If you are looking to develop an ICO, you may have considered using Ethereum and ERC-20 as ecosystem to distribute your token. A number of developers and companies however are creating new technologies to address some of the current issues with Ethereum blockchain that lot of ICO’s run on at the moment.
Three new and interesting ICO blockchains, in particular, stand out. They are Stellar, Cardano ADA and NEO. These three have the potential to enable next generation of ICO’s. The technology was developed to address shortcomings of the existing systems such as speed, fees, security and developer’s ability to use them.
What are some of the problems ICO’s currently face?
Transactions can take longer than expected to process and network can potentially encounter scaling and congestion issues. The time it takes for transactions to process is critical when dealing with large number of users. Another issue is transaction fees. If fees are prohibitively expensive then a lot of money being raised will not go to the original project creators but instead will be payable to the network. So what are these alternate blockchains doing to solve these problems for ICO’s?
Stellar
Stellar was co-founded by Jed McCaleb, a very prominent name in the cryptocurrency market via non profit organization called Stellar Development Foundation. The model is targeting various use cases through it’s financial infrastructure. Stellar, while not elaborate as full blown turing complete blockchain, has instead a more simplified and more secure way to create and issue your crypto token. It is said that one could create a simple token within hours while the more complex tokens can take more time to create. This is due to how easy it is to create the smart contracts within Stellar. Stellar also has very minimal transaction fees and can process transactions extremely quickly, somewhere on the order of 1000-10,000 transactions per second.
Cardano
Cardano (while still in development) has similar ICO goals. They intend to do this in the most scientific possible way. The intention is to provide a next generation de-centralized digital currency. ICO tokens may benefit from Cardano due to it’s transaction speed and low fees. Cardano states that “The platform is being constructed in layers, which gives the system the flexibility to be more easily maintained and allow for upgrades by way of soft forks” you can learn more by going to Cardano’s website. For those that want to learn more about how to integrate with Cardano ICO mechanism in the future, you can take a look at the updates from this particular Reddit thread.
NEO
NEO is a not for profit community based blockchain. It utilizes different aspects to create what they refer to as a “smart economy”. NEO states that they want “to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, and to realize a ‘smart economy’ with a distributed network. NEO allows for smart contract creation in multiple languages such as JAVA, .Net, Python and Go. This allows developers familiar with those languages to create smart contracts quickly, whereas with Ethereum developer needs to familiarize themselves with Solidity language. Another benefit offered by NEO is transaction speed as it can handle anywhere between 1000-10,000 transactions per second. NEO does not have transaction fees, but it has however smart contract fees that are payable when creating ICO token. These fees are shown here.