What Constitutes Gambling? Beneath the Distant Gambling Act (RGA), “gambling” is broadly outlined to incorporate betting, gaming, and participating in a lottery.
The RGA defines “betting” to incorporate the staking of money or cash’s worthy of on the end result of the horse-race or sporting function.
Under the Widespread Gaming Houses Act (CGHA), “gaming” refers to any video game involving an element of chance, or of combined chance and ability, where players stand to get funds or revenue’s well worth of benefits.
Games which will not include income (e.g. a simple recreation of mahjong concerning pals without cash concerned) never fall beneath the CGHA.
The CGHA also regulates general public lotteries, which happens to be defined to be a lottery to which the public or any class of the public has or could possibly have access. A “lottery” is defined as any recreation, plan or competition whereby cash or income’s worthy of is dispersed in a method dependent on possibility, whether this type of lottery is held or managed in just or outside the house Singapore.
When is it Legal to Gamble in Singapore? Gaming inside a “frequent gaming property” can be an offence under the CGHA. A “widespread gaming property” features anyplace saved or used for gaming, habitual gaming and public lottery, if the general public has access to it.
As a result, whether or not the gambling conduct in question crosses the line into an illegal act is dependent upon whether or not the gambling venue is stored as a common gaming house, or a location for use for gaming.
Personal gambling Although the CGHA will not provide a definition for personal gambling, it is mostly considered as gambling inside of a spot to which the general public may not have accessibility (e.g. at home).
Personal gambling constitutes an offence When the position exactly where these types of gambling is carried out is saved specifically for the objective of habitual gaming as a standard gaming residence.
Any one identified responsible of gaming in a common gaming residence are going to be responsible for a great as much as $five,000, or to imprisonment for just a phrase approximately six months, or to each.
Gambling in community Gambling in community refers to gambling in a spot to which the public could possibly have obtain and consists of anywhere in which 10 or even more individuals are utilized.
It is against the law to gamble in almost any public location. By way of example, gambling in a funeral held in a very void deck may be illegal as being a void deck is actually a community area.
Having said that, if the funeral is held in a private place (e.g. rented space for occasions) to which the public does not have access, gambling there might be unlawful given that the non-public position in dilemma would not represent a typical gaming property (as described earlier mentioned).
Any one uncovered responsible of gaming in a very community spot will likely be accountable for a good up to $five,000, or to imprisonment for your expression as much as 6 months, or to both of those. Their gaming devices can also be seized and forfeited.
Placing bets with bookmakers Bookmakers’ things to do are controlled under the Betting Act. Underneath the Betting Act, a bookmaker is anyone who receives or negotiates bets or wagers with a funds or credit score foundation in exchange for money or dollars’s value.
Any person who bets or wagers with A personal bookmaker (also called a “bookie”) in any place or by any suggests shall be guilty of the offence. Offenders are going to be accountable for a fine as many as $5,000, or to imprisonment for your phrase nearly 6 months, or to both equally.
Alternatively, it won't be illegal to wager with exempted bookmakers like Singapore Swimming pools, Tote Board and the certified casinos in this article.
Fiddling with jackpot equipment As jackpot gambling falls under the definition of “gaming” while in the CGHA, it is illegal to engage in jackpot gambling in a standard gaming house or in community Except the jackpot machine is found in a very club that is permitted to function the device.
Is there a Minimum amount Age to Gamble Legally in Singapore? The minimal age to gamble lawfully in Singapore may differ in accordance with the venue of your gambling activity. There's no just one minimum age that applies to all gambling routines.
Commonly, You should be a minimum of 18 a long time of age to gamble in Singapore. One example is, Singapore Swimming pools only will allow individuals aged 18 and above to purchase 4D or TOTO tickets, or putting horse racing bets. To get an account with Singapore Pools, you should be at the least 21 yrs outdated.
Beneath the Casino Handle Act, You will need to be at the least 21 several years of age before you decide to can legally gamble in casinos. Minors discovered responsible of faking their age to get entry to your casinos might be chargeable for a wonderful around $1,000.
On line Gambling beneath the Remote Gaming Act What's on the web gambling? Beneath the RGA, “on the net gambling”, often called “distant gambling”, is described as gambling through which players take part by means of distant conversation.
This sort of distant conversation consists of interaction by way of the net, phone, television or radio, or any other form of electronic or other know-how which facilitates conversation.
Legality of on-line gambling Portion 8 of your RGA states that anyone who gambles as a result of remote interaction and makes use of a distant gambling services (stated under) shall be responsible of an offence.
It does not make any difference whether the gambling was completed by the person only, or together with some other human being, or no matter whether the person straight or indirectly participated from the gambling.
What is a gambling provider? A “gambling company” is defined to include a assistance for the:
Conduct of a community lottery; Offer of general public lottery tickets; Placing, producing or accepting of bets; or Carry out of activity of opportunity in which the sport is performed for revenue, or money’s really worth, and buyers give dollars, or revenue’s really worth, to Perform the game. Level (4) on the other hand, won't utilize to social game titles and cell purposes which permit gamers to invest in tokens or activity-enhancement features. This can be given that these games do not provide facilities to transform these tokens or options to revenue, or to authentic-earth goods which may be exchanged for funds.
When is on the internet gambling legal? Online gambling is lawful whether it is completed by means of an exempt operator. Presently, only Singapore Pools and Singapore Turf Club are actually granted certificates of exemption beneath the RGA. Even so, other operators could be granted certificates of exemption in the future.
During the celebration of doubt, It will be finest to get more information as to your exemption standing of operators by lodging an inquiry Using the Ministry of Dwelling Affairs.
Repercussions of illegal on line gambling In case you have participated in unlawful distant gambling exercise, a fiscal institution company might be issued which has a payment blocking purchase which will:
Avoid it from accepting credit prolonged to you personally; Avert it from accepting any cheque, bank draft or identical instrument which can be drawn by or issued to you personally; Avoid it from accepting any resources transfer to or from you; or Trigger it to dam payments or prohibit transactions where these use merchant codes customarily affiliated with gambling transactions. You may also be arrested and not using a warrant.
If you're located responsible of unlawful remote gambling beneath the RGA, you're going to be liable for shell out a great as much as $5,000, or to imprisonment for the time period up to 6 months, or to the two.
Sentencing pointers The sentencing framework for first-time offenders below area 8 with the RGA was thought of in the situation of Lau Jian Bang v PP.
In that case, the court stated that initial-time offenders beneath area eight on the RGA will commonly be fined not less than $one,000 instead of receiving an imprisonment term.
The precise quantity of the good is pegged to the amount of the offender’s bets. Aspects which could enhance the quantity of the fantastic would include actions taken to conceal one’s unlawful bets and deficiency of regret. An offender who pleads guilty inside a well timed fashion or cooperates Along with the authorities may well deal with a more compact fantastic.
An imprisonment phrase will generally only be imposed in conditions involving repeat offenders.
Prohibition versus inviting people beneath 21 to gamble on-line Under part 13 of the RGA, it is actually an offence to ask, permit, or induce somebody below 21 years of age to gamble on line in Singapore.
This involves actions for instance sending the person an ad about a web-based gambling service or highlighting information regarding on the internet gambling to that person by using a see of encouraging her or him to gamble on-line.
Any one identified responsible of inviting an individual less than 21 a long time of age to gamble remotely shall be answerable for pay out a great of at the least $twenty,000 and up to $300,000, or to imprisonment for just a phrase as many as six a long time, or to both equally. This really is Until you can confirm that you choose to took all affordable methods to ascertain the person’s age and that you simply fairly thought that the person was not less than 21 many years of age.
Recommendations on Gambling Legally in Singapore Gamble in A non-public position with dependable buddies As a way to prevent remaining billed for unlawful gambling, you must not gamble inside a public spot, or a typical gaming property the place habitual gaming usually takes spot.
It is additionally most effective to gamble only with a trusted group of close friends and chorus from incorporating Many others to this group. This is because inviting strangers to gamble might be construed as gambling inside a place to which the public can have obtain, constituting the offence of gambling in a very “community spot”.
Stay away from gambling with seasoned gamblers as they may attract unwelcome awareness through the authorities. Seasoned gamblers could be characterised as those who are prepared to commit huge sums of cash when gambling, or anyone who has excellent debts because of their gambling practices.
Location small bets You'll want to cap your bets at a small amount. This this tends to support authorities to understand that that you are participating in a social action with buddies, in lieu of working a standard gaming property.
Guess only with exempted betting operators Keep away from non-public bookies, and area bets only with exempt betting operators. It's also wise to not try to flout the minimum amount age necessity for betting with exempt operators.
Ways to Get If You Have Been Charged that has a Gambling Offence For those who have been billed with a gambling offence, you may want to look at hiring a legal attorney to represent you in court.
The attorney may perhaps assist you in in search of acquittal in case you didn't in fact commit the offence in concern.
Such as, say that you have been identified actively playing mahjong in general public. Underneath the regulation, you will be presumed to become gaming in community for income or dollars’s truly worth, that is an offence.
Nonetheless if there was in fact no dollars involved with your mahjong session, an attorney can spotlight this to try to enable acquit you with the offence.
Alternatively, the law firm may well guide you by creating a defence or, When you are convicted of your offence, by seeking a lesser penalty for it.
Source : https://www.totohot.net

I am putting together my investment portfolio for 2018 and made a complete summary of the current Top 100. Interestingly, I noticed that all coins can be categorized into 12 markets. Which markets do you think will play the biggest role in the coming year?
Here is a complete overview of all coins in an excel sheet including name, market, TPS, risk profile, time since launch (negative numbers mean that they are launching that many months in the future) and market cap. You can also sort by all of these fields of course. Coins written in bold are the strongest contenders within their market either due to having the best technology or having a small market cap and still excellent technology and potential. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s8PHcNvvjuy848q18py_CGcu8elRGQAUIf86EYh4QZo/edit#gid=0
The 12 markets are

1. Currency 13 coins
2. Platform 25 coins
3. Ecosystem 9 coins
4. Privacy 10 coins
5. Currency Exchange Tool 8 coins
6. Gaming & Gambling 5 coins
7. Misc 15 coins
8. Social Network 4 coins
9. Fee Token 3 coins
10. Decentralized Data Storage 4 coins
11. Cloud Computing 3 coins
12. Stable Coin 2 coins

Before we look at the individual markets, we need to take a look of the overall market and its biggest issue scalability first:
Cryptocurrencies aim to be a decentralized currency that can be used worldwide. Its goal is to replace dollar, Euro, Yen, all FIAT currencies worldwide. The coin that will achieve that will be worth several trillion dollars.
Bitcoin can only process 7 transactions per second (TPS). In order to replace all FIAT, it would need to perform at at least VISA levels, which usually processes around 3,000 TPS, up to 25,000 TPS during peak times and a maximum of 64,000 TPS. That means that this cryptocurrency would need to be able to perform at least several thousand TPS. However, a ground breaking technology should not look at current technology to set a goal for its use, i.e. estimating the number of emails sent in 1990 based on the number of faxes sent wasn’t a good estimate.
For that reason, 10,000 TPS is the absolute baseline for a cryptocurrency that wants to replace FIAT. This brings me to IOTA, which wants to connect all 80 billion IoT devices that are expected to exist by 2025, which constantly communicate with each other, creating 80 billion or more transactions per second. This is the benchmark that cryptocurrencies should be aiming for. Currently, 8 billion devices are connected to the Internet.
With its Lightning network recently launched, Bitcoin is realistically looking at 50,000 possible soon. Other notable cryptocurrencies besides IOTA and Bitcoin are Nano with 7,000 TPS already tested, Dash with several billion TPS possible with Masternodes, Neo, LISK and RHOC with 100,000 TPS by 2020, Ripple with 50,000 TPS, Ethereum with 10,000 with Sharding.
However, it needs to be said that scalability usually goes at the cost of decentralization and security. So, it needs to be seen, which of these technologies can prove itself resilient and performant.
Without further ado, here are the coins of the first market

Market 1 - Currency:

1. Bitcoin: 1st generation blockchain with currently bad scalability currently, though the implementation of the Lightning Network looks promising and could alleviate most scalability concerns, scalability and high energy use.
2. Ripple: Centralized currency that might become very successful due to tight involvement with banks and cross-border payments for financial institutions; banks and companies like Western Union and Moneygram (who they are currently working with) as customers customers. However, it seems they are aiming for more decentralization now.https://ripple.com/dev-blog/decentralization-strategy-update/. Has high TPS due to Proof of Correctness algorithm.
3. Bitcoin Cash: Bitcoin fork with the difference of having an 8 times bigger block size, making it 8 times more scalable than Bitcoin currently. Further block size increases are planned. Only significant difference is bigger block size while big blocks lead to further problems that don't seem to do well beyond a few thousand TPS. Opponents to a block size argue that increasing the block size limit is unimaginative, offers only temporary relief, and damages decentralization by increasing costs of participation. In order to preserve decentralization, system requirements to participate should be kept low. To understand this, consider an extreme example: very big blocks (1GB+) would require data center level resources to validate the blockchain. This would preclude all but the wealthiest individuals from participating.Community seems more open than Bitcoin's though.
4. Litecoin : Little brother of Bitcoin. Bitcoin fork with different mining algorithm but not much else.Copies everything that Bitcoin does pretty much. Lack of real innovation.
5. Dash: Dash (Digital Cash) is a fork of Bitcoin and focuses on user ease. It has very fast transactions within seconds, low fees and uses Proof of Service from Masternodes for consensus. They are currently building a system called Evolution which will allow users to send money using usernames and merchants will find it easy to integrate Dash using the API. You could say Dash is trying to be a PayPal of cryptocurrencies. Currently, cryptocurrencies must choose between decentralization, speed, scalability and can pick only 2. With Masternodes, Dash picked speed and scalability at some cost of decentralization, since with Masternodes the voting power is shifted towards Masternodes, which are run by Dash users who own the most Dash.
6. IOTA: 3rd generation blockchain called Tangle, which has a high scalability, no fees and instant transactions. IOTA aims to be the connective layer between all 80 billion IOT devices that are expected to be connected to the Internet in 2025, possibly creating 80 billion transactions per second or 800 billion TPS, who knows. However, it needs to be seen if the Tangle can keep up with this scalability and iron out its security issues that have not yet been completely resolved.
7. Nano: 3rd generation blockchain called Block Lattice with high scalability, no fees and instant transactions. Unlike IOTA, Nano only wants to be a payment processor and nothing else, for now at least. With Nano, every user has their own blockchain and has to perform a small amount of computing for each transaction, which makes Nano perform at 300 TPS with no problems and 7,000 TPS have also been tested successfully. Very promising 3rd gen technology and strong focus on only being the fastest currency without trying to be everything.
8. Decred: As mining operations have grown, Bitcoin’s decision-making process has become more centralized, with the largest mining companies holding large amounts of power over the Bitcoin improvement process. Decred focuses heavily on decentralization with their PoW Pos hybrid governance system to become what Bitcoin was set out to be. They will soon implement the Lightning Network to scale up. While there do not seem to be more differences to Bitcoin besides the novel hybrid consensus algorithm, which Ethereum, Aeternity and Bitcoin Atom are also implementing, the welcoming and positive Decred community and professoinal team add another level of potential to the coin.
9. Aeternity: We’ve seen recently, that it’s difficult to scale the execution of smart contracts on the blockchain. Crypto Kitties is a great example. Something as simple as creating and trading unique assets on Ethereum bogged the network down when transaction volume soared. Ethereum and Zilliqa address this problem with Sharding. Aeternity focuses on increasing the scalability of smart contracts and dapps by moving smart contracts off-chain. Instead of running on the blockchain, smart contracts on Aeternity run in private state channels between the parties involved in the contracts. State channels are lines of communication between parties in a smart contract. They don’t touch the blockchain unless they need to for adjudication or transfer of value. Because they’re off-chain, state channel contracts can operate much more efficiently. They don’t need to pay the network for every time they compute and can also operate with greater privacy. An important aspect of smart contract and dapp development is access to outside data sources. This could mean checking the weather in London, score of a football game, or price of gold. Oracles provide access to data hosted outside the blockchain. In many blockchain projects, oracles represent a security risk and potential point of failure, since they tend to be singular, centralized data streams. Aeternity proposes decentralizing oracles with their oracle machine. Doing so would make outside data immutable and unchangeable once it reaches Aeternity’s blockchain. Of course, the data source could still be hacked, so Aeternity implements a prediction market where users can bet on the accuracy and honesty of incoming data from various oracles.It also uses prediction markets for various voting and verification purposes within the platform. Aeternity’s network runs on on a hybrid of proof of work and proof of stake. Founded by a long-time crypto-enthusiast and early colleague of Vitalik Buterin, Yanislav Malahov. Promising concept though not product yet
10. Bitcoin Atom: Atomic Swaps and hybrid consenus. This looks like the only Bitcoin clone that actually is looking to innovate next to Bitcoin Cash.
11. Dogecoin: Litecoin fork, fantastic community, though lagging behind a bit in technology.
12. Bitcoin Gold: A bit better security than bitcoin through ASIC resistant algorithm, but that's it. Not that interesting.
13. Digibyte: Digibyte's PoS blockchain is spread over a 100,000+ servers, phones, computers, and nodes across the globe, aiming for the ultimate level of decentralization. DigiByte rebalances the load between the five mining algorithms by adjusting the difficulty of each so one algorithm doesn’t become dominant. The algorithm's asymmetric difficulty has gained notoriety and been deployed in many other blockchains.DigiByte’s adoption over the past four years has been slow. It’s still a relatively obscure currency compared its competitors. The DigiByte website offers a lot of great marketing copy and buzzwords. However, there’s not much technical information about what they have planned for the future. You could say Digibyte is like Bitcoin, but with shorter blocktimes and a multi-algorithm. However, that's not really a difference big enough to truly set themselves apart from Bitcoin, since these technologies could be implemented by any blockchain without much difficulty. Their decentralization is probably their strongest asset, however, this also change quickly if the currency takes off and big miners decide to go into Digibyte.
14. Bitcoin Diamond Asic resistant Bitcoin and Copycat

Market 2 - Platform

Most of the cryptos here have smart contracts and allow dapps (Decentralized apps) to be build on their platform and to use their token as an exchange of value between dapp services.

1. Ethereum: 2nd generation blockchain that allows the use of smart contracts. Bad scalability currently, though this concern could be alleviated by the soon to be implemented Lightning Network aka Plasma and its Sharding concept.
2. EOS: Promising technology that wants to be able do everything, from smart contracts like Ethereum, scalability similar to Nano with 1000 tx/second + near instant transactions and zero fees, to also wanting to be a platform for dapps. However, EOS doesn't have a product yet and everything is just promises still. Highly overvalued right now. However, there are lots of red flags, have dumped $500 million Ether over the last 2 months and possibly bought back EOS to increase the size of their ICO, which has been going on for over a year and has raised several billion dollars. All in all, their market cap is way too high for that and not even having a product.
3. Cardano: Similar to Ethereum/EOS, however, only promises made with no delivery yet, highly overrated right now. Interesting concept though. Market cap way too high for not even having a product. Somewhat promising technology.
4. VeChain: Singapore-based project that’s building a business enterprise platform and inventory tracking system. Examples are verifying genuine luxury goods and food supply chains. Has one of the strongest communities in the crypto world. Most hyped token of all, with merit though.
5. Neo: Neo is a platform, similar to Eth, but more extensive, allowing dapps and smart contracts, but with a different smart contract gas system, consensus mechanism (PoS vs. dBfT), governance model, fixed vs unfixed supply, expensive contracts vs nearly free contracts, different ideologies for real world adoption. There are currently only 9 nodes, each of which are being run by a company/entity hand selected by the NEO council (most of which are located in china) and are under contract. This means that although the locations of the nodes may differ, ultimately the neo council can bring them down due to their legal contracts. In fact this has been done in the past when the neo council was moving 50 million neo that had been locked up. Also dbft (or neo's implmentation of it) has failed underload causing network outages during major icos. The first step in decentralization is that the NEO Counsel will select trusted nodes (Universities, business partners, etc.) and slowly become less centralized that way. The final step in decentralization will be allowing NEO holders to vote for new nodes, similar to a DPoS system (ARK/EOS/LISK). NEO has a regulation/government friendly ideology. Finally they are trying to work undewith the Chinese government in regards to regulations. If for some reason they wanted it shut down, they could just shut it down.
6. Stellar: PoS system, similar goals as Ripple, but more of a platform than only a currency. 80% of Stellar are owned by Stellar.org still, making the currency centralized.
7. Ethereum classic: Original Ethereum that decided not to fork after a hack. The Ethereum that we know is its fork. Uninteresing, because it has a lot of less resources than Ethereum now and a lot less community support.
8. Ziliqa: Zilliqa is building a new way of sharding. 2400 tpx already tested, 10,000 tps soon possible by being linearly scalable with the number of nodes. That means, the more nodes, the faster the network gets. They are looking at implementing privacy as well.
9. QTUM: Enables Smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. Useful.
10. Icon: Korean ethereum. Decentralized application platform that's building communities in partnership with banks, insurance providers, hospitals, and universities. Focused on ID verification and payments. No big differentiators to the other 20 Ethereums, except that is has a product. That is a plus. Maybe cheap alternative to Ethereum.
11. LISK: Lisk's difference to other BaaS is that side chains are independent to the main chain and have to have their own nodes. Similar to neo whole allows dapps to deploy their blockchain to. However, Lisk is currently somewhat centralized with a small group of members owning more than 50% of the delegated positions. Lisk plans to change the consensus algorithm for that reason in the near future.
12. Rchain: Similar to Ethereum with smart contract, though much more scalable at an expected 40,000 TPS and possible 100,000 TPS. Not launched yet. No product launched yet, though promising technology. Not overvalued, probably at the right price right now.
13. ARDR: Similar to Lisk. Ardor is a public blockchain platform that will allow people to utilize the blockchain technology of Nxt through the use of child chains. A child chain, which is a ‘light’ blockchain that can be customized to a certain extent, is designed to allow easy self-deploy for your own blockchain. Nxt claims that users will "not need to worry" about security, as that part is now handled by the main chain (Ardor). This is the chief innovation of Ardor. Ardor was evolved from NXT by the same company. NEM started as a NXT clone.
14. Ontology: Similar to Neo. Interesting coin
15. Bytom: Bytom is an interactive protocol of multiple byte assets. Heterogeneous byte-assets (indigenous digital currency, digital assets) that operate in different forms on the Bytom Blockchain and atomic assets (warrants, securities, dividends, bonds, intelligence information, forecasting information and other information that exist in the physical world) can be registered, exchanged, gambled and engaged in other more complicated and contract-based interoperations via Bytom.
16. Nxt: Similar to Lisk
17. Stratis: Different to LISK, Stratis will allow businesses and organizations to create their own blockchain according to their own needs, but secured on the parent Stratis chain. Stratis’s simple interface will allow organizations to quickly and easily deploy and/or test blockchain functionality of the Ethereum, BitShares, BitCoin, Lisk and Stratis environements.
18. Status: Status provides access to all of Ethereum’s decentralized applications (dapps) through an app on your smartphone. It opens the door to mass adoption of Ethereum dapps by targeting the fastest growing computer segment in the world – smartphone users.16. Ark: Fork of Lisk that focuses on a smaller feature set. Ark wallets can only vote for one delegate at a time which forces delegates to compete against each other and makes cartel formations incredibly hard, if not impossible.
19. Neblio: Similar to Neo, but 30x smaller market cap.
20. NEM: Is similar to Neo No marketing team, very high market cap for little clarilty what they do.
21. Bancor: Bancor is a Decentralized Liquidity Network that allows you to hold any Ethereum token and convert it to any other token in the network, with no counter party, at an automatically calculated price, using a simple web wallet.
22. Dragonchain: The Purpose of DragonChain is to help companies quickly and easily incorporate blockchain into their business applications. Many companies might be interested in making this transition because of the benefits associated with serving clients over a blockchain – increased efficiency and security for transactions, a reduction of costs from eliminating potential fraud and scams, etc.
23. Skycoin: Transactions with zero fees that take apparently two seconds, unlimited transaction rate, no need for miners and block rewards, low power usage, all of the usual cryptocurrency technical vulnerabilities fixed, a consensus mechanism superior to anything that exists, resistant to all conceivable threats (government censorship, community infighting, cybenucleaconventional warfare, etc). Skycoin has their own consensus algorithm known as Obelisk written and published academically by an early developer of Ethereum. Obelisk is a non-energy intensive consensus algorithm based on a concept called ‘web of trust dynamics’ which is completely different to PoW, PoS, and their derivatives. Skywire, the flagship application of Skycoin, has the ambitious goal of decentralizing the internet at the hardware level and is about to begin the testnet in April. However, this is just one of the many facets of the Skycoin ecosystem. Skywire will not only provide decentralized bandwidth but also storage and computation, completing the holy trinity of commodities essential for the new internet. Skycion a smear campaign launched against it, though they seem legit and reliable. Thus, they are probably undervalued.

Market 3 - Ecosystem

The 3rd market with 11 coins is comprised of ecosystem coins, which aim to strengthen the ease of use within the crypto space through decentralized exchanges, open standards for apps and more

1. Nebulas: Similar to how Google indexes webpages Nebulas will index blockchain projects, smart contracts & data using the Nebulas rank algorithm that sifts & sorts the data. Developers rewarded NAS to develop & deploy on NAS chain. Nebulas calls this developer incentive protocol – basically rewards are issued based on how often dapp/contract etc. is used, the more the better the rewards and Proof of devotion. Works like DPoS except the best, most economically incentivised developers (Bookkeeppers) get the forging spots. Ensuring brains stay with the project (Cross between PoI & PoS). 2,400 TPS+, DAG used to solve the inter-transaction dependencies in the PEE (Parallel Execution Environment) feature, first crypto Wallet that supports the Lightening Network.
2. Waves: Decentralized exchange and crowdfunding platform. Let’s companies and projects to issue and manage their own digital coin tokens to raise money.
3. Salt: Leveraging blockchain assets to secure cash loands. Plans to offer cash loans in traditional currencies, backed by your cryptocurrency assets. Allows lenders worldwide to skip credit checks for easier access to affordable loans.
4. CHAINLINK: ChainLink is a decentralized oracle service, the first of its kind. Oracles are defined as an ‘agent’ that finds and verifies real-world occurrences and submits this information to a blockchain to be used in smart contracts.With ChainLink, smart contract users can use the network’s oracles to retrieve data from off-chain application program interfaces (APIs), data pools, and other resources and integrate them into the blockchain and smart contracts. Basically, ChainLink takes information that is external to blockchain applications and puts it on-chain. The difference to Aeternity is that Chainlink deploys the smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain while Aeternity has its own chain.
5. WTC: Combines blockchain with IoT to create a management system for supply chains Interesting
6. Ethos unifyies all cryptos. Ethos is building a multi-cryptocurrency phone wallet. The team is also building an investment diversification tool and a social network
7. Aion: Aion is the token that pays for services on the Aeternity platform.
8. USDT: is no cryptocurrency really, but a replacement for dollar for trading After months of asking for proof of dollar backing, still no response from Tether.

Market 4 - Privacy

The 4th market are privacy coins. As you might know, Bitcoin is not anonymous. If the IRS or any other party asks an exchange who is the identity behind a specific Bitcoin address, they know who you are and can track back almost all of the Bitcoin transactions you have ever made and all your account balances. Privacy coins aim to prevent exactly that through address fungability, which changes addresses constantly, IP obfuscation and more. There are 2 types of privacy coins, one with completely privacy and one with optional privacy. Optional Privacy coins like Dash and Nav have the advantage of more user friendliness over completely privacy coins such as Monero and Enigma.

1. Monero: Currently most popular privacy coin, though with a very high market cap. Since their privacy is all on chain, all prior transactions would be deanonymized if their protocol is ever cracked. This requires a quantum computing attack though. PIVX is better in that regard.
2. Zcash: A decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that hide the sender, recipient, and value of transactions. Offers users the option to make transactions public later for auditing. Decent privacy coin, though no default privacy
3. Verge: Calls itself privacy coin without providing private transactions, multiple problems over the last weeks has a toxic community, and way too much hype for what they have.
4. Bytecoin: First privacy-focused cryptocurrency with anonymous transactions. Bytecoin’s code was later adapted to create Monero, the more well-known anonymous cryptocurrency. Has several scam accusations, 80% pre-mine, bad devs, bad tech
5. Bitcoin Private: A merge fork of Bitcoin and Zclassic with Zclassic being a fork of Zcash with the difference of a lack of a founders fee required to mine a valid block. This promotes a fair distribution, preventing centralized coin ownership and control. Bitcoin private offers the optional ability to keep the sender, receiver, and amount private in a given transaction. However, this is already offered by several good privacy coins (Monero, PIVX) and Bitcoin private doesn't offer much more beyond this.
6. Komodo: The Komodo blockchain platform uses Komodo’s open-source cryptocurrency for doing transparent, anonymous, private, and fungible transactions. They are then made ultra-secure using Bitcoin’s blockchain via a Delayed Proof of Work (dPoW) protocol and decentralized crowdfunding (ICO) platform to remove middlemen from project funding. Offers services for startups to create and manage their own Blockchains.
7. PIVX: As a fork of Dash, PIVX uses an advanced implementation of the Zerocoin protocol to provide it’s privacy. This is a form of zeroknowledge proofs, which allow users to spend ‘Zerocoins’ that have no link back to them. Unlike Zcash u have denominations in PIVX, so they can’t track users by their payment amount being equal to the amount of ‘minted’ coins, because everyone uses the same denominations. PIVX is also implementing Bulletproofs, just like Monero, and this will take care of arguably the biggest weakness of zeroknowledge protocols: the trusted setup.
8. Zcoin: PoW cryptocurrency. Private financial transactions, enabled by the Zerocoin Protocol. Zcoin is the first full implementation of the Zerocoin Protocol, which allows users to have complete privacy via Zero-Knowledge cryptographic proofs.
9. Enigma: Monero is to Bitcoin what enigma is to Ethereum. Enigma is for making the data used in smart contracts private. More of a platform for dapps than a currency like Monero. Very promising.
10. Navcoin: Like bitcoin but with added privacy and pos and 1,170 tps, but only because of very short 30 second block times. Though, privacy is optional, but aims to be more user friendly than Monero. However, doesn't really decide if it wants to be a privacy coin or not. Same as Zcash.Strong technology, non-shady team.
11. Tenx: Raised 80 million, offers cryptocurrency-linked credit cards that let you spend virtual money in real life. Developing a series of payment platforms to make spending cryptocurrency easier. However, the question is if full privacy coins will be hindered in growth through government regulations and optional privacy coins will become more successful through ease of use and no regulatory hindrance.

Market 5 - Currency Exchange Tool

Due to the sheer number of different cryptocurrencies, exchanging one currency for the other it still cumbersome. Further, merchants don’t want to deal with overcluttered options of accepting cryptocurrencies. This is where exchange tool like Req come in, which allow easy and simple exchange of currencies.

1. Cryptonex: Fiat and currency exchange between various blockchain services, similar to REQ.
2. QASH: Qash is used to fuel its liquid platform which will be an exchange that will distribute their liquidity pool. Its product, the Worldbook is a multi-exchange order book that matches crypto to crypto, and crypto to fiat and the reverse across all currencies. E.g., someone is selling Bitcoin is USD on exchange1 not owned by Quoine and someone is buying Bitcoin in EURO on exchange 2 not owned by Quoine. If the forex conversions and crypto conversions match then the trade will go through and the Worldbook will match it, it'll make the sale and the purchase on either exchange and each user will get what they wanted, which means exchanges with lower liquidity if they join the Worldbook will be able to fill orders and take trade fees they otherwise would miss out on.They turned it on to test it a few months ago for an hour or so and their exchange was the top exchange in the world by 4x volume for the day because all Worldbook trades ran through it. Binance wants BNB to be used on their one exchange. Qash wants their QASH token embedded in all of their partners. More info here https://www.reddit.com/CryptoCurrency/comments/8a8lnwhich_are_your_top_5_favourite_coins_out_of_the/dwyjcbb/?context=3
3. Kyber: network Exchange between cryptocurrencies, similar to REQ. Features automatic coin conversions for payments. Also offers payment tools for developers and a cryptocurrency wallet.
4. Achain: Building a boundless blockchain world like Req .
5. Req: Exchange between cryptocurrencies.
6. Bitshares: Exchange between cryptocurrencies. Noteworthy are the 1.5 second average block times and throughput potential of 100,000 transactions per second with currently 2,400 TPS having been proven. However, bitshares had several Scam accusations in the past.
7. Loopring: A protocol that will enable higher liquidity between exchanges and personal wallets.
8. ZRX: Open standard for dapps. Open, permissionless protocol allowing for ERC20 tokens to be traded on the Ethereum blockchain. In 0x protocol, orders are transported off-chain, massively reducing gas costs and eliminating blockchain bloat. Relayers help broadcast orders and collect a fee each time they facilitate a trade. Anyone can build a relayer.

Market 6 - Gaming

With an industry size of $108B worldwide, Gaming is one of the largest markets in the world. For sure, cryptocurrencies will want to have a share of that pie.

1. Storm: Mobile game currency on a platform with 9 million players.
2. Fun: A platform for casino operators to host trustless, provably-fair gambling through the use of smart contracts, as well as creating their own implementation of state channels for scalability.
3. Electroneum: Mobile game currency They have lots of technical problems, such as several 51% attacks
4. Wax: Marketplace to trade in-game items

Market 7 - Misc

There are various markets being tapped right now. They are all summed up under misc.

1. OMG: Omise is designed to enable financial services for people without bank accounts. It works worldwide and with both traditional money and cryptocurrencies.
2. Power ledger: Australian blockchain-based cryptocurrency and energy trading platform that allows for decentralized selling and buying of renewable energy. Unique market and rather untapped market in the crypto space.
3. Populous: A platform that connects business owners and invoice buyers without middlemen. Invoice sellers get cash flow to fund their business and invoice buyers earn interest. Similar to OMG, small market.
4. Monacoin: The first Japanese cryptocurrency. Focused on micro-transactions and based on a popular internet meme of a type-written cat. This makes it similar to Dogecoin. Very niche, tiny market.
5. Revain: Legitimizing reviews via the blockchain. Interesting concept, though market not as big.
6. Augur: Platform to forecast and make wagers on the outcome of real-world events (AKA decentralized predictions). Uses predictions for a “wisdom of the crowd” search engine. Not launched yet.
7. Substratum: Revolutionzing hosting industry via per request billing as a decentralized internet hosting system. Uses a global network of private computers to create the free and open internet of the future. Participants earn cryptocurrency. Interesting concept.
8. Veritaseum: Is supposed to be a peer to peer gateway, though it looks like very much like a scam.
9. TRON: Tronix is looking to capitalize on ownership of internet data to content creators. However, they plagiarized their white paper, which is a no go. They apologized, so it needs to be seen how they will conduct themselves in the future. Extremely high market cap for not having a product, nor proof of concept.
10. Syscoin: A cryptocurrency with a decentralized marketplace that lets people buy and sell products directly without third parties. Trying to remove middlemen like eBay and Amazon.
11. Hshare: Most likely scam because of no code changes, most likely pump and dump scheme, dead community.
12. BAT: An Ethereum-based token that can be exchanged between content creators, users, and advertisers. Decentralized ad-network that pays based on engagement and attention.
13. Dent: Decentralizeed exchange of mobile data, enabling mobile data to be marketed, purchased or distributed, so that users can quickly buy or sell data from any user to another one.
14. Ncash: End to end encrypted Identification system for retailers to better serve their customers .
15. Factom Secure record-keeping system that allows companies to store their data directly on the Blockchain. The goal is to make records more transparent and trustworthy .

Market 8 - Social network

Web 2.0 is still going strong and Web 3.0 is not going to ignore it. There are several gaming tokens already out there and a few with decent traction already, such as Steem, which is Reddit with voting through money is a very interesting one.

1. Mithril: As users create content via social media, they will be rewarded for their contribution, the better the contribution, the more they will earn
2. Steem: Like Reddit, but voting with money. Already launched product and Alexa rank 1,000 Thumbs up.
3. Rdd: Reddcoin makes the process of sending and receiving money fun and rewarding for everyone. Reddcoin is dedicated to one thing – tipping on social networks as a way to bring cryptocurrency awareness and experience to the general public.
4. Kin: Token for the platform Kik. Kik has a massive user base of 400 million people. Replacing paying with FIAT with paying with KIN might get this token to mass adoption very quickly.

Market 9 - Fee token

Popular exchanges realized that they can make a few billion dollars more by launching their own token. Owning these tokens gives you a reduction of trading fees. Very handy and BNB (Binance Coin) has been one of the most resilient tokens, which have withstood most market drops over the last weeks and was among the very few coins that could show growth.

1. BNB: Fee token for Binance
2. Gas: Not a Fee token for an exchange, but it is a dividend paid out on Neo and a currency that can be used to purchase services for dapps.
3. Kucoin: Fee token for Kucoin

Market 10 - Decentralized Data Storage

Currently, data storage happens with large companies or data centers that are prone to failure or losing data. Decentralized data storage makes loss of data almost impossible by distributing your files to numerous clients that hold tiny pieces of your data. Remember Torrents? Torrents use a peer-to-peer network. It is similar to that. Many users maintain copies of the same file, when someone wants a copy of that file, they send a request to the peer-to-peer network., users who have the file, known as seeds, send fragments of the file to the requester., he requester receives many fragments from many different seeds, and the torrent software recompiles these fragments to form the original file.

1. Gbyte: Byteball data is stored and ordered using directed acyclic graph (DAG) rather than blockchain. This allows all users to secure each other's data by referencing earlier data units created by other users, and also removes scalability limits common for blockchains, such as blocksize issue.
2. Siacoin: Siacoin is decentralized storage platform. Distributes encrypted files to thousands of private users who get paid for renting out their disk space. Anybody with siacoins can rent storage from hosts on Sia. This is accomplish via "smart" storage contracts stored on the Sia blockchain. The smart contract provides a payment to the host only after the host has kept the file for a given amount of time. If the host loses the file, the host does not get paid.
3. Maidsafecoin: MaidSafe stands for Massive Array of Internet Disks, Secure Access for Everyone.Instead of working with data centers and servers that are common today and are vulnerable to data theft and monitoring, SAFE’s network uses advanced P2P technology to bring together the spare computing capacity of all SAFE users and create a global network. You can think of SAFE as a crowd-sourced internet. All data and applications reside in this network. It’s an autonomous network that automatically sets prices and distributes data and rents out hard drive disk space with a Blockchain-based storage solutions.When you upload a file to the network, such as a photo, it will be broken into pieces, hashed, and encrypted. The data is then randomly distributed across the network. Redundant copies of the data are created as well so that if someone storing your file turns off their computer, you will still have access to your data. And don’t worry, even with pieces of your data on other people’s computers, they won’t be able to read them. You can earn MadeSafeCoins by participating in storing data pieces from the network on your computer and thus earning a Proof of Resource.
4. Storj: Storj aims to become a cloud storage platform that can’t be censored or monitored, or have downtime. Your files are encrypted, shredded into little pieces called 'shards', and stored in a decentralized network of computers around the globe. No one but you has a complete copy of your file, not even in an encrypted form.

Market 11 - Cloud computing

Obviously, renting computing power, one of the biggest emerging markets as of recent years, e.g. AWS and Digital Ocean, is also a service, which can be bought and managed via the blockchain.

1. Golem: Allows easy use of Supercomputer in exchange for tokens. People worldwide can rent out their computers to the network and get paid for that service with Golem tokens.
2. Elf: Allows easy use of Cloud computing in exchange for tokens.

Market 12 - Stablecoin

Last but not least, there are 2 stablecoins that have established themselves within the market. A stable coin is a coin that wants to be independent of the volatility of the crypto markets. This has worked out pretty well for Maker and DGD, accomplished through a carefully diversified currency fund and backing each token by 1g or real gold respectively. DO NOT CONFUSE DGD AND MAKER with their STABLE COINS DGX and DAI. DGD and MAKER are volatile, because they are the companies of DGX and DAI. DGX and DAI are the stable coins.

1. DGD: Platform of the Stablecoin DGX. Every DGX coin is backed by 1g of gold and make use proof of asset consensus.
2. Maker: Platform of the Stablecoin DAI that doesn't vary much in price through widespread and smart diversification of assets.

EDIT: Added a risk factor from 0 to 10. The baseline is 2 for any crypto. Significant scandals, mishaps, shady practices, questionable technology, increase the risk factor. Not having a product yet automatically means a risk factor of 6. Strong adoption and thus strong scrutiny or positive community lower the risk factor.
EDIT2: Added a subjective potential factor from 0 to 10, where its overall potential and a small or big market cap is factored in. Bitcoin with lots of potential only gets a 9, because of its massive market cap, because if Bitcoin goes 10x, smaller coins go 100x, PIVX gets a 10 for being as good as Monero while carrying a 10x smaller market cap, which would make PIVX go 100x if Monero goes 10x.

Airline Award Booking Basics

Feb 9 2019
There are tons of videos and trip reports out there, reporting how someone got a great award ticket in awesome FIRST CLASS! Everyday on this sub, we have people come in and say “Hey, I have xxxK UR points, Now what?”
This post is meant to be an Intro Guide to Award Booking, focusing on using Miles and Points to book awards outside of the various travel portals. The intent is not to show you how to book all awards, but understand the basic anatomy of an award booking so you can begin to know what questions you need to ask and answer.

The Basics

This section is important, as you need to understand the various parties involved in an award booking.

Frequent Flyer Program

This is the actual FF program, typically operated by a specific Airline. Most program tracks a FF balance using the term Miles. For example, a member of the program can have nnn Miles. Note that some programs name their Currency Points or other names, but for simplicity, we will refer to all of them as Miles. Some basic rules that applies to most FF Programs are: Miles are not transferable to other FF programs, so if you have AA Miles, they will always be AA miles. Miles can expire based on each program’s terms and conditions. Miles can only be used to redeem awards based on that program’s award chart and rules. You cannot join Miles from different FF programs to book an award.
Note, joining FF programs are usually, if not always, free. Just visit the Airline’s website and sign-up, providing your information and creating an account. Note, when signing up to a FF program, always use your full and accurate name as identified on your Passport. If you leave out your middle name, or use an abbreviation or alias, you may run into issue when you try to book and use award tickets.

Frequent Flyer Program Rules

Each Program has rules. The rules define the following:

• How many Miles you can accrue when you purchase a ticket.
• How can you earn Status in the program.
• Can Miles be freely shared between 2 program members. The answer is most oftenly No, but some programs such as BA Avios, ANA, and JetBlue offer family pooling features for free.
• What are the expiration rules surrounding the Miles. A key point to understand is that Most if not ALL programs believe they own the Miles. You are not the legal owner of any Miles. So the program has maximum freedom in defining how and if you can use them, or when you will lose them. Some programs will expire Miles so many months after earning them. Other programs will extend them based on certain conditions being met.
• How many Miles does it cost to redeem an award, most oftenly covered in an Award Chart. Certain programs such as JetBlue or Southwest roughly translates Miles to a fixed monetary value for redemption. Delta has decided that they will price award seats at whatever level they feel is right, so you won’t find an award chart for Delta.
• How much does it cost to redeem an award on partner airlines. Most oftenly covered in a Partner Award Chart. Some airlines such as Alaska has a separate award chart for each partner.
• Can you book one-way award flights, or are you required to book Round Trip?
• What are the fees associated with booking an award. For example, are there close in booking fees? Does the airline impose additional fees and surcharges on award bookings? Does the program pass along Fuel Surcharges from partner airlines?
• What are the rules surrounding stopovers, layovers, or open jaw. Basically, how you can take advantage of a ticket to visit the most cities possible.
• What are the rules and costs around changing or cancelling an award.
• Who can be a passenger. Certain airlines such as ANA and Korean Air only allow booking awards for direct relatives. Enforcement is specific to each airline with such rules, but don’t expect you can book an award for your BFF on any airline without reading up the rules.
• How far out you can book a ticket, and how long is the ticket good for. Almost all airlines limit award ticket travel to maximum of 1 year out.
• Can an award ticket contain segments of travel served by multiple partner airlines?

Airline Alliances

Airline Alliances are partnerships, created to provide a connected experiences for customers traveling outside the operational area of a particular airline. So when a customer purchases a ticket, the ticket may span flights operated by multiple airlines of an Alliance. The luggage may be through-checked through the final destination (foreign travels usually require luggage to be retrieved and examined at Port of entry), and your FF status is observed across the Alliance. For example, you may want to fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo, stop for a week, then fly to Hong Kong. You may find that on that ticket you bought from AA that the first segment, LAX-NRT, is on a flight operated by AA (Referred to as AA Metal). But the next segment, NRT-HKG, is on Cathay Pacific Metal, even though you are still on an AA ticket.
There are 3 major Alliances that many airlines belongs to: One World, Star Alliance, and Sky Team. There are some airlines such as Alaska that has direct partnership with a number of airlines, but does not belong to any of the 3 main alliances. Some of these unique alliances often create excellent value for award seekers.
When dealing with Award Tickets, the common misconception is that you can transfer Miles between Partners. Miles in a particular FF Program cannot be transferred to Miles in a different Program (with very specific exceptions, such as BA and Iberia,owned by the same parent company). However, through the use of Partner Award charts, you can use your miles to book flights operated by other Airlines. For example, your Korean SkyPass Miles cannot be transferred to Delta. However, you CAN book KE award tickets on Delta operated flights using your KE Miles. The cost would be based on KE’s partner award chart, and the availability will depend on whether Delta makes any award seats available to KE. Note that airlines often make more award seats available to their own FF members than partners.
A couple of terms here you need to be familiar are: Ticketing Airline is the airline that you redeemed an award. So if you used AA miles to redeem an award with AA, AA is the ticketing airline. Operating Airline is the airline that actually flies you from point A to B. Each award ticket has a Ticketing Airline, and one or more Operating Airline. Note that prior to day of travel, any issues or changes must be done though the Ticketing airline. On the day of travel, the Operating airline has control of the ticket, in order to deal with operational issues.
Since each program has different award charts and costs, this leads to the ability to arbitrage, provided you can earn enough Miles in a particular program. As a matter of fact, it maybe cheaper, relatively speaking, to book a flight not using the operating airline FF miles, but use a partner Miles since that award chart has a lower cost.

Transferable Points

A number of credit card companies, and one specific Hotel, allows you to transfer their points to Airline FF programs. This ability offers the freedom to hold points in a convertible currency, rather than in a specific FF program. These programs include the Chase Ultimate Rewards Points (UR), American Express Membership Rewards Points (MR), Citibank ThankYou Points (TYP), Capital One Venture Miles, and Marriott Bonvoy Points. Note that each of these program can only transfer to a limited selection airlines and hotel programs. For example, UR’s cannot be transferred to ANA, and only Marriott can transfer to AA. This information becomes important as if you want to save up Points for a redemption, you need to know if the points can transfer to your desired program.
I will be putting together separate articles on each of the transferable points, and their partners.

Class of Service

Let’s be honest, many people get into award tickets because the price of airline travel is a significant chunk of change. Furthermore, ever want to fly in those comfortable Business or First class seats?
If you ever try to book a premium class ticket, especially on international routes, you will find that a Business Class ticket can cost 5 to 10 times more than an Economy Class ticket. A first class Round trip to Japan is $20,000, but an Economy ticket can be easily under $1000. Where this gets interesting, is that if you look at an award chart, a First Class award ticket would only cost 2-3x more than a Economy award ticket. This is why a lot of people uses Miles to book premium awards.
Some common lingo on Class of Service:

• Y: Economy Class
• PE: Premium Economy
• J: Business
• F: First

Upgrading a paid ticket with Miles

People often ask whether they can upgrade a paid seat to a higher class of service. Programs such as United allows these types of upgrades. However, almost all such programs requires the original paid ticket to be the most un-restricted (i.e. Expensive) ticket of that class. For example, EVA allows you to upgrade from Y to J, but the Y ticket must be a full fare ticket. Often times, the full fare Y ticket is almost as expensive as buying a J ticket on sale, and most people don’t buy those tickets unless work is buying them last minute.
So yes, there is often a way to upgrade a Y ticket, but if you bought the Y ticket on the cheap, the upgrade would not be allowed. In addition, the operating airline must also make such upgrade award seats available.

Types of Award Ticket

In addition to Class of service, some airlines also offer different types of award tickets. While airlines may name them differently, the most common ones are “Savers” awards, and “Anytime” awards.
“Savers” are the cheapest award tickets in terms of points, and airlines will release only a certain number of these seats. Once these awards are gone, the airline is unlikely to release more. Usually, some or all of the Savers are released to partner airlines. So if you are hoping to use a partner program to book award seats, the operating airline must make Savers available first. Since not all Savers seat are bookable by partners as operating airline may reserve certain number of them for their own members, you may be forced to pay a higher cost and use an airline’s own Miles, rather than rely on a lower cost on a partner airline award cost.
“Anytime” are awards airlines make available to their own program members. Anytime awards are not dependent on award seats being made available, but can be redeemed anytime. As expected, these awards are usually much more expensive than Savers in terms of Miles, but offers the ability to get the last available seat on a flight. Anytime awards are not made available to partners, so when you are search partner awards, you need to make sure the availability you found are not Anytime awards.

Planning to Book an Award

After all that, I’m about to take you through the steps in booking an award ticket. Note that this is not on purposely confusing, but it is a reflection of booking awards is not easy.

Origination and Destination(s)

First of all, you need to be sure where you are flying from, and where you want to fly. This actually is not so straight forward.
If you live near a large city with a well served airport, then where you flying from could be straight forward. However, if you live near a smaller airport, you will have to deal with connections and layovers/transfers. When buying a ticket, you often just see the repositioning flight priced into the ticket.
When dealing with an award ticket, all bets are off. Let say you are in Reno, and you want to fly to Hong Kong on Cathay’s wonderful F product. You do your foot work, and find the award seat available on the date you want to travel. Unfortunately, you need to catch that CX flight in Los Angeles, and there are no Reno to LAX award seats available on AA or AS. You now have to choose: You can hope that CX F award seat remains available until AS/AA opens up a Savers award seat, or you can buy another ticket to reposition yourself to LAX in order to catch the CX flight.
There are certain awards, such as using Virgin Atlantic Miles to fly ANA F, that cannot have a repositioning flight. So unless you reside near an airport that ANA flies to directly, you are stuck with buying a repositioning flight.
As for Destination, it’s easy when you are visiting one place and then return. It’s more complicated if you want to visit 2 or more countries on that trip. You need to study up whether the FF program allows Stopovers, or Open JAW, or offer something like United’s excursion perk, in order for you to visit as many places as possible on one award ticket.

Dates

The dates you wish to travel is very important to award booking. Let’s explain something about award tickets. Airlines don’t like planes flying with empty seats. When you are already carrying 190 people, filling the last 10 seats on a 200 person capacity plane have very low incremental cost. If the airline thinks there are a bunch of seats that won’t be sold or generate any revenue, the airline will make those seats available as award seats. Conversely, when the airline knows that they will sell every seat, then they are unlikely to make any award seats available. Why would they settle for the incremental revenue from an award seat, while they can sell a ticket?
So basically, award seats are seats that the airlines don’t think they will sell. Some airlines have a practice to make n number of award seats available on each flight, and those airlines are well loved in this hobby for their predictability. Many airlines also wait until 1-2 weeks before travel date, and open up any still unsold seats for award travel.
So coming back to the dates and how airline practices impacts your award plans. If you are trying to book on a date when the airlines will sell every seat, you are unlikely to find award availability as the airlines are likely to reserve those for paying customers. For example, Spring Break and Summer Vacation in Hawaii, long weekends to anywhere, and Christmas in Australia are all difficult redemptions in terms of availability. Not impossible, but difficult. In addition, if you are booking on an airline that always releases seats 330 days in advance, you may have to book them 330 days i advance. Some people book them within minutes of those seats becoming available.
A typical scenario often asked by newcomers, is that I want a fantastic vacation 3 months from now, during summer. Or I finally got my points, and would like to visit Japan in 4 months. These types of requests are often during peak travel times, to very popular destinations. 3-4 months is just making your life harder as most awards are likely gone before then.
Another scenario is someone only has 5 week days of vacation, so they are trying to travel on a Saturday, and come back the net Sunday to max out their time not he ground. Well, hundreds of other people would love to travel those specific time, and the award seats will again be hard to come by. Specific travel dates, or even times, is rough when planning award travel. To maximize your chance of success, be flexible.
How flexible? First, can you fly out on a Tuesday or Wednesday? If you can avoid the peak travel dates for a particular route, you are more likely to find award seats. This applies to the return as well, as a matter of fact, can you stay a couple of days more or one day less, in order to find the award seats. How about flying to a different city? If you can’t find seats to Paris, what about flying into Frankfurt, and then take a train to Paris?
Also, plan plan plan. If you know that every year, you will be flying into SoCal for Christmas, can you book that award seat 330 days in advance? Don’t wait until 3-4 months out.

Get The Names RIGHT!

For the folks who haven’t travelled much, it is absolutely important that the name on the award ticket is exactly the same as the name on the passport. If the names do not match, you might not be able to fly. Or worse, you might fly out, but the foreign immigration agent may not let you on your return trip because you left out your middle name.
So before booking any award ticket, or indeed, signing up to a FF program, make sure the name you use for all passengers are exactly the same as the name on the passport. Sometimes, people ask about getting married during that time and a name change. If you can, leave your passport unchanged, same as the award ticket, until after the travel is done. Note that airlines can no longer just Change the Name on a ticket. For an award ticket, this may involve cancelling the award ticket, and hopefully you can book another under the new name, while paying the cancellation fees.
While we are here, let’s talk about Passport expiration when traveling to foreign countries. Many countries will not allow entrance unless your passport has an expiration date 3 months or 6 months in the future. Make sure you understand those rules are before doing foreign travel. While you are at it, make sure you understand whether the country you visit require a visitor Visa.

Search for Award Availability

Given that almost every airline has a website that allows you to book travel, it would seem like searching for award seats should be really straight forward. The fact is that searching for award travel is a huge pain. You also need to be prepared to call the airlines in question, and plan to talk to a real person, possibly not having English as a primary language.
In the most basic scenario, you are using Miles from the ticketing airline that is also the operating airline. In this case, booking is relatively straight forward. You login into the airline’s site, and use their flight search functionality. Usually, there is a checkbox that says something like “Use Miles”. Check that, and then search based on your destination and dates. If any award seats are available, the website will show those to you, along with the cost in Miles. Note that not all airlines would indicate whether an award is a Savers or Anytime award, so as you look at flights, you may see similar itinerary priced very differently. If you find what you need and acceptable, just book them through the website.
For a more complex scenario, you are trying to book a partner flight from an airline website. For this example, let’s say you have AA Miles, and trying to book a J award flight from ORD-HKG, operated by Cathay Pacific. You first go to the AA website, and enter the desired dates. When the list of available flights show up, no J awards, and no CX operated flights at all. You do have a bunch of AA Y awards with 2 transfers showing up. In this case, the issue isn’t that there are no award seats, but the fact that the AA website does not show all partner award seats. If you go to the Alaska Airlines website, and enter the same dates, you see that there is a J award on CX. What it comes down to is you need to know which airlines website to use to find the award seats for each partnership, and whether you actually have Miles in that airline’s program is irrelevant.
In general, if you are looking for an award seat for any airlines in OneWorld, you should search using British Airways or Qantas website. When dealing with Star Alliance, the United website is sometimes good (Except as of Feb 2019, SQ, Thai, and Turkish flights are NOT showing up on United), but ANA and Aeroplan are often more complete. For SkyTeam, the common recommendation is to use the Air France Flying Blue website. Once you think you found an award seat available, write down the dates, time, and flight numbers, and then CALL your FF program airline to try to book the ticket. Note that the award will cost what the ticketing airline want to charge, and not the airline you used to search for availability.

Phantom award seats

There are multiple types of Phantom awards, and you need to be mindful when searching award seats.
The first type is just wrong information. You may often find an award, but it actually does not exist. So let say you found that elusive pair of J tickets, and you call in AA to book them. After you give the CSR the flight information, the CSR says there are no award seats. Giving the CSR exact flight information and operating airline can help, but often times, what you are seeing is A) a system glitch or B) an inexperienced CSR. Your best bet in these situations is HUCA (Hang up and call again). If 3 different CSRs are telling you no award seats, then you can be pretty sure that you are seeing Phantom awards.
The second type of Phantom awards is Partner Availability. Since each airline may often reserve awards to their own FF, the award seat you found maybe only bookable by members of that FF. For example, if you find 3 J award seats on CX, your Alaska agent may only see 1 or 2 seats. The only way to determine if this is the case is to read a lot about other people’s experience when attempting the same awards.
The third type of Phantom awards is really just False Advertisement. Let say you are trying to book a nice F seat to Sydney, and woah, AA is showing 2 F seats available from LAS-LAX-SYD! If you look carefully, there is marking for “Mixed Class”, digging in deeper, you see that AA is offering you the LAS-LAX in F on a regional jet, and the LAX-SYD flight is in Y. Of course, AA website is pricing this as a F award ticket all the way. So before you start to despise your CSR because the person can’t find that F seat you found, be careful and make sure there is an actual F award on the long flights.
While we are here, let’s talk a bit about Married Segment. Airlines are in competition with other airlines, so they may price match a competitor on a certain itinerary. So if Airline A offers XXX-ZZZ at a good deal, Airline B would offer XXX-YYY-ZZZ at a good price as well. The same behavior happens in award availability. Some airlines may offer award seats if you book XXX-YYY-ZZZ, but there are no award seats if you just want to fly YYY-ZZZ.

Transfer the Points/Miles

This section probably requires one or more guides on it’s own, but I’ll try to cover the basic here. Let say you have a nice stash of convertible points, say UR, and you just found the ideal flights on United. Since UA is a transfer partner for UR, you go to the UR website, transfer the necessary points to your UA account, and book the ticket on the UA website. Piece of cake, right?
Well, this assumes a couple things have to go right: A) you are transferring to an allowed UA account, B) the transfer occurs instantaneous. For example, people often tries to transfer UR points to their SO or BFF accounts, and Chase imposes certain restrictions to prevent selling of points. Also, there have been reports of people initiating a transfer, and the points do not show up for days.
So here are some guidelines when transferring points you should follow:

• Understand how long a transfer SHOULD take by reading other people’s experiences. Also watch for current system status, as systems sometimes are problematic, and certain transfers are temporarily not allowed.
• Understand the rules on whose FF account you can transfer points to.
• Understand if there are velocity limits as to number of transfers allowed per time period. AmEx may block transfers if you try more than 1 transfer in a short period of time.
• Setup the linkage between your convertible points account and the FF account. One thing i do is do a test transfer of 1,000 points month before I need them, and make sure they arrive in the right FF account.
• Pray that when the points arrive, the award seat is still available.
• Have a backup plan if the points don’t get there on time. Remember, most if not all such transfers are non-reversible. The only cases where they may be reversed is if the Bank Really Screwed Up.

Some airlines allows limited Hold on an award ticket while the points are being transferred. Korean Airlines was really good, as you could hold an award for months. Sadly, UR can no longer be transferred to KE. But you may want to research the airline’s hold policy and use that to reduce your risk.

Booking the Award

OK, we are at the main event. For some of us, successfully booking an award may even be more exciting than the actual trip…

Prerequisite

• You have already written down the Dates, Time, Operating Airline, Flight Numbers. Through your searches, you already know how many F/J/Y seats are available on each of those flights.
• You have the Passport names for each of the passenger. Ideally, you have the FF number for each passenger as well for the ticketing airline.
• If you are planning for a paid reposition flight, you already searched and found seats on the desired flights. I will have a separate short guide on buying reposition flights.
• You have Miles already in the FF program. If each of passenger has Miles in their own account, make sure each account has sufficient Miles. Unless Airlines offer pooling option, you can’t just move a couple thousand Miles from one account to another.
• You’ve done the research, and understand the potential fees involved for the award ticket. You also understand the change/cancellation rules.

The Call

This section assumes the award ticket you need cannot be easily booked on the ticketing airline website.

• Call the FF Program airline, and ask for Award Reservations.
• Let the CSR have: Number of passengers, class of service (Y/PE/J/F), origination, destination, date, and operating airline information. Offer up that you have specific flight information, but don’t force that onto the CSR immediately. It will take time for a CSR to catch up to where you’ve spent weeks building up.
• If the CSR finds the availability, have them confirm the date, time, flight number, and award cost.
• Provide the passport names of each of the passenger, triple check this!
• Confirm the final cost in Miles as well as Fees need to be paid via CC.
• Provide CC information.
• Get the PNR or Passenger locator number. Note that if you are flying on a partner flight, make sure you get the PNR for the partner airline as well.
• Congrats! Once you have a PNR, your award is booked. You are not quite done though.

After the Call

Here are the things I do after booking an award. Depending on the airlines involved, you can usually complete these in the next 2-5 days.

• Make sure the award is properly tickets. For example, AA often has partner award tickets in the state “On Request”. I basically check each day and see if it has moved to “Ticketed”. In the past, I’ve called in 4 days after, and found that AA needed a bit more information, which is why the award was not ticketed.
• Make sure the operating airline knows about me and my award ticket. You can usually go to the operating airline’s website, and choose an option to Manage Trip/Reservations. By entering the operating airline’s PNR and passenger name, you can check if the airline has your information correctly (Double check each passenger name!), and if the ticket is issued properly.
• While at the operating airline website, I usually enter travel documentation information, such as passport number and expiration dates. When possible, I also use that to select seats. I also enter contact information in case the flight changes. When booking tickets 330 days in advance, you will often see schedule changes.

Watch the Award Ticket each month

Once you booked an award, you need to watch your award tickets regularly. Here are the reasons you need to do this:

• Airline schedule changes. Your flight may have moved up 2 hours, or moved back an hour. If you have a connecting flight, you need to make sure any scheduled changes don’t break the connecting flight. Airlines are supposed to catch these, but you need to do everything you can to prevent travel disruptions the day of.
• Equipment change. Let say you selected your ideal premium seat, and then the airline change the flight to be operated by a regional jet configuration. The airline isn’t going to change the equipment back for you, but you could select a different seat, or maybe be moved to a different flight.
• Flight cancellation. The flight that you have planned for months have been cancelled for that date. In the ideal case, the airline has another flight they can put you onto, but if no award seats are available, they may not be able to do so. In this case, having the ticketing airline being the operating airline is better. If Delta cancels a flight, it is more likely for Delta to open an award seat on another flight to get you where you want to go. If you booked your CX flight with AA miles, and CX cancels the flight, and no other CX flights that day have award seats, you may end up with a free refund of your AA miles. On certain routes, AA may try to route you on their own metal, but that is only if the ticketing airline offer flights on that route.

Ideally, the ticketing airline should contact you if any changes occur to your flight. In practicality, the communication is often lost or confusing. By checking in on your ticket regularly, you have more time to make adjustments to your trip.

What if you need to change/cancel the award ticket?

Understand the rules about award ticket changes for the ticketing airline before booking that award ticket! Each FF program is very different in this regards. For example, AA allows changing the dates, operating airlines, and routing of your award ticket, provided that the origin and destination remains the same. If you want to cancel, you will incur a fee of $150 per passenger per ticket. Singapore allows you to make a change to an award ticket, but you need to pay 3,000 SQ miles. British Airways allows you to cancel an award ticket, and all you need to pay is the taxes on the original ticket. Read the rules of each FF program you plan to use, so you can set your expectations accordingly.
Note that if the change is out of your control, such as a schedule change by the operating airline, you usually get a free shot to cancel a ticket with no cost. So if you are booking flights far in advance, and your plans changed, don’t be hasty in paying the cancellation fee. You might want to wait for an airline schedule change, and use that to cancel your ticket for free.

What is next?

There are tons of topics we did not cover in this Basics guide. How to transfer Points, how to actually search for rewards, how to determine which FF to use, etc. Let me know what topics you would like to see me cover in the future.

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There are currently a lot of platforms, more specifically, there are 35 platforms within the Top100 only and many do very similar things. How is one supposed to know how they differ? That was the question that I asked myself.
So, I decided to compare all platforms within the Top100. I noticed that they can be put into into 5 different categories. Note: A platform is a cryptocurrency that offers smart contracts at least.

1. Dapps platforms - 12
2. BaaS - 11
3. Liquidity - 2
4. Misc - 7
5. Behemoths -3

Here are all platforms in an excel spread sheet in their categories with a description: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s8PHcNvvjuy848q18py_CGcu8elRGQAUIf86EYh4QZo/edit#gid=268170779
In order to find out which one is the best platform in each market currently and made sure to be strict with every platform and point out their flaws.
Let's look at the 5 markets.

1) Dapps platforms

Dapps platforms are definitely a solid bet for the next years. Besides Ethereum, Neo, EOS and Stellar are probably the most known here, however, all 4 are simply extremely centralized and would need to completely change their architecture to become more decentralized. Until that happens, none of these platform can really be considered as a platform with good technology, since everyone can achieve high scalability by letting a few hundred nodes do the consensus algorithm. There is nothing difficult about that. The difficulty is achieving several million TPS with 100,000 nodes deciding consensus.
Cardano, Aeternity are the only ones that seem to be able to maintain excellent decentralization with high scalability, because they scale through side-chains/horizontally.
All platforms considered, Ethereum seems to be on the way there as well with its change to Casper.

1. Cardano has a great team, has probably the most secure PoS that was peer-reviewed in a scientific approach, has their mainnet launched, has near infinite scalability through sidechains and offers broad usability of Smart contracts in a number of programming languages.
2. Ethereum is a 2nd generation blockchain that allows the use of smart contracts and dapps on a smaller scope. Ethereum currently has bad scalability, though this concern could be alleviated by the soon to be implemented Sharding concept and its new PoS/PoW consensus algorithm Casper. Still, there are platforms with much more comprehensive dapp ecosystems, and much more scalability. However, Ethereum just closed a partnership with AWS. This is probalby the biggest partnership in the cryptosphere. Though, in order to be better than any of the top 3 platforms, it would need to provide Oracles, a lot more functionality for dapps, partnerships, decentralized data storage, cloud computing.
3. Neblio is similar to NEO and a good platform, though it has a much smaller market cap.
4. EOS has high scalability, though is much more centralized than Skycoin, Elastos and Cardano. However, it offers a lot of functionality for Dapps. EOS is overhyped. It is on the same level as Neblio, Neo, Aeternity, but not on the same level as Skycoin, Elastos, IOTA, Cardano.
5. NEO is a very established platform in this category.However, Neo dapps scale on-chain and can thus clog the network quickly. For that reason, NEO had to pick a very centralized approach to maintain scalability and it looking to rely on hand-picked nodes to maintain scalability in the future, very similar to EOS also very centralized approach of 121 handpicked nodes.
6. Stellar has similar goals as Ripple, only that it is more a platform than only a currency, so it does offer more functionality. . Stellar uses Byzantine Fault Tolerance in the consensus protocol, which ensures secure consensus can be reached (moving the blockchain forward) even if a large percentage of nodes are disabled or acting dishonestly. It also helps keep nodes distributed. Stellar is a good platform with tight involvement with banks. While it doesn't have as much functionality as all above platforms, it can probably carve out its niche by doing really good business with banks.
7. Aeternity: We’ve seen recently, that it’s difficult to scale the execution of smart contracts on the blockchain. Crypto Kitties is a great example. Something as simple as creating and trading unique assets on Ethereum bogged the network down when transaction volume soared. Ethereum and Zilliqa address this problem with Sharding. Aeternity focuses on increasing the scalability of smart contracts and dapps by moving smart contracts off-chain. Instead of running on the blockchain, smart contracts on Aeternity run in private state channels between the parties involved in the contracts. State channels are lines of communication between parties in a smart contract. They don’t touch the blockchain unless they need to for adjudication or transfer of value. Because they’re off-chain, state channel contracts can operate much more efficiently. They don’t need to pay the network for every time they compute and can also operate with greater privacy. An important aspect of smart contract and dapp development is access to outside data sources. This could mean checking the weather in London, score of a football game, or price of gold. Oracles provide access to data hosted outside the blockchain. In many blockchain projects, oracles represent a security risk and potential point of failure, since they tend to be singular, centralized data streams. Aeternity proposes decentralizing oracles with their oracle machine. Doing so would make outside data immutable and unchangeable once it reaches Aeternity’s blockchain. Of course, the data source could still be hacked, so Aeternity implements a prediction market where users can bet on the accuracy and honesty of incoming data from various oracles.It also uses prediction markets for various voting and verification purposes within the platform. Aeternity’s network runs on on a hybrid of proof of work and proof of stake. Founded by a long-time crypto-enthusiast and early colleague of Vitalik Buterin, Yanislav Malahov.
8. IOST: To improve speed and scalability, IOStoken uses a Proof of Believability consensus mechanism eliminating the need for an energy-hungry proof-of-work protocol, which stands as a barrier to blockchain scaling up for widespread adoption. With this system, a node is validated based on its past contributions and behaviors. Moreover, to increase fairness and to most fully embrace the decentralized nature of the blockchain, IOS uses a “fairness” algorithm that randomly distributes data to various nodes. It’s intended to support service-oriented goods and services with large customer bases. Decentralized applications and smart contracts, the hallmarks of blockchain platforms, are a priority for IOS as well.
9. Request Network: Req payments can be used for online purchases, business to business invoices, escrow, advanced payments and eventually IoT payments between machines. Other than payments, the Request Network is also tackling auditing and budget transparency. Businesses have the ability to track invoices to audit payments as well as record transactions for accounting purposes. Governments, nonprofits, and other organizations can also use Request to bring transparency to their budget and expenditures.
10. Rchain: Similar to Ethereum with smart contracts, though much more scalable at an expected 40,000 TPS and possible 100,000 TPS. However, Rchain has not launched ye..
11. Ziliqa: Zilliqa is building a new way of sharding, so that 10,000 tps are soon possible by being linearly scalable with the number of nodes. That means, the more nodes, the faster the network gets. They are looking at implementing privacy as well.Rchain is an ok platform.
12. Ethereum classic is the original Ethereum that decided not to fork after a hack for philosophical reasons. The Ethereum that we know is its fork.

2) BaaS (Blockchain-as-a-Service)

BaaS take a different route to adoption than mere Dapps platforms. They are also dapp platforms, but focus on businesses (B2B) instead of end-users (B2C) within the cryptosphere. They sell their blockchain services to companies, who then can build their own customizable blockchain as a side-chain to the BaaS without hassle and worry about technology or blockchain architecture. This is all handled by the BaaS company already and the customer only needs to change a few variables and they have their own blockchain. Side-chains are interesting, because they allow virtually infinite scaling, since there can be an infinite number of side-chains that only communicate with the main-chain occasionally and handle the majority of transactions on their own chain. This is also called horizontal scaling.
The success of a BaaS platform largely depends on its ability to close partnerships to sell to large businesses and having the best usability. The more contracts they can sell to businesses and institutions, the more valuable it will be. For that reason, the BaaS with the best ability to form partnerships and do sales will win this market. Technology isn't as important here. Of course, the platform has to work without bugs, but having a platform with outstanding technology, average usability and average marketing will lose against a platform with average technology, great usability and great marketing.

1. VeChain is a Singapore-based project that’s building a business enterprise platform and inventory tracking system. . While it is not really competing with the above mentioned platforms, any of them can build supply management tools into their platform and compete with VeChain. However, VeChain has very strong partnerships. This gives them some protection of any of the above mentioned entering the market. Examples are verifying genuine luxury goods and food supply chains. VeChain has one of the strongest communities in the crypto world. If you are looking for something more high risk, high return, have a look into Ambrosus and Devery(Eve). Both also seem to be good at building partnerships, which is the most important characteristic for a supply chain platform required to succeed.
2. Icon is called the Korean Ethereum. However, it specializes more on building customizable blockchains for banks, insurance providers, hospitals, and universities, since it's a BaaS. Icon has a focus on on ID verification and payments. Icon is ery close behind Vechain, because with Samsung and Line.
3. WTC is a supply chain management platform, similar to Vechain, however, with fewer partnerships.
4. Komodo’s open-source platform is for doing transparent, anonymous, private, and fungible transactions. They are then made ultra-secure using Bitcoin’s blockchain via a Delayed Proof of Work (dPoW) protocol and decentralized crowdfunding (ICO) platform to remove middlemen from project funding. Offers services for startups to create and manage their own Blockchains. While it doesn't have as many partnerships as other BaaS, it is the only BaaS that offers privacy so far. However, that's. it such a bug competitive advantage, since it can be replicated rather swiftly.
5. NEM: The NEM blockchain powers what they call the Smart Asset System. This system is intended to be an open, customizable blockchain solution for any number of use cases built on top of simple, powerful API calls. NEM started as a NXT fork and introduced a new consensus mechanism called Proof of Importance (PoI), designed to reward users’ contribution to the XEM community. It is roughly based on proof-of-stake, but it also reflects how active a user is in transacting with other users. POW rewards powerful computers and also requires excessive amounts of energy. POS gives an unfair advantage to coin hoarders. The more coins they keep in their accounts, the more they earn, meaning that the rich get richer and everyone has an incentive to save coins instead of spending them.
6. Ark is a fork of Lisk, which is doubling down on a smaller feature set than Lisk. Ark is a good BaaS, though it doesn't have many partnerships. Furthermore, they haven't launched their platform yet.
7. Dragonchain: The Purpose of DragonChain is to help companies quickly and easily incorporate blockchain into their business applications. Many companies might be interested in making this transition because of the benefits associated with serving clients over a blockchain – increased efficiency and security for transactions, a reduction of costs from eliminating potential fraud and scams, etc. Dragonchain is a good BaaS, though it doesn't have many partnerships. However, it was funded by Disney, so it might be able to get partnerships more easy.
8. LISK: Lisk's difference to other BaaS is that side chains are independent to the main chain and have to have their own nodes. Similar to neo whole allows dapps to deploy their blockchain too. Lisk is a good BaaS, though it doesn't have many partnerships. Furthermore, they haven't launched their platform yet.
9. Stratis: Different to LISK, Stratis will allow businesses and organizations to create their own blockchain according to their own needs, but secured on the parent Stratis chain. Stratis’s simple interface will allow organizations to quickly and easily deploy and/or test blockchain functionality of the Ethereum, BitShares, BitCoin, Lisk and Stratis environements.Stratis is similar to Lisk, but also doesn't have many partnerships
10. ARDR: Ardor is a public blockchain platform that will allow people to utilize the blockchain technology of Nxt through the use of child chains. A child chain, which is a ‘light’ blockchain that can be customized to a certain extent, is designed to allow easy self-deploy for your own blockchain. Nxt claims that users will "not need to worry" about security, as that part is now handled by the main chain (Ardor). This is the chief innovation of Ardor. Ardor was evolved from NXT by the same company. NEM started as a NXT clone.
11. Bytom: Bytom is an interactive protocol of multiple financial assets ( digital currency, digital assets warrants, securities, dividends, bonds, intelligence information, forecasting information and other information that exist in the physical world) can be registered, exchanged, gambled and engaged in other more complicated and contract-based interoperations via Bytom.

3) Liquidity

There are really only 2 platforms in the Liquidity market, albeit the Liquidity market could be one of the biggest markets with insitutional investors entering the cryptoworld soon, since there is very little liquidity in Bitcoin. For example, say a pension fund wants to buy or sell $10B in Bitcoins. No single exchange has that many Bitcoins available and it would wreak havoc on the market. This wouldn't be a problem with Liquidity platforms, since they pull all order books together and back up market liquidity with FIAT money among other things.

1. QASH is used to fuel its liquid platform which will be an exchange that will distribute their liquidity pool. Its product, the Worldbook is a multi-exchange order book that matches crypto to crypto, and crypto to fiat and the reverse across all currencies. E.g., someone is selling Bitcoin is USD on exchange1 not owned by Quoine and someone is buying Bitcoin in EURO on exchange 2 not owned by Quoine. If the forex conversions and crypto conversions match then the trade will go through and the Worldbook will match it, it'll make the sale and the purchase on either exchange and each user will get what they wanted, which means exchanges with lower liquidity if they join the Worldbook will be able to fill orders and take trade fees they otherwise would miss out on.They turned it on to test it a few months ago for an hour or so and their exchange was the top exchange in the world by 4x volume for the day because all Worldbook trades ran through it. Binance wants BNB to be used on their one exchange. Qash wants their QASH token embedded in all of their partners. More info here https://www.reddit.com/CryptoCurrency/comments/8a8lnwhich_are_your_top_5_favourite_coins_out_of_the/dwyjcbb/?context=3Qash is doing something completely different as the above mentioned. It offers liquidity in an illiquid market. Sell shovels during a gold rush.
2. Loopring is similar to Qash, only that it functions as a dezentralized exchange, while QASH is more of an API without a user interface. It is a protocol that will enable higher liquidity between exchanges and personal wallets by pooling all orders sent to its network and fill these orders through the order books of multiple exchanges. When using Loopring, traders never have to deposit funds into an exchange to begin trading. Even with decentralized exchanges like Ether Delta, IDex, or Bitshares, you’d have to deposit your funds onto the platform, usually via an Ethereum smart contract. But with Loopring, funds always remain in user wallets and are never locked by orders. This gives you complete autonomy over your funds while trading, allowing you to cancel, trim, or increase an order before it is executed.

4) Misc

These are platforms that are focused on a specialized functionality

1. Nebulas: Similar to how google indexes webpages Nebulas will index blockchain projects, smart contracts & data using the Nebulas rank algorithm that sifts & sorts the data. Developers rewarded NAS to develop & deploy on NAS chain. Nebulas calls this developer incentive protocol – basically rewards are issued based on how often dapp/contract etc. is used, the more the better the rewards and Proof of devotion. Works like DPoS except the best, most economically incentivised developers (Bookkeepers) get the forging spots. Ensuring brains stay with the project (Cross between PoI & PoS). 2,400 TPS+, DAG used to solve the inter-transaction dependencies in the PEE (Parallel Execution Environment) feature, first crypto Wallet that supports the Lightening Network.Nebulas is the only one doing what it's doing. This makes them very unique and a good investment.
2. Centrality is a decentralized market place for dapps that are all connected together on a blockchain-powered system. Centrality aims to allow businesses to work together using blockchain technology. With Centrality, startups can collaborate through shared acquisition of customers, data, merchants, and content. That shared acquisition occurs across the Centrality blockchain, which hosts a number of decentralized apps called Scenes. Companies can use CENTRA tokens to purchase Scenes for their app, then leverage the power of the Centrality ecosystem to quickly scale. Some of Centrality's top dapps are, Skoot, a travel experience marketplace that consists of a virtual companion designed for free independent travelers and inbound visitors, Belong, a marketplace and an employee engagement platform that seems at helping business provide rewards for employees, Merge, a smart travel app that acts as a time management system, Ushare, a transports application that works across rental cars, public transport, taxi services, electric bikes and more. All of these dapps are able to communicate with each other and exchange data through Centrality. Centrality is the only one doing what it's doing. This makes them very unique and a good investment.
3. Salt: Leveraging blockchain assets to secure cash loans. Plans to offer cash loans in traditional currencies, backed by your cryptocurrency assets. Allows lenders worldwide to skip credit checks for easier access to affordable loans.Salt is a good lending platform. However, there is also Elixir, a better investment with a 30x smaller market cap, but also strong technology. Elixir has such a low market cap, because they didn't have an ICO and they only focused on development and no marketing. As of last week, they started marketing.
4. Aion: Today, there are hundreds of blockchains. In the coming years, those hundreds will become thousands and—with ,widespread adoption by mainstream business and government—millions. Blockchains don’t talk to each other at all right now, they are like the PCs of the 1980s. The Aion network is able to support custom blockchain architectures while still allowing for cross-chain interoperability by enabling users to exchange data between any Aion-compliant blockchains by making use of an interchain framework that allows for messages to be relayed between blockchains in a completely trust-free manner.
5. Waves is a decentralized exchange and crowdfunding platform by letting companies and projects to issue and manage their own digital coin tokens to raise money.
6. ChainLink is a decentralized oracle service, the first of its kind. Oracles are defined as an ‘agent’ that finds and verifies real-world occurrences and submits this information to a blockchain to be used in smart contracts.With ChainLink, smart contract users can use the network’s oracles to retrieve data from off-chain application program interfaces (APIs), data pools, and other resources and integrate them into the blockchain and smart contracts. Basically, ChainLink takes information that is external to blockchain applications and puts it on-chain. The difference to Aeternity is that Chainlink deploys the smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Chainlink's main functionality is oracles, a functionality also offered by IOTA.
7. QTUM: Smart Contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. QTUM is a smart contracts for BTC, a very niche market. Furthermore, BTC might offer smart contracts itself soon and make QTUM obsolete. Hopefully QTUM will expand into more smart contracts functionality to become relevant again.

Nebulas with Indexing the Blockchain world and Salt with Lending are probably the 2 most interesting platforms here. Nebulas doesn't have a single competitor, though there are several competitors to Salt with a much smaller market cap and with similar development progress, ELIX.

5) Behemoths

There are 3 platforms that have not been discussed yet. However, they can do most what the above platforms can do and have the potential to steal the market of all above mentioned platforms. That's why I call them behemoths.
1.) Skycoin :Skycoin is building what Pied Piper is building in the series HBO's Silicon Valley, a completely decentralized internet that is not run by ISPs, but by IoT devices, making telecom providers like Comcast, ISPs who can control bandwith, cost, net neutrality, filters, access etc. obsolete and completely decentralize them. Skycoin offers what 36 coins are offering:

1. 12 Scalable Currency (Bitcoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dash, Bitcoin Gold, Nano, Bitcoin Diamond, Dogecoin, Digibyte, Decred, Bitcoin Atom)
2. 10 Smart Contract and Dapps platforms (Cardano, Ethereum, Neblio, EOS, Stellar, Neo, Rchain, IOST, Ziliqa, Eth classic)
3. 10 BaaS (VeChain, Icon, WTC, Ontology, Komodo, NEM, Ark, Dragonchain, LISK, Stratis).
4. 4 Decentralized Storage (Siacoin, Maidsafe, Gybte, Storj)

If you think that the decentralized Internet will blow all other markets out of the water and will be the biggest invention of this decade, then Skycoin is your pick, because covers that and what 27 coins do.
2.) IOTA: With the launch of Q 1 week ago, IOTA is about to offer what 27 platforms within the Top 100 are offering (!) and they are probably looking to replace several more.

1. 12 Scalable Currency (Bitcoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dash, Bitcoin Gold, Nano, Bitcoin Diamond, Dogecoin, Digibyte, Decred, Bitcoin Atom.)
2. 10 Smart Contract and Dapps platforms (Cardano, Ethereum, Neblio, EOS, Stellar, Neo, Rchain, IOST, Ziliqa, Eth classic)
3. 2 Oracles (Aeternity, ChainLink)
4. 3 Outsourced Cloud Computing (DBC, Aelf, Golem)

IOTA is at the same level as Skycoin and Elastos. However, SKY's flagship product is the Decentralized Internet and ELA's is the most comprehensive dapps operating system in the cryptosphere, which IOTA cannot really replicate in the near future, because it takes years of reseach and development. This protects ELA and SKY from IOTA for now.
However, it looks like IOTA can snatch up all the smaller, easier to replicate markets, such as cloud computing, oracles, smart contracts, decentralized storage, currency exchange and soon possibly also supply chain management, BaaS functionality, privacy, security identification since none of those are really hard to build. However, Skycoin and Elastos will probably focus on their flagships and leave IOTA to scoop up all the rest. It will be an interesting year.
3.) Elastos started out as a mobile operating system 18 years ago and has now moved towards a smart contracts platform, operating system and a runtime environment for Dapps. Thanks to side-chains they are near infinitely scalable and is thus also very decentralized. Elastos is offering what 36 coins are offering

1. 12 Scalable Currency (Bitcoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dash, Bitcoin Gold, Nano, Bitcoin Diamond, Dogecoin, Digibyte, Decred, Bitcoin Atom.)
2. 10 Smart Contract and Dapps platforms (Cardano, Ethereum, Neblio, EOS, Stellar, Neo, Rchain, IOST, Ziliqa, Eth classic)
3. 10 BaaS (VeChain, Icon, WTC, Ontology, Komodo, NEM, Ark, Dragonchain, LISK, Stratis).
4. 4 Decentralized Storage (Siacoin, Maidsafe, Gybte, Storj)

If you are very convinced that BaaS solutions and dapps platforms will be the big winners for 2018, then Elastos is your pick as far as I can see, because it is probably the best BaaS and dapps platform with near infinite scalability and the best decentralization and thus does what 32 coins do.
3 Closing Questions
All of the above findings leave me with those 3 questions. What are your thoughts?

1. Why invest in any of Dapps platforms (Cardano, Neblio, EOS, Stellar, Neo, Aeternity, Rchain, IOST, Ziliqa, Ethereum, Eth classic) when Elastos and Skycoin do everything they do, are much more decentralized and scalable through side-chain/off-chain/horizontal scaling and offer lots more functionality beyond that?
2. Why invest in any BaaS (Ontology, Komodo, NEM, Ark ,Dragonchain, LISK, Stratis, ARDR) if ICX and VeChain offer everything what all of the above offer and already have 10x more partnerships than their competitors?
3. It looks like out of all 35 platforms, only 5 are really strong: IOTA, Skycoin, Elastos, VeChain, ICX. While the first 3 seem to cover already almost half of the top 100, the last 2 really convince in the partnership department. What's the argument for investing in any of the 30 other platforms? Maybe that they can specialise on a specific feature set, however, is this really a convincing argument? The cryptoworld is harsh and if you can't keep up with competition, you'll be moved out of the market quickly.