?

Coinbase, the top-ranking US-registered exchange, is exploring a new set of digital assets.  And there is something about the 17 currency list that makes it interesting. As per the announcement the exchange is scouting assets that “have yet rolled down the slipway.”

In the past, Coinbase received some serious community criticism. Precisely, because of its limited crypto offerings. With 30 million users spread across 32 countries, the exchange has a massive audience to please. Coinbase’s take on the situation has always been different and it continues to be so.

To be fair to the users, the exchange evaluates prospective assets in a rigorous manner. This time also it is gauging the assets on the fixed set of parameters. These are security, compliance and the assets coherence with the Coinbase’s mission, i.e. to fortify an open financial system.

There happens to be a “Shout Out” for asset listing applicants too!

And we made a bizarre observation while we footslogged through the project status.

Now coming to this recent asset list

As soon as the list was out, we became a curious cat. And went on an exploration spree to dig out more about these assets. Particularly, to understand what makes them a suitable match for Coinbase listing?

Telegram

Telegram

Website: https://telegram.org/

Ticker- GRAM

It seemed to be an obvious listing choice. Presumably, the project is about to unveil in a short-while (by October 2019). Unlike its close competitor Libra, “Gram” proceeded in complete secrecy. The only details of the project we know have come either from its “sales pitch” or the Telegram Open Network.

Industry- Finance

It was the “The New York Times” that laid its hands on the Telegram sales pitch. And the pitch says that Gram is the new digital money similar to Bitcoin.

Intention- Once the coin releases, Telegram will have no control over how these coins move and where they go. Regulators are concerned.  But just like the Telegram App, the digital currency also seems to disregard such opinions.

Stage of Development- The crypto community took the “Gram” project more seriously in 2018. This happened only when it raised $1.7 billion in a private coin offering. It promises the private investors Gram delivery by 31st October, or return the funds raised.

The TON platform still stands unreleased. But it did roll out the TON testnet explorer in early September as per an investor. It was also reported by a set of Anonymous test developers that they were testing TON blockchain. Till now, the launch seems to be on track.

Polkadot

Polkadot

Website: https://polkadot.network/

Ticker- DOT

The first project launched by Web3 foundations intends to establish a decentralized trustless web. As a project with a purpose, it will facilitate the internet for decentralized apps, institutions, and services. Specifically, it caters to the users who wish to control their information and transactions.

Industry- Web Decentralization, Blockchain interoperability

Intention- One can consider the project to be the decentralized web preparatory ground since it promises to free the society from the shackles of large institutions that control the web. The reason for its existence is the trust violations users’ face by internet giants.

Stage of Development- Incepted in 2017, the project has come a long way. Currently, many teams are already building projects on Polkadot infrastructure which is yet to go the main net. In June 2019, Polkadot conducted an unannounced 500,000 DOT token sale. And the sale immediately proceeded with the launch of its experimental protocol, Kusama.

Filecoin

Filecoin

Website: https://filecoin.io/

Ticker- FIL

Since its announcement, the project gained a lot of community interest. That’s because it addresses the underutilized storage infrastructure across the globe. And acts as an incentivization layer for the IPFS project that targets to replace HTTP.

Industry- Data Storage

Intention- A Filecoin miner gets paid for fulfilling the data storage or retrieval requests.  As a decentralized exchange for data storage, it will process the data storage asks and bids. That done, the network will validate client and miner actions. And it is the nodes that will keep a tap on available storage, fix the data faults and verify the storage proofs.

Stage of Development- After raising $200 million, in 2017, the project lost a lot of supporters due to its crowd sale and investment strategies. But it did stick to its roadmap of opening up its code to the developer community. Precisely, the codebase launched in Feb 2019. And the community is eagerly waiting for the blockchain-based data storage network.

Coinbase indeed has some revolutionary projects lined up to make to the listing.

dfinity

dfinity

Website: http://dfinity.com/

Another decentralized project that promises to be a synergistic component of the new cyberspace.

Ticker- DFN

Industry- Decentralized Cloud

Intention- Essentially aiming to extend the Internet, the project will be a serverless cloud. And will host software, services, and data in a trustless manner.

Stage of Development- dfnity is a nonprofit foundation and managed to raise over $190 million in the last two years. Precisely, the project targets to replace the centralized internet system by Google and Amazon. But the eager community is yet to witness test-launch which had to go live in June 2019. This was not the first time the launch got delayed for the platform. The crypto world is moving fast and so must the team dfinity.

Avalanche

Avalanche

Website: https://avalabs.org/

Led by an esteemed critical crypto thinker, Professor Emin Gün Sirer, the project targets to be Blockchain 3.0. That promises to phenomenally improve payment processing, DApps, tokenization, governance and user experience.

Ticker- AVA

Industry- Improving Blockchain for business

Intention- Prof. Emin likes to call it a “Lego set” for digital assets. And that is what makes AVA platform special. As a platform of platforms, it targets to support the issuance of all kinds of digital assets supported by a variety of nodes.

Stage of Development- Earlier this year in May, the project opened up its blockchain network to developers and users. This is an early attempt to battle-test the blockchain. And as soon as the code gets a go-ahead, it will open to wider audience. Although it is not ready to handle real money.

Celo

Celo

Website: https://celo.org/

Specifically, a mobile-first solution for blockchain users. And is considered a direct competitor to Libra coin.

Ticker- CELO

Industry- Decentralized Finance

Intention- Right from its inception, the project intends to simplify the value exchange of crypto. As simple as texting. But on top of that, it believes for accelerated adoption, the industry must have stable-value assets. And that’s what the project is after now.

Stage of Development- After multiple investment rounds, the project team unveiled its software development kit in early September this year. And the developer community is happy. As they can now build DeFi Apps using the protocol.

Very soon the network might go live. It’s because the project team has been testing its wallet, protocol, and updated SDK aggressively.

Chia

Chia

Website: https://www.chia.net/

Chia Network is a less energy-intensive alternative to bitcoin. This is because it utilizes proof of space and proof of time in place of proof of work.

Ticker- CHIA

Industry- Blockchain

Intention- As a green initiative, the project aims to prevent wasting massive amounts of power to secure a blockchain. However, it also is attempting to lessen the centralization in POW. The Chia token will be farmed with unused storage space like hard drives.

Stage of Development- It is indeed an ecological alternative to support blockchain. But the project published its “green paper” just 2 months back. And we are unsure about its public and network launch in 2019- as it wants to make sure the protocols are confidence-inspiring.

Coda

Coda

Website: https://codaprotocol.com/

Coda is a revolutionary cryptocurrency protocol that aims to build a constant-sized blockchain. And the aim is to scale up the performance for millions of user at a phenomenal throughput.

Ticker- TBA

Industry- Blockchain

Intention- It is a project that targets to compress the blockchain so that even a smartphone user can validate the ledger state. Promising to bring in software transparency into the crypto space, it intends to create a lightweight blockchain. Using zk-SNARKs, Coda blockchain copy utilizes only 22 kb of storage and that is going to remain constant.

Stage of Development- Investors have been pumping money into the project. And the testnet has been up to but we are yet to hear the token sale date from the team.

 

handshake

Handshake

Website: https://handshake.org/

The idea behind Handshake seems too complex. As its founder’s state, the project attempts to recreate the web. But its approach is different than the rest. It plans to replace digital entities that authenticate web payments currently.

Ticker- HNS

Industry- Internet

Intention- Led by the ones who gave internet its current shape, the project will not exactly the DNS protocol. But it will revamp things the root level. It is expected to replace the root zone file and the root servers. And that too with a public commons. As the root zone will be replaced by the Handshake protocol, the root zone becomes permissionless and decentralized.

Stage of Development- Last we heard about the project was in August 2018 when the project raised 10.8 million. Valued at $136 million, the project launched a testnet on Sep 2018. And post that it seems to have entered the stealth mode again. But if Coinbase is eyeing the token, there must be something important brewing in there.

Kadena

Kadena

Website: https://kadena.io/

Another project that is just about to launch in October. The Brooklyn-based start-up developed a lightning-fast network Chainweb, by heavily parallelizing the blockchain. And by doing that its offerings users high transaction volumes without any impact on network speed and network cost.

Ticker- TBA

Industry- Blockchain for business

Intention- Chainweb’s goal is impressive enough. As it intends to produce 1,000 blockchains, all running parallel to each other. And the TPS is expected to be 10,000.

Stage of Development

The waters will be tested soon as the public blockchain is going live in October.

Mobilecoin

Mobilecoin

Website:https://www.mobilecoin.com/

The supporters called the project a game-changer. But we noticed no updates from the team for over a year. Why did it create waves? The answer is right in front of us. As a privacy coin, it promised the community to integrate with a very popular messaging tool like WhatsApp.

Ticker- MBCC

Industry- Cryptocurrency

Intention- Backed by Binance Labs, the project announced it is going to use Stellar’s blockchain network. And it was an obvious choice for the speed and throughput Stellar offers.

Stage of Development- In April 2018, the project raised $30 million funds but post that it seems to be hibernating. Let us wait and watch how soon it surfaces back and becomes part of Coinbase token listing.

Near

Website: https://nearprotocol.com/

NEAR a POS public blockchain that has been sharded and is developer-friendly. With an extensive tool support an easier UX, the platform makes decentralized application development easy. Even for the non-blockchain developers.

Ticker- TBA

Industry- Blockchain Development

Intention- A project that intends to change the ground for non-blockchain developers in the crypto space. And it promises that with smooth developer experience in developing apps on the blockchain. But on top of that, it offers cost-effective throughput via sharding.

Stage of Development- In June 2019, the project had a lot of updates regarding the project. They announced, they were extremely close to deploying the Nightshade consensus to TestNet. It further communicated that the wallet can be used to send money and contracts can be deployed on Rust.

That’s an impressive pace.

nervos

Nervos

Website: https://www.nervos.org/

One project that came a long way during the bearish market. It comes across as a layered blockchain network that promises higher throughput for the DeFi.

Ticker- CKB

Industry- DeFi

Intention- The Nervos Network promises to solve the issues that are stopping Bitcoin and Ethereum to go mainstream. That said, it has a collection of protocols and public blockchain where assets are stored in a secure and permissionless manner. At the same time, it offers a layer 2 for smart contracts.

Stage of Development- It recently partnered with Huobi and that’s what we call a feather in the cap. The project is providing the technology for the development of a new blockchain platform by Huobi. And that is going to testnet launch in early 2020.

oasis

Oasis

Website: https://www.oasislabs.com/

One project that is on roll is Oasis. And it impresses the community as it is developing smart-contract technology for “privacy-preserving”. This is so important because currently, every node needs to execute every smart contract. That said, both privacy and speed of the blockchain are hampered.

Ticker- TBA

Industry- DeFi

Intention- Using blockchain technology, the project is attempting to build a “privacy-first” cloud computing platform. And that is expected to accelerate the blockchain adoption. As that will help overcome the limitations in performance, security, and privacy.

Stage of Development

A lot for development work is happening at Oasis Labs. With the Devnet 2.0 launch in Aug 2019, it has delivered a simple API that makes using DApps easy. But are they close to mainnet? We are yet to know that.

orchid

Orchid

Website: https://www.orchid.com/

The still in development project Orchid targets to enable private internet browsing. And eventually plans to penetrate the VPN market with more transparency, privacy and fair pricing.

Ticker- OCT

Industry- Decentralized Internet

Intention- The project has been designed in a way that the internet users get incentivized for sharing their network bandwidth. Such an ecosystem will help build a bigger network where micropayments can be made for sharing bandwidth.

Stage of Development- After raising a total of $43 million in its pre-token sale in May 2019, the project is taking its development seriously. Very soon it’s launching a mobile VPN on iOS and Android much like the TOR network. And now the community is curious about its beta launch.

Solana

Solana

Website: https://solana.com/

Claims are high! The project promises a 50,000 TPS blockchain network to the users spread across 200 nodes. And that is because of technological breakthroughs. As a performant blockchain, it is expected to be the first web-scale decentralized network.

Ticker- TBA

Industry- Blockchain

Intention- The goal of the team was always clear. As they wanted to build a decentralized, permissionless network that had performance levels of a single node.

Stage of Development- As a web-scale blockchain, the project in its last leg of development as the Testnet is already out. And many projects like Everstake are already scrutinizing the revolutionary technology platform of Solana

Spacemesh

Spacemesh

Website: https://spacemesh.io/

Using the mesh technology and a brand new Proof of Space-Time consensus protocol, it targets to replace POW for good.

Ticker- TBA

Industry- Cryptocurrency

Intention- By leveraging its Spacemesh protocol, the project allows users to make a contribution towards network security. And that too by utilizing the unused storage space on their hard drives

Stage of Development- On the 13th of September, the project released an updated version of its Spacemesh protocol paper. And in July 2019, a core developer walked the Twitter community through proof of space-time local testnet. It’s quite reassuring to see that the project is close to a testnet launch.

And now the observation

It was quite interesting to notice that most of the projects revolved around Web-3.0. Is decentralized web the next big thing? While a fistful of projects, targets to improve the blockchain performance by offering whopping TPS and network security. It is the decentralized internet that seems to be making the most out of blockchain.

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