Only project with functional on-chain governance. Did the first ever on-chain user activated hard fork.
Everyone says this, but fantastic devs. Ours include the developers of btcsuite, & also the author of the atomic swap code used by btc and ltc recently.
Unique hybrid PoS/PoW system that is extremely resilient to attacks. Making a 51% attack extremely difficult & a minority hard fork nearly impossible for example.
Direct PoS. No masternodes or DPoS where you will inevitably run into issues like the "Lisk elite"
The project is relatively young, at almost 2 years since launch. So it's still getting in early.
Great, active community, that is distributed pretty evenly around the world.
Big war chest in the community treasury (something like $30-40 million currently).
Support from many influential community members including Charlie Lee & Jimmy Song.
At least 2 competing ASICs coming out next year... should be an indicator of where some see this project going.
Also, initial distribution. I'd argue that Decred had one of the fairest distributions in crypto. Decred founders started with 4% of total supply (which they paid for w/ cash into the community fund) and airdropped another 4% to crypto community members. The PoS % of new DCR is purposefilly set low so the relative power of holders decreases, not increases, over time. Compare to today where it seems like 90% of projects are totally premined with the founders starting with the majority or all of the tokens that will ever exist.