With the rise of Ethereum and smart contracts the entire crypto space has been thrown on its head. The promise of scalability and unlimited potential at our fingertips. Yet as time goes on we see there are holes in Ethereum just in its infancy. Status and Bancor ICO has showed us that ETH can get easily overloaded in transactions. As well as have an infinite number of coins Ethereum is going to see fierce competition in the space and this is where Lisk and Ubiq come in.
Lisk
Lisk is a coin that currently sits at a $335 million market cap in 23rd place. While the coin is not unknown it still had a lot of ways to go and evolve. What sets Lisk apart from Ethereum is the focus on side chains and the use of JavaScript instead of Solidity. The developers of Lisk are also very engaging and some even come from Ethereum its main competitor. Lisk addresses its scaling issues by using PoS and DPoS. DPoS helps when making decisions on which way the coin will move and PoS helps with transactions being secured faster.
Ubiq
Ubiq is definitely lesser known than Lisk but also provides tremendous potential for the use of smart contracts. Ubiq uses an improved Ethereum code that helps address scalability and hard forks. With the coin sitting at only $67 million in market cap in 48th place it is severely under priced. With a growing community and a very engaged development team I see this coin gaining a lot of ground over the next year.