M or New Economy Movement is the first “Smart Asset” blockchain. Smart Assets give users the ability to modify and customize blockchains for their own unique Smart Contracts. NEM is especially beneficial to businesses, its unique platform is a great tool for businesses to manage their assets. XEM is NEM’s unique token, and it is the second most used token in Japan. Differently from Bitcoin, XEMs cannot be mined. All of the tokens have been distributed among NEM’s clients and the only way to obtain XEMs is through transactions. Another unique feature of NEM is that it has one of the cheapest transaction costs among digital assets, exchanging XEM is much cheaper and faster exchanging Bitcoin for instance.

Bitcoin Gold

Bitcoin Gold is a hard fork of Bitcoin.The primary goal of Bitcoin Gold is to simplify the mining process by making it easy for anyone to mine Bitcoin with just basic hardware. The effect of this change will be to enable a whole new class of individuals and businesses to participate in mining this new branch of the Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Gold uses a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm, different than the one used for Bitcoin, and an entirely different mining infrastructure, ensuring that Bitcoin Gold is not in competition with Bitcoin over resources. The purpose for this is to make Bitcoin mining decentralized again.

Wanchain

This technology aims to connect blockchains together. They are isolated now, but Wanchain aims to connect these blockchains together. Wanchain wants to eliminate counterparty risk by allowing blockchains to connect through the Ethereum blockchain through smart contracts. This would allow users of Wanchain to exchange digital assets on the Wanchain blockchain across other blockchains. If there are multiple blockchains continue to coexist, Wanchain could play an important role in a continued motion towards decentralization.