3 Upcoming ICO’s You Don’t Want to Miss
Aragon
Crowdsale begins: May 17
Project Lead: Luis Cuende, Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, MIT TR35. He previously cofounded the blockchain startup Stampery.
Tech Lead: Jorge Izquierdo, curious hacker, creator of multiple apps for iOS, macOS and Pebble.
Whitepaper: https://github.com/AragonOne/whitepaper/raw/master/Aragon%20Whitepaper.pdf
Imagine an organization where founders, employees and investors can trade their shares seamlessly. Aragon is an application running on Ethereum that does that, and many other operations central to running a company, including governance, fundraising, payroll, accounting, and bylaws. Aragon provides all this in a unified, beautiful interface running on the Ethereum blockchain. In general Aragon facilitates decentralized organizations where governance and equity are managed on the platform.
The Aragon Network Token (ANT) is an Ethereum ERC20 token used to power the “Aragon Network”. The Aragon Network is a decentralized organization running on the Aragon app, which will provide core services to other organizations, such as development of smart contracts for decentralized organizations, a bug bounty program, and a decentralized arbitration system. New organizations joining the Aragon Network will need to pay a fee (voted on by ANT token holders), and in return they will get some ANT of their own.
There is no cap on the number of ANT issued and the crowdsale will use a price function that increases over time.
Tezos
Crowdsale begins: May 22
CEO: Arthur Breitman, formerly high frequency trader at Goldman Sachs and options market maker at Morgan Stanley.
COO: Kathleen Breitman, formerly management associate at Bridgewater and strategy associate at R3.
Primary investor: Tim Draper http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tezos-blockchain-draper-idUSKBN181250
Overview: https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/position_paper.pdf
Whitepaper: https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/white_paper.pdf
Tezos is a new blockchain protocol, billed as a “self amending crypto-ledger”. It’s aim is to solve two major issues in current blockchain implementations, governance and smart contract security.
For governance, Tezos has a built-in voting mechanism to allow for changes to the protocol itself, including the consensus algorithm and the transaction layer. It will consist of an outer “shell” program that will converge on only one set of rules, eliminating the possibility of a protocol fork. The notion is that not using the outer shell with its upgrade mechanism, would be categorically rejected by all users. The concept of a program that can modify itself comes from philosopher Peter Suber and the game Nomic.
For smart contract security, Tezos uses a functional programming language, OCaml, which is mathematically rigorous to avoid “side-effect” bugs, unintended consequences that caused The DAO hack for instance. Tezos also limits the number of operations that any one smart contract can perform. If longer operations are needed they must occur over multiple transactions.
Tezos uses a Proof-of-Stake for voting and consensus.
Status
Donation Period begins: Maybe Mid June
Co-founder: Carl Bennets, also co-founded Opulence.
Co-founder: Jarrad Hope, also co-founded Opulence.
Status is an ethereum light client designed to bring the benefits of the blockchain to everyday smartphone users. Think of it as Mist or MetaMask for you mobile device. Status is part cryptographic messaging service, part web3 browser. This allows Status to interact with dapps (decentralized applications). Two dapps, named Console & Wallet, are currently running in their Alpha, which was released at the beginning of this year and is only running on the Ropsten testnet.
The project is completely open sourced and the team is distributed globally. There are almost 1,500 people in both the dapp-chat & dev-status slack channels, both of which are very active. Status uses the Whisper protocol for messaging and depends on the light client protocol (LES).
The beta release aims to be out sometime this year. In the upcoming roadmap a major focus will be on exposing a chat API. The API will allow for dapps to integrate with chat functions and chatbots. There are also plans to add support for Solidity, importing from existing wallets and implementation of Swarm, which will allow for audio and image file sharing.
To fund this development and to give thanks to the early supporters and developers who have been working on the project Status plans to issue Status Genesis Tokens (SGT). The contribution period will most likely be in mid June, although no official date has been announced. A more formal announcement about the token model and contribution period will be made next week. Status Genesis Tokens (SGT) will be available to swap for Status Network Tokens (SNT) when the network is up and running. Both are ERC20 tokens. It is not clear how the tokens will be used within the Status platform as of yet. The team has made it very clear that people who contribute should be doing so not as an investment but because they support the vision the team has and want to see it realized.
To find out more about Status or how you can contribute join their slack and github and check out their wiki and blog.
