High performance proof of stake blockchain, unforkable, all transactions are final in Algorand(single block finality). Algo uses PPoS, a highly democratized PoS consensus mechanism with a low minimum staking requirement for participating in and securing the network. Heavily funded and developed, lacking user volume and adoption.

Leadership: A     Silvio Micali(MIT, Turing Award), highly academic team and advisors. Several of the largest crypto investment funds are involved.

June 2019 ICO raised $122.4M

Borderless Capital Announces the Launch of $500M Algo Fund II

An open-source sharded multichain protocol that connects and secures a network of specialized blockchains, facilitating cross-chain transfer of any data or asset types, not just tokens. Self-labeled Layer 0, so it has Layer1s on it like Substrate and Moonbeam. They are applying several new solutions to increase transaction speed and ease of use. Highly interoperable, similar to Cosmos $ATOM.

Leadership: A+     DOT is flagship protocol of Web3 Foundation, a Swiss Foundation with a mission to facilitate an open-source, fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web. Founders are Dr. Gavin Wood(ETH founder/creator of Solidity), Robert Habermeier(Thiel Fellow) and Peter Czaban(Director at Web3 Foundation).

Oct 2017 ICO raised $144.6M

Moonbeam Foundation and Arrington Capital Launch New $100 Million Fund to Fuel Moonbeam Ecosystem Growth

April 2017 ICO raised $17.3M

Cosmos Builder Tendermint Rebrands to ‘Ignite’ as Team Shifts Focus

Bishop Fox Lands $75 Million Series B Funding

A decentralized Ethereum scaling platform that enables developers to build scalable user-friendly dApps with low transaction fees without ever sacrificing on security, built on Plasma Framework POS. Polygon is a Layer 2 of Ethereum and offers convenient side chains.

Leadership: A     Backed by Binance and Coinbase. Top developers. Advisors from ETH Foundation, Mark Cuban

April 2019 ICO raised $5.6M

After Benefitting From Projects Spearheaded by Aave and Disney, Polygon Just Launched zkEVM!

Polygon raises $450M from Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank and Tiger Global

• One of the oldest and most developed smart contract platforms
• See my article on dev commits and contributors, of which they are leaders
• The most secure POS network for now in my opinion, lacking users

Listen to Charles Hoskinson

An open, programmable smart contracts platform for decentralized applications, the fastest smart contract network by finality time. Built by Ava Labs in Singapore to be eco-friendly. One of Avalanche's biggest claims is decentralization, and large number of validators.

Leadership: A+     Previously at all the big Fortune 500 companies. Founder is Emin Gün Sirer, a Turkish-American, Cornell Alum.

July 2020 ICO raised $42M

Avalanche raises $230 million from private sale of AVAX tokens

A community based cloud computing platform. Original POS algorithm has enhanced performance using Nightshade sharding. Highly interoperable and supports many languages. Ecofriendly. Focused on ease of use for developer and users. Committed to decentralization, relatively high number of active devs.

Leadership: A+     Founded by Illia Polosukhin previously Google, Alexander Skidanov previously dev at Microsoft, Y Combinator, highly academic and acclaimed team, CEO Erik Trautman previously Wallstreet and edutech

August 2020 ICO raised $33.6M

NEAR Announces $800 Million in Funding Initiatives To Support Ecosystem Growth

• 2nd most established
• Largest smart contract platform by active users and transaction revenue
• Most usage and dApps of any crypto

For more insight, listen to Vitalik Buterin

• Largest exchange in the world 
• 2nd most common smart contract platform for dApps 

Binance is infamous for closing accounts in many states because of regulation problems, but now they seem too big to fail. CZ is an important figure.

High performance DPOS smart contract network built to facilitate a decentralized internet. EVM compatible with Ethereum and most other smart contract networks. Focused on on-chain governance, scalability, and dynamic smart contracts. Heavy in metaverse and gaming, low volume in DeFi.

Leadership: A     Justin Sun is founder and leader. former Google, AirBNB, Alibaba, Meta, BitTorrent execs.

June 2018 ICO raised $70M

Tron Foundation, APENFT Launch $100M Fund for NFT Projects

• Digital Gold
• Very fundamentally sound, highly audited
• Most widely established

If you need more convincing, listen to Michael Saylor, Andreas Antonopulous, or Robert Breedlove on a podcast.

Solana Foundation in Geneva, open source, Proof-of-History more efficiently sequences blocks so the network does not need confirmations, high number of developers and commits relative to others. 50k+ TPS, world's first web-scale blockchain. Centralization and VC manipulation concerns.

Leadership: A-    Anatoly Yakovenko is founder with Greg Fitzgerald, many previously at Qualcomm and Dropbox, research and heavy funding

March 2020 ICO raised $25.6M

The Seventh Outage of the Year