Bitshares was launched in 2013 and aimed to fix some of the scalability issues bitcoin was running into. In addition to that, it offered some new features in the form of smart contracts which is similar to what Ethereum uses but the way the two coins implement these contacts is a little different. What Bitcoin did for money, Bitshares was meant to do for business
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Bitshares is a decentralized exchange platform that allows for the creation of decentralized autonomous companies. These companies can create shares, produce profits then redistribute those profits as dividends to shareholders. This allows people to create services on the Bitshares network. So if you want to think of Bitshares as a company, you can think of the individual products as services. For example, Bitshares is the overall company but BITUSD is a specific service and what it offers is a stable store of value. This means 1 BITUSD will always equal to 1USD with a variance of maybe 1% and that closes up as the market depth deepens. In that respect, BITUSD and Tether are very similar cryptocurrencies only that BITUSD is a service underneath Bitshares. Bitshares uses a delegated proof-of-stake (POS) system as opposed to Bitcoin which uses proof-of-work (POW). In delegated POS system, one coin equals one vote and if you're neither involved in the politics nor understand the implementation or what's going on, you're able to elect someone to vote for you. For example, you could join an exchange and buy that cryptocurrency and the exchange, on your behalf, could go make decisions for you and vote on what the best direction for the cryptocurrency would be. This delegated POS is much faster than just POS and POW. It shows the network to stay decentralized while being able to handle traffic volumes that are larger than Mastercard's and Visa's.
CONCLUSION
I believe there's going to be a place for Bitshares as a highly efficient decentralized exchange that's gonna be able to run parallel to Ethereum and their smart contracts. While Ethereum will most likely service the majority of the market, Bitshares will service some financial services with very specific use cases. This promises a bright future for this platform and you might want to add BTS to your watchlist this year if you already haven't.
