Hi all, I'm new to cryptocurrencies. I've been looking into different currencies and I see that many offer a certain platform.

Afaik is ethereum the first to successfully launch a platform by smart contracts. Nem tries to improve on the scalability problems eth is facing and advocates to have better security. I cannot really discover what lisk does different, but I understand that they make an effort to support individual/simple projects to sell to the masses. Ark is sort of a fork from Lisk and will support bridging between different block chains.

There are probably many more, but these are some of the bigger projects going on. Can somebody with more knowledge explain shortly what the main differences are between the ones listed?