TrueChain is developing a secure and scalable blockchain platform with a strong developer community. TrueChain hopes to improve upon current platforms with a hybrid consensus protocol called Minerva. This hybrid model will combine a consensus mechanism based on Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) with a FruitChain-based Proof-of-Work protocol. Fruitchain is designed to minimize the incentives of mining pools by decreasing the variance of mining rewards; making the network more decentralized.
TrueChain's architecture also hopes to improve transaction times and reduce fees, by including a sharding mechanism that is locked to Gas fees. The first use cases for their platform will be digital advertising solutions.
The company is backed by several large Chinese blockchain companies, including ZB.com; one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges. digital advertising industry

ChainLink is developing the LINK Network, which will enable connected smart contracts. LINK will provide smart contracts with a variety of external data and access to APIs. ChainLink's goal is to solve the connectivity problem that plagues smart contract based systems, and discourages mass adoption. Many decentralized applications are unable to connect with important external data sources due to limitations involving their consensus protocols. The LINK network wants to connect their smart contracts with external systems and APIs by using secure middleware.