Handfull of blockchain

Aragon

Aragon is also tackling the challenge of designing a company that operates according to smart contract logic, with a focus on creating a company, rather than an organization, that can accept investment, handle accounting, pay employees, distribute equity, and generally do business as we know it today. They’re also building a beautiful dApp client to make using their protocol as easy as possible.

Check out the aragon-core contracts for a better understanding of how it operates.

Swarm

Swarm is a decentralized storage network being developed within the Ethereum ecosystem as a first-party project. Read this wiki where the primary Swarm developer compare/contrasts the two projects, but the gist is that they’re basically the same except they have slightly different philosophies and use different protocols under the hood.

Projects

IPFS & FileCoin

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a protocol (among other things) for distributing files. Think of it as a filesystem using the ideas behind bittorrent and git where data is content-addressable and immutable. IPFS stores information using a data model called IPLD, which you can learn about via the links below.

While this is a new protocol, there is an http gateway and a filesystem adaptor, meaning you can fetch IPFS content via http and mount the entire world wide filesystem on your local disk at /ipfs . IPFS also provides a naming system called IPNS (InterPlanetary Name Space), which allows for mutable state (recall that everything in IPFS is immutable). You can even use DNS TXT records to direct your IPNS client, allowing you to generate human-friendly links to data.

FileCoin is Protocol Labs’ effort to create a distributed market for storage on IPFS; aka, an incentive layer for providing storage to the network. The FileCoin consensus protocol (mostly) does away with wasteful Proof of Work and uses Proof of Replication and Proof of SpaceTime (yes, really) to ensure that a piece of data is replicated a certain number of times and is stored for a specific amount of time.