Carry Protocol have noticed that the traditional offline retail is a $25 trillion industry, capturing at least 90% of all retail spending, which generates lots of data. While many companies try to put more focus on online shopping, Amazon's $14 billion acquisition of Whole Foods reflects the strategic importance of linking online with offline. While it's easy to track user behaviour and data in online activity, it is much harder for regular brick-and-mortar retailers to benefit from all of these helpful data, which can significantly boost sales. The system aims to empower customers, merchants and also advertisers. They want to provide payment terminals which can support crypto payments in regular shops, branded tokens which can act as loyalty points and bonuses, a wallet API for payments that enables consumers to manage their own privacy and optionally monetize their transaction data and a targeted advertising system. The interesting feature is that customers have access to the type of data their produce and can anonymously monetize it, which finally gets back the power and control over our data back to the people and not big companies. The site is very well designed and provides a lot of information about the project, which makes it easy to understand and research for potential investors. The team is relatively big and most importantly consists mostly of developers, designers, programmers and blockchain specialists, which means they will be easy to deliver the promised technology and system.

First and foremost, the project gives a very professional vibe, the site is well designed and it's a pleasure to navigate through it and look for project's details and information. The whitepapers easily explain the sole idea, the current problem and potential possibilities for such platform as the market they are targeting is very large and can generate lots of revenue. I think the project is prepared very well both from the technical side, as their team consists of skilled and experienced developers but also from the strategic side and they have a high chance of succeeding both in conducting the ICO, but also delivering the system.

Ankr Network (2985)

ANKR is a blockchain company that offers cloud computing services by utilizing blockchain to enable a distributed cloud computing service which gives a user-friendly structure. The company uses 6th generation CPUs with Intel SGXs which are used to allow app developers to create barriers to protect sensitive data and avoid malware. Also, this tech allows apps to preserve the confidentiality of the data on the system. It uses a proof of useful work (PoUW) consensus protocol. Rather than spending energy for nothing with mining just like Bitcoin does, this new consensus protocol actually utilizes the electricity for useful and important tasks, which is considerably more useful overall. This market is projected to grow a lot in the coming years and it can even become a trillion dollar market in the near future, yet it is monopolized by some of the largest tech conglomerates in the world. Overall Ankr's innovations include Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) Consensus Protocol(this new consensus protocol actually uses the electricity for useful tasks unlike bitcoins), a Seamless interface of Oracle service (This service will authenticate data feed by leveraging them), a multi-chain structure supporting consortiums (that will allow people to use smart contract to deal with other chains, which cause even more decentralization of business). The team was made by the trio Chandler Song (Co-founder & CEO), Stanley Wu (Co-founder & CTO) and Ryan Fang (Co-founder & COO) and have gathered an experienced team and has research partners of the company are Blockchain at Berkeley, CPC, DoraHacks along with the strategic investors OJ Lab, NGC, DHVC, OK Blockchain Capital, LINKVC, GBIC and Block VC.

As the cloud computing market could reach a trillion dollar market which according to me is a huge thing and will be used a lot and very often in the coming future. The website has been professionally designed providing its users with a great user interface and the information provided is important and sufficient. As there have been new updates in the technology, it has affected the development of fine tech industry and ANKR could be of high value if it can execute its potential. So overall I personally would like to be a part of its project and my most favorite part about this project is its proof of useful work (PoUW) consensus protocol.

SPARKSTER is a decentralized platform that aims to democratize the application development process by cultivating a functional software skill services for its users. With more entities examining the possible benefits of these decentralized applications, It hopes their vision of democratizing the access to software innovation will help users make their ideas into realities. That is in line with its vision to provide software skills and tools for the customers looking to leap forward by building their first decentralized applications. By all the features it provides such as drag and drop interfaces for users to present a possible sample of their DApp design and features, Integration option for the application testing in an actual real-world reality, Define application behavior in plain English for the less-than-tech-savvy users it hopes it will help cultivate the app making process among many more. It will result in faster app development as it will use of a plain English code system to replace the typical code syntax resulting in the reduction in the cost of app development. As an effort to revolutionize cloud computing, it provides for a decentralized cloud platform to sustain the application's transactions and empower the application owners and seamless application operations are a result of this Sparkster Decentralized Cloud transaction rate (TPS) that accelerates the process. Its token symbol is SPARK and is based on the Stellar platform accepting XLM, ETH, BTC, USD, XRP and is priced 1 SPARK=0.15 USD. Its hard cap is $30 million whereas the soft cap is $5 million.

To be frank, Sparkster is not presenting a novel idea since there already exists multiple ventures which are working to provide many similar services in a better way. However, the feature that is unique for their platform is its coding language that could present a single and straightforward selling point. Also, it already has a working product in their cloud service possessing a TPS rate of 6k transactions. Overall the team looks determined and concentrated on getting the project to work and this is a huge plus point for a bright future.

Kairos claims to be the first artificial intelligence-driven ETF for blockchain assets. It is a crypto-asset management fund which is run by an AI program and is focused on trading blockchain-based assets. Its objective is to make informed investment decisions and better-calculated risk while investing in volatile crypto markets. The AI agent running the platform is called Kairos and is described as “predictive by nature, and analyzes mass data sets with incredible speed and accuracy.” The Kairos AI manages the Kairos Fund by optimizing and harnessing the vast investment potential available in the crypto markets. It is being developed by two companies, including Rocky Mountain Ayre Inc. (RMTN) and Ocubicle Inc) which are sharing their physical and intellectual resources to bring the platform to life. Kairos’s whitepaper describes details about the AI system’s investment strategy. The company claims “many factors are implicitly considered” before Kairos invests in a crypto asset. Some of the considerations are underpriced crypto assets with long-term growth potential, crypto assets that are experiencing strong and consistent growth, assets within a certain market capitalization range, assets deemed to be a good value relative to the value of the company’s business. Kairos is led by Timi Olorunyomi, a tech entrepreneur who has a considerable experience of more than 10 years. Other members being Timothy Ayre as a financial market expert having 25 years of Wall Street experience.

As far as I know, Kairos isn’t the only trading bot on the market. There are numerous options inside and outside the cryptocurrency community. It has not published its performance results publicly at this time but will start investing in markets in September, and then begin publishing its results in December. So currently I have neutral feelings about this project, All its aspects are fine but would they succeed in their goals is what time will tell.

Due to the exponential growth of internet-enabled devices, it is estimated that by 2020 15 billion terabytes of data will be generated per year. However, currently, there is no effective solution for processing and analyzing this data to make use of it. Hypernet is aiming to solve this problem by building a decentralized computational power marketplace to enable billions of devices around the world to utilize idle processing power. The ecosystem matches buyers - anyone with a need for computing e.g. researchers, with sellers - anyone who owns a device with excess processing power e.g. laptops, PCs, tablets, with Hypertokens facilitating the payment. In a centralized data center, as much as 85% of the price of computing can be attributed to infrastructure, hardware, maintenance, personnel, and cooling. Hypernet eliminates much of these costs, resulting in greatly reduced prices for computing. This should help aid adoption of the network. It has a strong team with several members holding PhDs from Stanford. CoFounder Daniel Maren founded Solar Electronics Company Dragonfly Systems and received a Forbes 30 under 30 award, others have founded successful start-ups and worked for a diverse set of organizations including NASA, Nvidia, Facebook, and Twitter. Whilst the team are certainly very accomplished in a variety of fields, it is a slight concern that none of them have experience developing blockchain related projects. The Hypernet sub-Reddit currently only has 500 members. Reddit has a huge cryptocurrency community, it would be good for the team to work on this. Although, this is only a minor concern given the Telegram already has over 10,000 members.

Hypernet promises to bring in a new breakthrough in the distributed computing world, through their new proposed principle of Distributed Average Consensus, they want to tap into the power of every device to its fullest to facilitate new science, power smart cities, and enable large-scale data processing. With the details of the token metrics awaited at this stage and a reasonable expected hard cap (their closest competitor Golem has a market cap of 600m+ and Hypernet claims to be a better technology than Golem with a team from Stanford to back up their claims), this could very well be one of the most promising projects to look forward to in 2018!

The blockchain is experiencing challenges from a relatively new technology known as Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Whereas the blockchain smart contracts rely on “blocks,” the DAG version will run each transaction through a chain that solves it making the solution faster, therefore, enhanced execution. FANTOM is a DAG-based platform that will allow users to establish and execute smart contracts in a much flexible and scalable manner compared to blockchain-based agreements. Often without realization, most people do not realize that the blockchain technology carries its transactions and smart contracts within the blocks which run under the miners. With them in between it often presents several risks which tend to snag the trades. Through the DAG elimination of miners, the deals will go on quicker since the solution eliminates different transactions. The Opera Chain is the main component and works to confirm one transaction at a time without rights to modify any of the previously approved purchases. This will provide benefits like instant settlements, low fees, infinite scalability and more. The FANTOM platform main token (FTOM) will adopt an inflationary system which enables the expansion of the ecosystem. The total token supply will be 3.55 billion with an initial 5% inflation rate annually. Once the price reaches 20%, the rest of the tokens go into offering incentives and rewards for the FANTOM platform users. Still, it is tactful to note that the idea is still primarily on paper and plans to roll out once it finalizes all its developments at the beginning of 2019.

In conclusion, the FANTOM platform can genuinely change despite the foreseeable challenges. It smart contracts system could go into helping companies and individuals to build advanced business models for their economic quest. Additionally, their token model is somewhat unique as it helps to safeguard the value of the currency and ultimately regulate inflation levels. Will FANTOM become the future of smart contracts? Who knows, but it is probably wise to not bet against it at the moment.

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