A feeless and scalable cryptocurrency--does it exist? You might be surprised to hear that it does. IOTA is the cryptocurrency for IoT, or the Internet of Things. Its goal is to power the world of machine-to-machine payments; payments that can be smaller than a cent.

If you want to publish a book online, do you really own it? Or does your distributor own it? In today's world, there isn't any way to claim digital content. Content exists on the Internet hosted on servers owned by big companies such as Amazon. On top of that, once someone downloads your digital content, they can freely copy and redistribute it however they like. Elastos plans to solve this problem by making all traffic on the Internet authenticated by the blockchain.

The EOS technical white paper provides a software specification for scalable blockchains. Thanks to delegated proof of stake (DPOS) and a commitment to parallel execution, EOS promises a blockchain that can scale to support millions of transactions.

Today, we do a reading of "Tether - Fiat Currencies on the Bitcoin Blockchain." The paper explores the idea of fiat-pegged cryptocurrencies, or cryptocurrencies that I have a 1:1 backing to a fiat currency such as the US Dollar.  The goal? To fight against price volatility. Let's see how it works.

In today's episode we explore "The Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm." The paper is kept alive for historical interest, but is not an accurate reflection of the XRP Ledger today. Despite that, we can learn a thing or two about what consensus is and how the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm managed to make consensus fast.

This week, we take a dive into Vitalik Buterin's 2013 white paper, "Ethereum: A Next Generation Smart Contract & Decentralized Application Platform." In this paper we learn that the blockchain technology introduced in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper doesn't need to just be restricted to electronic cash systems. There are many more decentralized applications that can be built on top of a new blockchain that Vitalik calls 'Ethereum.'

This week, we explore Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 white paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." This white paper is historical, laying the foundation for cryptocurrencies and blockchains to come.