[DarpalRating]Our Ratings, Thoughts and Ranking on some major cryptos

5 min readMar 23, 2018

March 24th, 2018; by Darpal Rating team, Translated by Tyler Garant

What is this list?

After that we launched our reviews and audit reports, many readers came to ask our views on the major cryptos on the market, so we decide to package it into a Ranking list.

Our Cryptocurrency Rating list includes the ratings of different cryptocurrencies with our evaluation models: Embryo, Growth and Mature. Each model is tailored for Cryptos in different development progress. The 2 additional dimensions Risk and Popularity provide more aspects of the projects.

Details explained:

Downgrades:

NEO (NEO): A lively discussion on social media has brought attention to some problems that might exist in NEO, such as a complete centralization of consensus nodes (all controlled by NEO Council), low capacity (a single ICO, TNC, turns down the entire chain for more than 20 minutes), flaws with smart contract and synthetic financial barriers in deploying smart contracts and so on. Meanwhile the official statement from NEO, “A Statement from NEO Council,” sought to acknowledge and dispute these issues. The scores of corresponding factors have to be reduced according to our crypto rating model “Maturity.” Considering the size and strength of their community, NEO still receives a comparatively high rating in the community dimension. The NEO/GAS bilateral configuration and theoretically efficient dBFT consensus algorithm both provide reason for the growth and success of NEO’s own ecosystem. Even so, given their crucial technical issues, NEO has to be downgraded to a grade of B- with a score of 79.7.

IDT (InvestDigital): Due to lack of progress and poor performance on the market, we have decreased the score of IDT but have still kept its rating at C+.

Upgrades:

EOS (EOS): In our recent code audits for January and February, EOS was among the top projects thanks to the high activity of the developing team and the completion of their 2018 Q1 milestone. Therefore, the rating of EOS was raised to B-.

AE (Aeternity): According to our continuous project tracking, AE performed well in the most recent code audits, with notable fulfillments and high involvement in team participation. Consequently, AE’s graded score was increased but it is still rated as C+.

XMR (Monero): Monero’s score rose because of the official announcement that XMR will hard fork with several updates and anti-ASIC algorithms.

ABT (ArcBlock): Prof. Zhang Shoucheng (a prominent Chinese investor, founder of Danhua Capital) has joined the advisor team, so we have increased the score of ABT but have still kept its rating at C+.

SNT (Status): Due to rapid development and considerable fulfillments, we have upgraded SNT to C+.

NULS (Nuls): The official technical yellow paper was released with many new advancements. The NULS community is also very active. We upgraded NULS to C+.

TRX (Tron): Tron has taken action toward building its development team and committing code more regularly, so we have upgraded TRX to D+.

Freshly added:

ZIL (Zilliqa): As one of the few remarkable projects aiming to become a next-gen high-throughput blockchain platform, ZIL has performed very well since ICO. According to the company’s official release, ZIL’s latest testnet trial run achieved 2488 TPS with 6 shards and 3600 nodes. Key features of ZIL include network sharding, transaction sharding, secure and efficient consensus algorithm (with scalable signature scheme CoSi), computational sharding, data-flow smart contract language and profitable mining. The team behind ZIL has both distinguished academic backgrounds and solid engineering experience. Taken altogether, ZIL is rated as B+.

DCR (Decred): A great blockchain project that is not as well-known as others, DCR has a creative hybrid POW+POS consensus scheme, with a strong focus on autonomy, open governance, sustainable funding, and development. DCR’s principles and evolution are entirely consistent with blockchain’s decentralized spirit. Thus, we rate DCR as B+.

NANO (Raiblocks): Since November 2017, the price of NANO has skyrocketed. Its revolutionary block-lattice architecture guarantees instantaneous transaction and great scalability. However, the dPos consensus leads to the specific problem of centralization, which is apparent from the representatives list. Furthermore, most of NANO’s code is committed by NANO’s founder. They lack community contributed code. NANO is rated as B-.

BNB (Binance Coin): As the industry benchmark, there is no doubt as to Binance’s profitability, which ensures the buy-back mechanism. Binance has also decided to officially launch the development of the Binance Chain, which means that BNB will exist on its own blockchain mainnet as a native coin. BNB is rated as B-

ONT (Ontology): One of the most fashionable projects of late, ONT has an ambitious vision, lots of institutional investors, experienced developers and a strong background. However, at the present time ONT can only be judged based on its white paper and website. The code is not open source and there is no further material available for evaluation at this time. The risk level is relatively high. Given the above, ONT is rated at B-.

XLM (Stellar): Similar to XRP, XLM has a centralized distribution （筹码集中） and has already been the recipient of significant speculation. However, XLM is essentially less centralized than XRP. XLM is rated as C-.

RFR (Refereum): With excessive hype, a low ceiling due to limited use case, and weak token utilities, RFR is rated as D+.

GEM (Gems): Given the levels of hype surrounding this project, Gems’ nature as a highly speculative investment is clear. The price has dropped below the ICO price. GEM also possesses a chaotic and nontransparent funding procedure. GEM is rated as D+.

BEC (Beauty Chain): Along with a poor website and an extremely centralized token distribution (99.9% of tokens are not in circulation), the single-player token BEC is rated as E+.