Exceptional Blockchain Projects
By: Jeremy Cheng
Tags: Dapps, Web3, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Technology

Exceptional Blockchain Projects

For those of you just starting to pay attention to the different “altcoin” projects, I am going to attempt to summarize what I think are the more technically interesting ones out there. While fundamentals do matter, I am in no way insinuating any of these projects are “good investments” or not. So if you are a Crypto trader looking to get tips on what’s the next 100x altcoin in the next 2 months, you are probably reading the wrong post. However, if you are interested in getting the cliff notes of what I think is technically exciting out there in this space or looking for a post that will kick you off to further research for a long term investment with strong fundamentals, this post might just be for you.

Before I begin, I am going to first note that I am skipping the trending and technically interesting projects that are already super well known like Ethereum, Cardano, and Polkadot to keep my list under a controllable size. So without further ado, here are 12 of my favorites:

Cosmos Network

Cosmos is simply amazing for building your own proof-of-stake blockchain/dapp. To get started with a full blockchain template with tokens, accounts, and wallets ready for you to start developing with, all you need to do is execute 2 commands after installing Starport:

Voila! Everything is ready to go and you can checkout the localhost link it spits out and see what’s already there:

Pretty amazing right? It’s no wonder why some of the biggest projects out there are built with Cosmos. It scaffolds everything that would otherwise be reinventing the wheel and let you focus on the real innovations of your project. You will also notice that transactions are super fast and IBC will allow for robust cross-chain compatibility which is extremely important for building successful dapps.

For those who require “name dropping” to be convinced, Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain were built with Cosmos. You can also see the rest of the projects built on Cosmos here.

There’s so much more to Cosmos that will turn this into too long of a post so I suggest that you start with their website and documentation and see what the hype is all about yourself.

Akash Network

Speaking of building on Cosmos, Akash Network, a Censorship-resistant, permissionless, and self-sovereign open source cloud was built on Cosmos too! If you are using Kubernetes or containers at work or for fun, you will love this project. It essentially allows for you to host your containers on some of the most robust data centers and compute resources around the world for a fraction of the cost of our existing cloud services like AWS, Google, and Azure. You can learn more about this project from one of my previous posts here or simply visit their website.

Skynet

Skynet AKA SiaSky is a really cool solution for building dapps but perhaps it’s most known for its storage capabilities and how fast the content delivery is. It even has a dapp store where you can monetize your app through them easily. It seems that there’s a lot of interest in the Akash community to use Akash for compute and Skynet for storage too.

Storj

Are you building a dapp coming from a lot of experience building on AWS with S3 or other cloud providers’ block storage services? Well, Storj is probably your answer. It’s a decentralized object storage solution that’s backwards compatible with S3.

IPFS + Filecoin

The IPFS and Filecoin combo has been one of the earliest leaders on building a decentralized internet. It’s also a great solution for storing/archiving files. Although many other similar solutions have popped up over time, this project with strong ties to Stanford University has been the one that remained strong and prevailing against all odds.

Solana

Solana has been one of the most talked about small cap gems lately. Some of my crypto investor contacts are all-in with Solana’s promise for being the blockchain that’s super fast and low cost on transaction. By concept, Solana can handle up to 65,000 transactions per second. It even has a live update on how many transactions has already occurred on chain which is constantly moving on their homepage. Akash also chose Solana as the tech to handle smart contracts since the CEO of Akash deemed Solana to be simply the best solution available.

The side effect of doing super fast transactions at low costs is that Solana’s blockchain is extremely huge in size. Understanding this downfall, Solana decided to partner with Arweave to handle the permanent data storage which seems like a great move on their part.

Theta

Theta is looking to disrupt the video delivery space with blockchain just like how Youtube and Twitch did in the web2.0 days. It already has a working product with a lot of things done right. The advisory team includes some heavy hitters too like Steve Chen (YouTube), Justin Kan (Twitch), and Fan Zhang (Sequoia Capital).

NuCypher

Security and encryption seems to always be the boring topic to the average person but yet, such a pertinent part of all technologies used in the real world. As proven in the past, while the concept of blockchains are more secure than its predecessors, it’s not invincible. NuCypher is looking to provide additional cryptography infrastructure (secrets management and dynamic access control) so that users are provided with more secure dapps that are also privacy friendly.

Brave Rewards

What can I say… Brave is hands down my favorite browser. Aside being a kick ass browser to begin with, it also comes with a privacy focused blockchain based advertising mechanism called Brave Rewards. You can literally earn money from just using your browser. There’s really nothing else out there that comes close to it.

Mysterium

Mysterium is not the only player out there in the dVPN space. However, it’s the only cross-platform solution that just worked when I tried it. The best part of it is that you get to try things out free before you start buying those myst coins to pay for their VPN service.

The Graph

The Graph provides a way for developers to create subgraphs (custom API) to access the open data indexed from Ethereum and IPFS. Need I say more? It definitely is a crucial piece of the dapp equation.

The Internet Computer

I have mixed feelings about this project due to the partial closed source nature and certain aspects of governance (permissioned and require standardized hardware) but nonetheless worth a mention. This project is launched by a non-profit out of Switzerland that has been around for quite some time so it has earned a lot of confidence as a legitimate project by both retail investors as well as institutions. Recently, it got listed on Coinbase and Binance and within just the matter of 24–48 hours, it went from US$0 to US$750. What a crazy bull run or what some of my other friends might call, “pump and dump”.

So what is Internet Computer? Think Ethereum but not just covering the application layer but it plans to replace the whole entire internet stack including networking to replace our existing internet all together. In the past, they have run a decentralized version of Linkedin that is just as fast as the centralized one.

They have been in the past criticized for their Network Nervous System (NNS) component. It has been said that this component has negative implications on privacy and that rather than solving the problem of the existing Internet that has a small number of tyrants ruling it all, it will have a new consolidated tyrant instead. Does this give one organization too much power? I leave that up to you to judge.

Needless to say, since the scope of the project is so large, I would suggest that you look at their website yourself to learn more as this post would turn into a book if I had to share all the underlying concepts of what the Internet Computer is all about.

That’s it!

Hope this list of 12 technically more interesting projects will be a good stepping stone towards your research on your next big dapp project or long term investment.