Right now, I think there is 5 different names competing in this space right now
Mastercoin
NXT
Colored Coins
Bitshares
eMunie
Out of all of them, Mastercoin has the biggest amount of capital to work with, but some others seem to have faster development
bitshares is far far behind and seems no developer other than the CEO himself.
eMunie is supposed to be released late January.
Nxt will be formally open on January too. Currently, only alias function is implemented.
This is all bordering in ridiculous in that none of these coins have been shown to have a real implementation in the wild. People are betting on untested prototypes!
Mastercoin - doubtful how this approach of protocol layering prevents double spending.
NXT - Closed source implementation. Does anyone have any idea of how this actually works? How fair is the distribution when all coins were bought for a mere 21 BTC.
Colored Coins - Fortunately, they don't have a ridiculous buy in vehicle to support their work.
Bitshares - So these folks use a bitcoin like clone to raise funds. They are redoing everything from scratch. Anybody's guess that this even works out.
eMunie - I heard about it 6 months ago, not certain if their multiple simultaneous block chain forks really work.
Anyway, my plan for iXcoin (The Internet eXchange Coin) is dirt simple.
Stick with tried and proven Satoshi Nakamoto bitcoin technology and layer on top of it Colored Coins.
iXcoin surprisingly has already secured 1/2 of all bitcoin network hash rate. So any financial instrument you layer on top of iXcoin will automatically get the tried and proven security of 1/2 of the bitcoin proof of work scheme. Mastercoin, NXT, Bitshares and eMunie don't even come close to this kind of security.
Furthermore, each coin is dirt cheap, so using is as a platform for Colored Coins makes more sense.
Anyway, keep informed with iXcoin developments at
www.ixcoin.co