The crypto world has evolved fast over the past years, transforming itself from a bitcoin-driven ecosystem into a blossoming landscape with a diversity of cryptocurrencies and technologies. All these offer the potential to change the way we live and work.

Along with the price surge in the past few years particularly in 2017, the crypto space has received huge amount of attention. Plenty of people choose to invest directly cryptocurrencies with or without knowledge about it, and some take on the bandwagon by starting up blockchain firms.

In an effort to discover high-quality blockchain-related projects and insightful investors, 8BTC, the foremost and oldest crypto social media site in China, in collaboration with TokenInsight, a local crypto ratings agency, creates 7 top lists of the most popular and promising crypto projects and teams that are performing as pathfinders and disruptors.

The impetus for creating the top lists is “a lack of completely ‘clean’ and non-commercial rating” for cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects, according to 8btc co-CEO Wang Lei.

“The ranking is clean and non-commercial with data all open sourced, and meant to be future guiding. By creating this ranking of Blockchain Insight, we want to rebuild trust within the industry and reunite the industry particularly in this crypto winter…”

According to TokenInsight CEO Hu Tao, the ratings team, first read up on 2,000+ project whitepapers and sorted out the initial categories for investors. Via the code monitoring and access to data onchain and offchain, the team then had a better knowledge of these projects; the following step is to conduct risk assessments and the top 200 projects were graded.

A total of 81 projects from 7 areas make into the final top lists.

• Most valuable decentralized platforms: Ethereum, EOS, NEO, TRON, Qtum, Nebulas, Tezos, ICON, Lisk, Cardano, Aelf, Quarkchain
• Most valuable exchanges: Coinbase, Binance, Huobi Global, OKEx, Bitfinex, Bithumb, Kraken, KuCoin, Liquid, Bibox
• Most valuable mining pools: Antpool, F2pool, BTC.com, ViaBTC, BTC.TOP, Slush Pool, Poolin, Ethermine, Dwarf Pool, Huobi Pool
• Most valuable wallets: Cobo Wallet, Qbao Network, BitKeep, Kcash Wallet, Math Wallet, Freewallet, HB Wallet, BlueWallet, MEET.ONE, Nano S, KeepKey, imToken, Bitpie, Model T, Secrypto, ONE
• Most promising teams: Bitcoin, Ethereum, CyberMiles, Augur, ReddCoin, Ontology, Aion, KuCoin Shares
• Best-performed blockchain apps: VeChain, Factom, SingularityNET, Golem, Cortex, Wanchain, Bytom, Populous, Stratis, Cindicator, Basic Attention Token, Theta, Status, CyberMiles, Syscoin
• Most insightful value finders: Pantera Capital, Node Capital, FBG Capital, Fenbushi Capital, 8Decimal Capital, Danhua Capital, Matrix Partners China, ZhenFund, Draper Dragon, NEO Global Capital

Apart from those most talked about names like bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, etc, a plurality of Chinese blockchain projects have also stood out catching eyes within and outside the country for either their development team or great community supports. Even though some of them have moved abroad since the ICO ban in September 2017 within the territory. (Chinese projects hereinafter refer to projects either based within the country or led by Chinese teams.)

Among the top 14 decentralized platforms – best performers based on 12 key indicators including developing capability (GitHub commits and contributors), community supports, platform starting time, market cap, crypto withdrawal commission, history performance, development schedule, ecosystem (dApps based on it), TPS (Transactions Per Second), user addresses, and performance in secondary market, Ethereum and EOS took the top two positions, followed by four Chinese projects – NEO, TRON, Qtum, Nebulas, as well as three local projects whose mainnets have yet been launched – Aelf, Quarkchain, IOST.

The top list of most valuable decentralized platforms from the Blockchain Industry Insight Whitepaper

Top decentralized platforms

NEO

Founded in 2014, previously known as Antshares, NEO is an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency that builds on the technology used to power Ethereum’s smart contracts. NEO hopes to improve upon Ethereum’s technology to provide a faster, smarter and more secure cryptocurrency, and it has been on the way to realize network decentralization.

NEO has rocketed in price during the second half of 2017, although prices have stabilized below the highs of August. Like other currencies and platforms, NEO hopes to become a standard by which users can transfer money and accept payments without the usual fees or delays.

As one of the foremost Chinese blockchain projects, NEO takes the lead in market cap among Chinese projects, according to the ranking, in addition, its blockchain now facilitates 75 dApps.

TRON (TRX)

TRON is a blockchain platform launched as the foundation for a decentralized entertainment ecosystem. It is a controversial blockchain platform that has a habit of grabbing headlines, which partly explains its high score in community support and performance in the secondary market.

Focusing on expanding the market of decentralized digital content applications by making it easier to create and deploy them, it is designed to ease this transition and hasten the decentralization of existing platforms and creation of new DApps.

Qtum

Qtum is an open sourced public blockchain platform built on UTXO model and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Designed to help developers build decentralized applications, Qtum is designed specifically for improved stability, interoperability and modularity, its block size can be increased without the need of a hard fork.

Using Qtum, businesses and institutions can create their own tokens, engaging in self-executing agreements and automate supply chain management. Qtum is also compatible with Ethereum contracts and Bitcoin gateways, giving it strong cross-platform and backward compatibility.

According to the freshly-released ranking, Qtum got a full mark in developer strength among these listed Chinese projects. 25 dApps are currently running on Qtum blockchain according to official data.

Nebulas (NAS)

Nebulas is an incentive-based, self-evolving blockchain system with a decentralized platform that integrates a blockchain search engine to index and ranks its Dapps, smart contracts, and data, as well as external blockchains.

The blockchain is claimed to be quite easy to get started with for developers and promises smart contracts without scaling worries.

Aelf (ELF)

Aelf is a customizable operating system (OS) specifically for blockchains. The team is aiming for it to be the “Linux system” of the blockchain community, so that DApps could efficiently run on it with scalable solutions.

The project segregates resources and smart contracts through the use of side chains to improve scalability while utilizing a Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus system for more adaptable governance.

Though still being a relatively new competitor in the Dapp platform race, Aelf was graded high in the aspect of TPS.

QuarkChain (QKC)

QuarkChain is a multi-layer, permissionless blockchain designed to enable peer-to-peer transactions. It was developed to address key concerns in scalability that crippled Ethereum’s initial release.

QuarkChain uses sharding to enable sidechain interoperability and achieve over 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).

IOST

IOST is building an ultra-high TPS blockchain infrastructure to meet the security and scalability needs of a decentralized economy.

Its Proof of Believability (POB) consensus mechanism, Efficient Distributed Sharding (EDS) technology and ultra-high Transaction process system (TPS) bring out its unique scalability factor that helps this crypto make its mark.

Most promising teams & best-implemented apps

More teams, like CyberMiles, Ontology and Kucoin Shares, are credited as the most promising teams in terms of Chinese projects; with regard to best-implemented apps, Chinese projects Vechain, Wanchain, Bytom, Theta and CyberMiles have made themselves visible on the top list.

 

Vechain (VET)

Vechain, also an enterprise-level blockchain solution provider, has implemented blockchain solutions across various industries such as luxury goods, liquor and agriculture, with these use cases already launched on the market globally.

Wanchain (WAN)

Wanchain is a cross-chain blockchain infrastructure designed to facilitate asset transfers and host dApps for the financial industry. From investments to banking, payments, and more, it hopes to replace legacy banking system around the globe with blockchain-based solutions using its coin.

Bytom (BTM)

Bytom is an interactive protocol of multiple byte assets. It takes a unique tri-layer approach to blockchain distributed applications with the adoption of AI-friendly POW mechanism, creating a faster, more secure payment system and has potential in the field of Big Data too.

Theta

Theta is a work-in-progress blockchain designed for peer-to-peer video streaming. It aims to be a decentralized video Content Distribution Network (CDN) by allowing anyone with spare bandwidth to become video distribution nodes.

CyberMiles (CMT)

CyberMiles is a smart blockchain network designed to facilitate fast e-commerce transactions. It has built highly customized solutions for the e-commerce companies to deploy their business on the blockchain with ease.

Ontology (ONT)

Ontology is an enterprise-grade blockchain project that provides secure and unique client chains, designed to protect data and systems. It is created as a way for businesses of all sizes to install blockchain technology within their company with simple process, at the same time, without having to completely change all of their current systems.

Despite the crackdown on ICO and crypto activities within the country together with industry winter, China is still an influence in the crypto space, with so many prominent projects and diligent teams still moving forward.