The idea is to cooperate between blockchain projects that offer a significant technical novelty.
Unlike projects with a relatively similar scope but a more "organizational" structure, like SuperNET, this network should remain open and decentralized. It should never be a closed group: Any project that offers something outstanding could join.
The cooperation can occur on many levels. Some coins may only opt to rise awareness within their communities for other technically interesting coins. Others may want to create common software projects, or even services like exchanges. In fact, one of the long-term ideas is to open an exchange only for technically interesting blockchain coins, without ICO tokens and clones. Also, joint web projects like blogs and info websites could be created.
However, there must be some criteria to be added to the group - because otherwise, every clone that e.g. adds a line of code that does "something" different. Also, in my opinion, not every new hashing algorithm belongs here, because most of them have no practical advantages over others.
My proposal for requirements to be included:
Requirement 0: The project must be an independent blockchain, not a token, asset etc.
Requirement 1: The project must offer something new at protocol level. (For example, an unique GUI does not count.)
Requirement 2: The novelty must be interesting and significant. That means it meats one of the following criteria:
- a) The novelty solves (or attempts to solve) one of the "big problems" cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects face, the most well known being Scalability, Privacy, and Efficient Energy Use.
- b) The novelty enables new use cases for blockchains and cryptocurrencies that are not possible without it; for example, with rich smart contract languages.
- c) The novelty is a new consensus method.*
Examples for cryptocurrencies I consider worth to be included, grouped by the type of novelty:
a) Cryptonite, Ardor (Scalability); ZCash, Bytecoin (Privacy), NXT, Burst (energy efficiency)
b) Ethereum, Burst (rich smart contract languages), Sia (decentralized storage), Datacoin (on-blockchain data storage),
c) Burst (Proof of Space/Capacity), Peercoin** (Proof of Stake), Bitshares (DPoS), Slimcoin (Proof of Burn), Cardano/Ada ("Follow-the-satoshi"-PoS), NEM ("Proof-of-Importance"), Decred (PoW/PoS hybrid), Raiblocks, Byteball**, IOTA** (three different DAG types), Primecoin, Gapcoin ("useful" Proof of Work)
*Consensus is not limited to relatively "objective" methods like "standard" Proof of Work, but also "weakly subjective" methods like Proof of Stake where a theoretical ambiguity of the "best chain" is tolerated as long as the practical security is sufficiently high. Experimental, non-tested methods are allowed, as long as the blockchain is intended to work without a central server that dictates consensus.
**Early versions of these projects feature centralized elements, but they are not intended to be permanent, so I tend to allow these coins in the group.
OK, now it's your turn. In this thread, now everybody who is member of the community of a blockchain project that wants to be part of the group can make proposals. I am also open to change the requirements a bit, but they should not be too weak.