As ICOs and other blockchain projects continue to rack in billions in prospective funding, many projects have emerged from their initial investment phases with an abundance of funding to spend on their projects. For those struggling to keep track of all the promising projects out there in the blockchain ecosystem, below is a quick summary of just 20 prominent, well-funded projects out there, from least to most.
What they do: A cryptocurrency exchange platform that combines digital technology along with traditional finance, providing access to digital currency pairs while maintaining a liquid and secure trading environment.
[maxbutton id="1" ]
Competitive advantage: One of the worlds largest trading exchanges, Binance enjoys a strong reputation among the blockchain community. ICOs are eager to get their tokens listed on the exchange.HQ Location: Tokyo, Japan
What they do: A financial technology company that empowers digital asset networks to digitize, trade, and manage any asset as well as reduces operating costs.Competitive advantage: Reduced operational costs thanks to their customizable, scalable, and highly secure platform.HQ Location: New York, United States
What they do: A platform that helps make it easy to create asset-backed tokens that can be exchanged across the world. Their first token was the TrueUSD token, a well-known stablecoin in the industry.Competitive advantage: Founded by an illustrious team from Stanford, Airbnb, Goldman Sachs, PayPal, and Google alumni and employees.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: A digital currency trading platform in Canada - and available internationally through licensing deals.Competitive advantage: Coinsquare has never lost a coin since its inception and maintains a strict cold storage policy.HQ Location: Toronto, Ontario
What they do: A crypto-investment firm that focuses entirely on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, as well as other blockchain companies in the ecosystem.Competitive advantage: Unlike other investment funds, they are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the explosive growth potential of crypto due to their exposure in the sector. This makes them an attractive investment platform for crypto-enthusiasts.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: Blockchain Inc is a web-based bitcoin platform that uses innovative software to make purchasing bitcoin safe, secure, and easy for everyone involved.Competitive advantage: Strong user base of over 3,000,000 users built over a 5 year period since launching in 2011.HQ Location: Luxembourg
What they do: An open source software company that also produces hardware to help create virtual reality experiences with anyone across the planet.Competitive advantage: One of the few blockchain projects in the marketplace that focus on innovating in the virtual reality space.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: A world-leading designer of hardware-based blockchain wallets. With over 1,000,000 units sold in 165 countries, the company also provides an enterprise-level product called the Vault for safeguarding large amounts of cryptocurrency.Competitive advantage: The world-leading expert in cryptocurrency wallet development.HQ Location: Paris, France
What they do: Ripple offers a seamless way for participants to send money across the world in real-time, letting banks and financial institutions interact with each other without a central correspondent.Competitive advantage: The Ripple platform lets large institutions transfer funds across borders without paying exorbitant transaction fees.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: tZero is a financial technology firm that develops its own specialized solutions for the capital markets, along with having its own trading platform that supports the exchange of equity tokens.Competitive advantage: tZeros products promise to help make financial markets more efficient, transparent, as well as liquid.HQ Location: Midvale, United States
What they do: A token-based social network that lets senders pay users in digital currency to complete tasks and reply to emails, letting millions of regular users on the platform get paid in crypto.Competitive advantage: The first blockchain-powered solution dedicated to helping individuals get paid for completing micro-tasks on the network.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: Formerly known as Basecoin, Basis is a price-stable cryptocurrency known for its algorithmic central bank. The platform automatically adjusts supply and demand to ensure that the price of the coin remains stable.Competitive advantage: As one of the few stablecoins on the market at the moment, crypto investors looking for a safe place to store their value are drawn to the token for precisely that reason.HQ Location: New York, United States
What they do: Another cryptocurrency investment firm that focuses exclusively on managing a portfolio of emerging digital asset classes.Competitive advantage: Focusing on altcoins and emerging digital assets gives plenty makes BlockTower Capital an attractive investment for more speculative crypto-investors.HQ Location: New York, United States
What they do: Blockstream is a FinTech company that helps accelerate innovation in the cryptocurrency, digital asset, and smart contract arenas through their open-source platforms specifically designed to test applications.
[maxbutton id="1" ]
Competitive advantage: The company has a unique innovation idea called sidechains, bitcoin-like ledgers that exist independently of, but remain related to, bitcoin.HQ Location: Montreal, Canada
What they do: Bancor is a blockchain protocol that allows users to convert directly between different cryptocurrencies they already own, as opposed to having to exchange them on an exchange. This process ends up saving both time and money.Competitive advantage: The Direct exchange between currencies means that users wont need to pay transaction fees on exchanges.HQ Location: Zug, Switzerland
What they do: A venture capital firm that invests in blockchain technology companies and ICO. Launched in 2013, the firm was one of the first to accept capital calls in Bitcoin, and helps numerous startups grow into the marketplace.Competitive advantage: As one of the first venture capital firms dedicated to supporting blockchain start-ups, the company enjoys both expertise as well as a great reputation in the marketplace.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: A digital currency wallet service that lets merchants, consumers, and traders transact with each via digital currency. Users can create their own wallets and start buying tokens by connecting with their bank accounts.Competitive advantage: One of the industry leaders with a foothold in the marketplace, Coinbase enjoys a reputation as one of the most reliable and mainstream platforms in the market.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: A decentralized blockchain that was meant to be a self-amending, self-governing platform. Unfortunately, the ambitious dream ended up in a series of lawsuits. Currently, the project still is moving forward, although without the same hype as before.Competitive advantage: The promise that developers would be able to propose and vote on technical improvements to the blockchain network.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: One of the industries earliest manufacturers of Bitcoin mining hardware (ASICs) and other related products, as well as operating some of the worlds largest bitcoin mining pools.Competitive advantage: Worlds leading expert in dedicated cryptocurrency mining hardware.HQ Location: Beijing, China
What they do: A stock brokerage application that democratizes access to the financial market. Every customer can buy any US-listed ETF or security, but also most forms of cryptocurrencies as well. The company sees enough crypto volume going through its accounts that it might overtake dedicated crypto-giants such as Coinbase.Competitive advantage: Simplifying the process of investing for the common person, reducing barriers to entry to both conventional as well as digital assets.HQ Location: San Francisco, United States
What they do: An open source software publisher that specializes in providing end-to-end solutions to developers and businesses, helping them integrate their business operations from strategic planning to product deployment onto the blockchain.Competitive advantage: Besides the billion in funding achieved, the project is led by Dan Larimer, the inventor of the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism.HQ Location: George Town, Cayman Islands
On this list alone theres a over $6.8B USD in funding (over $8.9B CAD) for blockchain and cryptocurrency startups. While a lot comes from crowdfunding and ICOs, a good chunk also comes from private investments and venture capitalists. This funding not only gives companies the opportunities to innovate, but also to out last downturns in the market and work to build out full-fledged solutions that could help the world see the full potential of blockchain technology.
Buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital currencies on Coinsquare, Canadas most secure trading platform.
[maxbutton id="2"]
