Almost every crypto aficionado remembers 2017, the year that saw a massive boom on all cryptocurrency accounts, from Bitcoin’s incredible surge from $900 to $20,000 at the end of the year, to thousands of exciting new projects hitting the market.
Fast forward to 2018, and though we aren’t seeing the same kind of financial inputs, we are still seeing various new exciting projects with each passing day, as well as projects that have to deliver on their promises made in 2017.
The crypto community saw various important platform releases and mainnet launches in the first quarter and more in the second quarter. Some of the most important Mainnet releases include Oyster Pearls (PRL) on May 29th, TRON (TRX) on May 31st, EOS (EOS) on June 2nd, and VeChain on June 30th.
And still there are more! Here is our list of the top mainnet launches coming up in the third quarter of 2018:
Zilliqa
The Zilliqa project launched its first testnet in the initial part of 2018, with a second version of the testnet following just a few months later. The summer period has seen the smart contracts alpha launch, as the mainnet launch is scheduled for Q3 2018.
Zilliqa (ZIL) is undoubtedly a very interesting project as its main purpose is that of addressing one of the most pressing issues of any crypto project, scalability. Zilliqa was designed from the ground up to facilitate millions of transactions per second. It’s also the first public blockchain to implement a technology called sharding.
The platform’s network has the ability to actively increase the number of nodes to proportionately match the number of transactions. This means that Zilliqa can always meet the transaction demands, regardless of their number.
OriginTrail
The OriginTrail project (TRAC coin) successfully launched its testnet dubbed Apollo on June 29th. According to OriginTrail’s official roadmap section, a fully decentralized mainnet is scheduled to take part in Q3 2018. The mainnet launch will include a second open call for use-case voting (the first use-case voting opened shortly after its testnet launch), various updates to the IoT protocol, and new office locations in the US.
OriginTrail aims to revolutionize the supply chain management sector by providing businesses with a platform that can store and share data transparently and securely. What started out in life as a straightforward blockchain system for tracking and selling food product is now one of the most prominent names in the supply chain industry.
Bee
The Bee platform (BEE) is all about revolutionizing the way hosts and guests carry out property rental transactions. The peer-to-peer home sharing platform is still in development as it just recently launched select listings for San Francisco properties in the first half of the year. The platform allows homeowners to list their properties on the so-called Beenest.
Clients can then book the properties using cryptocurrency payments while benefit from very low fees. Another benefit of Bee is that it offers unique transparency, meaning that user reviews cannot be manipulated or removed by any central authority.
According to the platform’s roadmap, the mainnet launch is scheduled for Q3 2018. The event will also bring new payment, arbitration, and reputation features. Subsequent to its mainnet launch, the company aims to expand its business to at least 5 US cities in 2019, as well as to United Kingdom, South Korea, and Singapore beyond 2020.
Aeternity
Founded by Vitalik Buterin’s early colleague, Yanislav Malahov, Aeternity (AE) is a popular platform for decentralized apps (dApps) that launched its testnet in 2017. The platform’s main focus is increasing the scalability of smart contracts and dApps by moving them off-chain. To be more precise, instead of running on the blockchain, smart contracts on Aeternity run in private state channels between various parties involved in the said contracts.
According to the official roadmap, Aeternity’s main net launch was originally scheduled for June 30th but is now expected to take place somewhere in August 2018.
Enigma
Enigma (ENG) launched the first version of its testnet on June 30th, allowing developers to create, deploy, and to validate secret contracts within a secure execution environment. According to the project’s roadmap, the mainnet launch is scheduled for Q3. The main benefit of the mainnet launch is that, with it, developers will be able to execute secret contracts on the Ethereum mainnet.
The Enigma project has an interesting philosophy. For starters, Enigma isn’t a typical cryptocurrency project, but rather a privacy protocol that can be used in conjunction with other blockchain projects. In short, Enigma ensures that the partnering blockchain’s nodes don’t see the data they compute.
Cardano
We’ll end our list with a somewhat unusual situation, where a project has already released its mainnet (on September 29th, 2017, to be exact) but without making it available for the large public. Even though Cardano (ADA) has released its mainnet, it is available to only a select few such as miners verified by the Cardano Foundation, Emurgo, and IOHK.
Developed by an early insider in the Ethereum world, Charles Hoskinson, Cardano provides greater transaction speeds (100,000 transactions per second), reliability and security. The ADA cryptocurrency is also said to require very little computing power.
According to the project’s roadmap section, Cardano is planning on launching Shelley to decentralize the network somewhere around Q3 of 2018. If everything goes smoothly, we might even see a public mainnet release in the following period.
Conclusions
As trivial as it might sound, mainnet launches represent a very important milestone in the life of any crypto project. When this milestone is met, the platform in question proves that it is here to stay. The launch of a mainnet also marks the best time for investors to start paying attention to the project in question.
We hope you have found this article to be useful and we hope you will consider tracking these projects based on their long-term investment potential.
