Originally based off of Ripple’s protocol, Stellar Lumens now runs on its own network. Stellar Lumens is a decentralized alternative and acts as a nonprofit organization aiming to connect people internationally to low cost financial services. The coins main functionality is to make international, mobile and micro-payments frictionless. Focused on the developing world, Stellar’s infrastructure aims to fight poverty by enabling users access to currency just by having an internet connection. XLM has security features that function as an anti spam tool on it’s network and caters users the ability of multi currency transactions with each other. Users will be able to do this without the seller or buyer needing to touch the currency. The network can handle thousands of transactions per second, with a 3-5 second confirmation time.

Monero

Monero is a cryptocurrency designed to be used completely anonymously, it is secure, untraceable, private and fungible. It has a reputation for being a big part of the silk road and dark-net markets used for illegal activities/products. Bitcoin’s blockchain records all transactions on a completely public ledger, so if you know someone’s address, you could identify their transaction history. With Monero you are completely under the radar. Monero is solving this problem by implementing cryptographic hashing of receiving addresses, therefore separating the coin from the address it is going to, making the sender unknown. If the previous owner of a Bitcoin you hold, used it to buy drugs, that will be forever in the transaction history of it, but with Monero neither you or no one else can find out what your token was used for before. Monero is completely private.

NEO

Referred to as China’s Ethereum, NEO is a non-profit community-based blockchain project that utilizes blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets, to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, and to realize a “smart economy” with a distributed network. NEO has two tokens, NEO and NeoGas, abbreviated GAS. NEO gives the rights to manage the network while users pay in GAS to deploy and run smart contracts. One example of NEO’s function would be to tokenize the title of a house into a smart asset, and then setting up that asset to automatically transfer to another person after the payment has been received. This allows the network to facilitate the renter and landlord payment with no central authority. Neo tokens can be transferred and multiple participants can exchange assets across different chains. It’s smart contract system can overcome the jamming effect caused by static fragmentation that other blockchain systems face. NEO makes it possible for cross-chain collaborations and smart contracts to perform different parts on multiple chains, either succeeding or failing as a whole.