I made a posting at http://www.impulsecorp.com/what-is-the-next-big-thing
which gives a summary of various metacoins (and I also made a follow-up posting at
http://www.impulsecorp.com/bitcoin_2_making_money where talk about LTB and LTB Coin in the comments section). I am not an expert at all on this topic, I was just trying to expose it to wider audience (readers of my blog know almost nothing about cryptocoins), so here's what I wrote about the metacoins:
Ripple – A peer-to-peer payment network that is a cross between Facebook, Paypal, and Western Union. It supports almost any currency or commodity, and has almost no fees.
Colored Coins – Uses “sidechain” technology, allowing you to mark Bitcoins with additional information so they can be used to trade more than just currency. You “color” each coin to represent one of your assets such as a car, house, gold, stock, bond, etc. Anyone can then trade these colored coins anywhere, just like how bitcoin works. It also has the security of piggybacking on the existing Bitcoin network and protocol.
Ethereum – Allows financial contracts on top of its cryptocurrency, kind of like an automated escrow service. Each Ethereum transaction is recorded in the Ethereum cryptoledger and can have its own scripting code (providing the automation part).
NXT – An improved version of Bitcoin, written entirely from scratch in Java. It has all the abilities of Bitcoin, but also can handle colored coins, includes a decentralized asset exchange (i.e. you can buy and sell things with no 3rd party needed), includes a built-in encrypted messaging system, and has the ability for anonymous payments. It also uses much less electricity for mining than Bitcoin does (it can be mined using a mobile phone, Raspberry Pi, or any PC), due to the use of “proof-of-stake” instead of “proof-of-work” protocol.
Mastercoin (and also Counterparty) – Uses the Bitcoin blockchain to store data, so it has the security of Bitcoin, but creates a different currency than Bitcoin. The extra data can be used to create smart contracts to enable the electronic exchange of assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and intellectual property. In addition, you can create your own currency with it.
Open Transactions – An open source financial cryptography software that can be used to create an online financial market and banking system. You can also use it to create their own cryptocurrency backed by hard assets such as gold, silver, dollars, euros, stocks, oil futures, and more. In addition, it can be used for things such as issuing stock, virtual currencies for online games, paying dividends, sending and receiving digital cash, and escrow using scripted custom agreements.
HolyTransaction – A universal cryptocurrency wallet. Typically if you want to buy 10 different cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, LiteCoin, Dogecoin, NameCoin, etc.) you need to have 10 different wallets, which makes it hard to manage. HolyTransaction solves this problem, plus it comes with currency exchange features so you can easily convert one cryptocurrency to another.
