Mapping the blockchain project ecosystem by Josh Nussbaum

Blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and token sales are all the rage right now. In the 5+ years I’ve been working in the VC industry, this is by and large the fastest I’ve seen any area of technology take off in terms of new company (or project) formation.

It wasn’t too long ago that founders and VCs were mainly focused on centralized exchanges, enterprise or private blockchain solutions, wallets, amongst several other popular blockchain startup ideas that dominated the market from 2012 to somewhere around 2016.

However, as I wrote about a few months ago, the rise of Ethereum with its Turing-complete scripting language and the ability for developers to include state in each block, has paved the way for smart contract development. This has led to an influx of teams building decentralized projects seeking to take advantage of the most valuable property of blockchains — the ability to reach a shared truth that everyone agrees on without intermediaries or a centralized authority.

There are many exciting developments coming to market both in terms of improving existing blockchain functionality as well as the consumer’s experience. However, given the rapid pace at which projects are coming to market, I’ve found it to be difficult to keep track of each and every project and where each one fits into the ecosystem.

Furthermore, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees without a comprehensive view of what the proverbial forest looks like.

As a result, here’s a compiled a list of all of the decentralized blockchain-based projects that I have been following, and was able to dig up through research, along with recommendations from friends in the ecosystem.

A quick disclaimer: While it’s difficult to pigeonhole a number of projects into one category, I did my best to pinpoint the main purpose or value proposition of each project and categorize them as such. There are certainly many projects that fall into the gray area and could fit into multiple categories. The hardest ones are the “fat protocols” which offer functionality in more than a couple of areas.

Here the original link to read full article ... https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/mapping-the-blockchain-project-ecosystem/