Yeah, surprisingly there doesn't seem to be basic blockchain information available anywhere.

Anyway.

Bitshares has a supply of 2.5 billion BTS, with a maximum of 3.7 billion.

The consensus algorithm is delegated proof of stake, which is a variant of proof of stake where people vote for 101 delegates who act as a kind of "PoS pool" that create the blocks. Whitepaper: https://bitshares.org/blog/delegated-proof-of-stake/

The block times are 10 seconds, with little variance because the delegates can control who is next in line. Transactions are secured after 1 confirmation so average confirmed transaction time is 5 seconds.

The system has TITAN transactions which is a combination of registered names (so sending is as easy as email) and stealth transactions (which don't really have that great anonymity compared to darkcoin, as mentioned here, but still offer some advantages over bitcoin).

The most important feature of the system is market pegged assets: They are a type of smart contract that creates what can best be described as a fungible contract-for-difference that is collateralized by 300% of its nominal value in BTS (the core token) and locked verifiably on the blockchain. This creates a series of assets with stable values pegged to the price of their underlying assets, such as bitUSD (https://bter.com/trade/btc_bitusd) or bitGOLD (https://bter.com/trade/bitgld_btc). These assets work just like bitcoin, but have a stable price and are completely free from counterparty risk so if you hold the private keys for them they are totally safe. They give value to bitshares because they increase demand for the collateral and thus if they become widely used the price of BTS will also increase. Whitepaper: http://docs.bitshares.org/content/

There is also a decentralized exchange that works pretty much like other decentralized exchanges, such as the NXT asset exchange. In addition to trading the market pegged assets mentioned above there are also UIA - user issued assets. These assets are just like NXT assets and can be used as gateway IOU's (like ripple) or can be used as cryptostock for crowdfunding. The biggest difference is that the UIA on bitshares are usually traded in bitassets so their price can be more stable since they are not affected by the volatility of BTS itself.

Finally the elected delegates that produce blocks can be elected by stakeholders to get a salary, and this can be used as a decentralized funding mechanism for further development that avoids single points of failure like the bitcoin foundation. There are currently 18 developer delegates, 9 marketing delegates and 2 delegates that subsidize infrastructure (tradebts and DACX). You can see all the employee by sorting by payrate here: http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegates those with 100% payrate are employees while those with 3% payrate are regular block producers.

Bitshares is better since it has bitUSD, which means it has both anonymity and price stability. If you want to actually do commerce rather than speculation you need a unit of account that doesn't swing wildly in value.

Bitshares is so undervalued its almost hilarious. Best tech of any altcoin with the most horribly failed marketing and PR.