Together with IOTA, AION is my best bet for 2018. According to Metcalfes law this one could be a giant, nearing the Ethereum market cap.
The market cap is still tiny, gains of x10 are possible.
Why AION over Ark? trying to understand which will be better choice.
Ark simply added an extra Vendor field in their wallet labelled Smartbridge" where you put some instructions like: "Use this ark token I'm sending to trigger an Ethereum contract". Then an "Encoded Listener", which is just an off-chain bot that's connected to Ethereum blockchain, sees that transaction with those instructions, and does what you asked.
Aion bridges completely moves tokens between different blockchains by deploying smart contracts on 2 different blockchains so they can:
1. Burn a certain amount of tokens on Blockchain A
2. Mint that same amount of tokens on Blockchain B
The Aion-1 blockchain acts as Router at the core of the Aion network. It has a Virtual Machine (AVM) which gives Aion 2 major advantages:
1. Instant Finality: The Aion-1 VM has parallel transaction processing to make sure Aion-1 doesn't become a bottleneck for performance while routing transactions between blockchains since they have different confirmation times.
2. Interoperable Dapps: The Aion-1 VM can host Dapps that read & trigger logic between different blockchains:
. IF THIS happens on blockchain A
. THEN THAT should happen on blockchain B