BitShares (BTS)

Bitshares (BTS) is a blockchain based financial network. It represents an innovative form of decentralized security exchange, which is similar to NASDAQ but for trading cryptocurrencies. Bitshares omits the need for a central authority to manage the trading via reliance on a network of computers, in which anyone can participate, to validate the trading deals. BitShares has a cryptocurrency token called "BTS", which can be transacted between users' accounts and is mainly used to collect fees for network operations and as a financial collateral for issuing loans. Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) is the Bitshares' blockchain consensus algorithm. It relies on a voting protocol to control the blockchain's parameters including block intervals, transaction fees, the number of nodes producing blocks, and to decide which nodes it will be. This predefined group of nodes can confirm a transaction in a period of less than a second. The Bitshares' blockchain can confirm 100,000 transactions per second (tps) and this rate can even increase with minimal optimization. The block producing nodes are known as "witnesses". Their main role is to group the transactions that have been broadcast to the network into "blocks" and add them to the blockchain. On the Bitshares network, wallet addresses are in the form of aliases, or usernames, just like your login handle on Facebook or Twiter. This is way better than the long cumbersome strings of hexadecimal characters commonly associated with cryptocurrency wallet addresses.