Nano- The Green BTC

Twitter: Eco-friendly Digital Money for the modern world, Nano makes money efficient - simple to pay with, easy to integrate, and open to all.

Let’s face it - at this day and age, every single person and their dogs have heard about Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency has completely shattered the doors of mainstream success and is now more popular than ever before. However, not everybody is aware of the coin’s shortcomings - ones that might not exist with the Nano coin.

There are a few big problems that Bitcoin has that people keep referencing and talking about - and for every such problem, there’s an altcoin to solve it. Today, we are going to be talking about one such altcoin - the Nano coin. Towards the end, we'll see why simplicity truly is the best approach when it comes to cryptocurrency's success.

One of the biggest complaints facing the cryptocurrency industry is the inefficiency of transaction processing. Not only do users rack up fees, but the energy expended in processing has become a bit of an environmental concern. Thankfully, this is a problem many in the development sphere are well aware of, and solutions are being formulated to combat the problem. Nano is a digital protocol that attempts to remove friction in transactions across crypto networks.

Nano (NANO), formerly RaiBlocks (XRB), is a peer-to-peer digital currency. It is a decentralized, open-source cryptocurrency based on directed acyclic graph (DAG) architecture, and released under the FreeBSD License. It operates without intermediaries by using a distributed ledger with a block-lattice data structure. Nano was launched in October 2015 by Colin LeMahieu, with the aim of addressing blockchain scalability limitations that can result in restrictive fees and increased transaction confirmation times under load. It has feeless transactions that typically achieve full confirmation in under one second.

What Is Nano (NANO)?

Billed as "digital money for the modern world," Nano is a lightweight cryptocurrency that is designed to facilitate secure, practically instant payments, without fees, and addresses some of the major limitations of both legacy financial infrastructure, and many modern cryptocurrencies.

Nano is a cryptocurrency that describes itself as “a low-latency payment platform that requires minimal resources.” Each address on Nano has its own blockchain (a structure known as a block lattice) and users provide the computational power required to verify their own transactions, allowing transactions to be processed without fees.

Development of the project began in 2014 under the name RaiBlocks, and the coin (then termed XRB) launched the following year through a public faucet, which allowed users to claim small amounts of XRB after completing a captcha challenge. Users were allowed to complete as many captchas as they liked to increase their words — effectively trading their time and effort for XRB.

RaiBlocks (XRB) was rebranded to Nano (NANO) in January 2018, with the new name chosen to better represent the speed and simplicity the project offers to users.

It is a peer-to-peer platform that uses a unique block-lattice data structure to allow users to easily transfer value to one another without relying on centralized intermediaries.

Unlike other platforms which typically use the combined proof-of-work of a massive mining network to achieve consensus, Nano instead uses a system known as Open Representative Voting (ORV) — which sees account holders vote for their chosen representative, who then work to confirm blocks of transactions securely.

ORV makes Nano extremely energy efficient, positioning it as a more environmentally friendly alternative to proof-of-work (POW)-based cryptocurrencies.

The term “NANO” itself has been officially rebranded from what was known as “RaiBlocks”. At the beginning of 2018, the company officials decided to name their cryptocurrency project (and the currency itself) Nano - this marked a new beginning for the coin.

As a project and a cryptocurrency on its own, Nano is pretty self-explanatory - it is a coin that aims to replace fiat currencies and bring crypto into people’s daily lives. The coin’s goals and aims are almost identical to those of Bitcoin.

Unlike Bitcoin, however, Nano aims to perform the tasks (mainly - transactions) of its blockchain in a much faster and more flexible way.

Nano coin uses a combination of Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Work algorithms. The mixture is called a “delegated Proof-of-Stake”. The way that it works is that, when there is a problem with a transaction in the Nano coin’s system (let’s say, two transactions collide - one of them is legit and the other one is a robbing or infiltration attempt), there are “delegates” that are there to vote for the legit transaction and dismiss the fraud one.

To become a delegate, you must have some XRB in your wallet - this incentivizes people to participate in the growth and advancement of the Nano community.

The History of Nano

Nano wasn’t called Nano in its original iteration. Constructed by a former AMD programmer in 2014, Nano was originally called Raiblocks and used the Block Lattice chain in order to cut costs, energy and process transactions regardless of speed or girth. With a promise of no transaction fees, the newly rebranded Nano quickly gained steam during the 2017 crypto rally.

If you thought Bitcoin had a meteoric rise in 2017, check out Nano. After spending most of the year hovering around 1 penny, Nano began to rise and reached $0.16 by Thanksgiving. A 16-bagger isn’t a bad trade, right? Now here’s where things went really crazy. From Thanksgiving 2017 to January 2018, Nano saw an astronomical run that created unspeakable wealth and then took it nearly all back.

On New Year’s Day 2018, Nano topped the $37 mark. You read that correctly — not $0.37 but $37. If you had invested $100 in Nano during its penny day, you had $370,000 on New Year’s Day. Not a bad way to ring in 2018, huh? Of course, the gains were short-lived and the cost of Nano was under $10 by the 1st week of February. By Thanksgiving 2018, Nano was back under $1 and it would stay under a buck until the tail end of 2020.

Nano was hacked in February 2018 through the Italian exchange BitGrail. Over $170 million worth of Nano was stolen from the exchange and most of it has never been recovered. The hack was a black mark on Nano, although recent events have police now pointing the finger at the operator of the exchange himself.

Nano has potential as a low energy, flexible cryptocurrency, but questions remain due to the hack and its extreme volatility.

Nano (ex-RaiBlocks) was launched back in 2015 by a man named Colin LaMahieu (a software engineer with years of prior experience in the field of computer software). It was launched under the name RaiBlocks, but after a few years, the team decided to rebrand. Why is that?

The reason is pretty simple. The initial name simply did not resonate with the mainstream audience that the company tried to appeal to. It is worth noting that they weren’t wrong - after the announcement of the name change, their transactions increased vastly.

This is also the reason why you might often encounter the Nano coin referred to as the “XRB coin”. It is a tag left since the days of RaiBlocks, and both Nano and XRB are correct when referring to the coin itself.

Ever since the inception of what would end up becoming the Nano coin, it had one solemn purpose in mind - to make peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transactions more scalable. It is probably no secret that not only Bitcoin (although this coin especially), but a lot of other older blockchain version-based cryptocurrencies identify scalability as the biggest problem of all. This results in huge transaction fees, super slow trading speeds and so on.

Many different altcoins have tried creating their versions of blockchain that would help improve the scalability in question, and the Nano cryptocurrency is one of them. Now, the natural question that might arise for you might be - what’s so special about the Nano coin, then? My answer to that would be one simple thing - block-lattice.

Nano Block Lattice

A difficult term in of itself, block lattice refers to a mixture of two systems - the traditional blockchain, and what is called a “directed acyclic graph”, or DAG for short.

DAG is a type of data structuring. When, for example, you perform a transaction (buy, sell or simply trade) with a traditional cryptocurrency, your transaction is grouped into a “block” with a predefined space and size - these blocks make up the blockchain. With the DAG structure, however, you would be able to see individual transactions and how they correlate in the bigger picture of the blockchain itself.

What’s good about DAG is that it’s extremely scalable - exactly what the traditional blockchain lacks. The downside is that it isn’t particularly safe - however, this is where the infamous security of blockchain steps in.

The Nano coin aims to unite the best of these two worlds - DAG’s scalability and blockchain’s security.

How Does it Work?

The working principle behind Nano's coin is quite simple.

To over-simplify it, Nano simply stores incoming and outgoing transaction data into designated, individual blocks in your own, personal blockchain. This way, your wallet balance is always kept updated and secure, while also keeping the blockchain working smoothly.

The general concept and idea behind the Nano cryptocurrency is the driving goal behind this process. The company has only one, single focus - scalability. They aren’t too concerned with security - that’s where the blockchain itself comes in.

Rather, the team focuses on providing the fastest possible transactions in the field of cryptocurrency. In turn, the “fee” topic comes up - there are no fees whilst using Nano coin in your transactions. Yup, you’ve read that right - 0 fees.

Nano is a digital currency that uses a blockchain known as Block Lattice. Unlike other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Nano allows each account to possess its own personal blockchain. Block Lattice enables each user to upload their transactions individually for verification, which greatly enhances processing speed. Since all transactions involve two parties, both the sender and receiver would be adding blocks to their personal chain, allowing for easy verification.

Claiming itself to be “accessible and lightweight,” Nano reduces the amount of energy needed to process transactions. In theory, this has two benefits:

• Reduction of fees needed to process transactions

• Reduction in energy consumed to maintain the network

One of the biggest complaints of Bitcoin and Ethereum are the energy expenditures required to mine it and the gas fees required to complete transactions on the network. Nano’s goal is to solve both of these problems while allowing the network to be infinitely scalable.

Nano is secured by delegated proof of stake (DPoS), which is thought to be more efficient than the proof of work (PoW) system used to secure Bitcoin. DPoS doesn’t rely on computational power but votes from “delegates” to secure the network. A nefarious actor would need to control 51% of all Nano in existence to hack a DPoS system.

Who Are the Founders of Nano?

Nano was founded by Colin LeMahieu, a heavily experienced software developer and engineer with a wealth of experience working for prominent tech companies, including Dell, AMD and Qualcomm.

Self-described as an inventor, LeMahieu has interests that range from space technology to physics and environmental sustainability, and is a well-known name in the digital currency space. He began working full time on Nano in 2017 and remains the CEO of the Nano Foundation — an organization created to drive the development and adoption of the Nano — to this day.

Colin LeMahieu also pushed the vast majority of commits to Nano’s GitHub repo.

Beyond LeMahieu, the Nano Foundation has over a dozen other employees, including George Coxon, a graduate in Evolutionary Anthropology and experienced account executive, and the current COO of the foundation.

What Makes Nano Unique?

As previously touched on, Nano is designed to be fast. So fast, in fact, that most Nano transactions reach absolute finality within less than a second — compared to several minutes or even longer for many other major cryptocurrencies.

This speed makes Nano suitable for commercial payments, since merchants and retailers no longer need to worry about transaction delays when accepting payments.

Moreover, Nano transactions are completely free. Since representatives do not receive financial compensation for their efforts to secure the network, there is no need for a transaction fee. This makes Nano an ideal solution for processing micro-transactions, since users no longer need to worry about fronting a potentially expensive transaction fee when making small payments.

These features are enabled by its unique architecture. Unlike many cryptocurrencies which are built on top of a distributed ledger known as a blockchain, Nano is instead built around a similar ledger technology called a directed acyclic graph (DAG).

This structure is highly reliable and allows Nano to process as many as 1,000 transactions per second (tps) — without requiring an energy-intensive mining network to maintain its integrity, positioning Nano as an eco-friendly digital payment option.

How Many Nano (NANO) Coins Are There in Circulation?

Like the vast majority of cryptocurrencies, Nano has a fixed maximum number of tokens that will ever enter existence, this number is set at exactly 133,248,290 NANO.

The original maximum supply was set much higher than this, but any remaining NANO tokens above the current 133 million limit were permanently burned. In total, around 39% of the original genesis supply was distributed.

Nano is unusual in the fact that its entire supply is already in circulation, this means it is fully diluted.

Because it is fully diluted, Nano is also highly decentralized, and well distributed, with the vast majority of Nano accounts holding less than 100 NANO. As of December 2020, around 20% of all Nano in circulation (~26 million) is held in one of the cold wallets associated with the Binance cryptocurrency exchange.

A total of 5% of the circulating supply was held back for the continued development of the project, this was allocated to a so-called “developer fund.”

How Is the Nano Network Secured?

Nano is secured by a network of representatives, each of which is voted into position by NANO holders.

These representatives are responsible for casting their votes when the network needs to achieve consensus, and their voting power is the sum total of the voting weight delegated to them by NANO holders. These vote on the validity of transactions on the Nano network, ensuring only valid transactions are confirmed.

This process protects the network against a type of attack known as a double spend—which occurs when an attacker is able to manipulate the network to effectively spend the same funds twice.

In addition, the Nano network features a wide variety of additional defenses against various possible attack vectors—a full overview of which can be found here.

Price Analysis

There has been a notable (or I should probably say - a VERY notable) price swing that impacted the Nano coin price, and it happened back during January of 2018. If you’re familiar with cryptocurrencies and have been following them for a bit of time, you might know that the XRB coin itself didn’t have anything to do with it.

At the turn of the year (2017-2018), the cryptocurrency market experienced the strangest period of its lifetime - the prices of cryptocurrencies inflated and then suddenly crashed - some completely, others - not so much.

There were many reasons behind this crash (it would take way to long to list all of them here), but just to name a few of the main ones: some governments banned cryptocurrencies altogether, financial experts prophesized the doom of the crypto world, people started panic-selling (I should say - dumping) their coins, etc.

This had very little to do with the Nano coin itself. And it goes to show - towards September of 2018, the Nano coin price started stabilizing and is currently in quite a good position, even showing signs of growth.

As for the XRB price prediction… A lot of experts say that if the company will keep on advancing their technology and stay focused on the “feeless, fast and scalable” goal, the price of the Nano coin might keep on slowly increasing.

Nano vs BTC

Nano- the fastest, feeless and green crypto has many properties that make us enthusiastic. First of all, transfers are instant. It takes an average of 0.14 seconds to fully confirm a Nano transaction. When you’re trying it out for yourself you’ll see that by the time you hit send and check to see whether it’s arrived, it’s already there. It does so while having the highest security in the market. Don’t take our word for it — Kraken considers Bitcoin deposits “secure” after 4 confirmations (40 minutes), while they consider Nano securely confirmed instantly. When Elon Musk talks about “least error & latency”, Nano is what comes to mind.

Second, Nano is feeless. That’s right, fees are absolutely $0. This isn’t some temporary gimmick either, transactions are feeless forever. Nano accomplishes this through the innovative Open Representative Voting mechanism.

A third advantage of Open Representative Voting is that no mining is involved. Because of this, Nano has a good claim to being an extremely green cryptocurrency. To put this into context — a single Bitcoin transaction uses so much energy that you could drive a Tesla for 3000 miles with the same energy used. Nano on the other hand is so efficient that a single wind turbine can power the entire network. With the increasing focus on energy efficiency and saving the planet, this is going to become increasingly important.

The final impressive aspect of Nano that we would to highlight is its scalability. Nano has no upper limit. While Bitcoin tops out at 7 transactions per second on its best day, Nano has been tested at over 200 confirmations per second and scales with hardware. It uses whatever resources are available, and doesn’t stop growing.

Someone summarised it well by saying Nano is like Bitcoin, just 1000x faster, millions of times cheaper to use, with 30x the transaction capacity, 1 million times as energy efficient, while being more decentralised and more secure.

Despite all this, Nano is priced lower than Bitcoin. In fact, its market cap is about 1/1000th of Bitcoin’s thus making it a massive growth opportunity.

Final Words

Nano coin, as a cryptocurrency platform, has very specific and straight-to-the-point goals. Ultimately, it aims to make peer-to-peer crypto trading fast and fluid. This isn’t achievable with the old versions of blockchain, but Nano coin offers a solution. The merging of blockchain and the DAG systems seems to be a great way to solve these problems - only time will tell if it works in practice.

It is important to note, however, that the team has made some noticeable progress throughout the years - the coin’s price seems to reflect this pretty well.

When it comes to the actual price of the coin, however, it will be an interesting process to observe. Naturally, there are experts on both sides who prophesize very different things - this is true to cryptocurrencies in general, though. The main thing that you should keep in mind when thinking about Nano coin’s price is that everything lies in research.

People who are thinking about investing in Nano coin (and cryptocurrencies, in general) should do extensive research on the topic. And I don’t mean only reading the latest news or watching the price charts of the past couple of weeks. You should get to the bottom of the matter - a good way to go about it is to listen to crypto experts and other, fellow enthusiasts.

If nothing else, cryptocurrencies like Nano prove that the crypto technology is constantly advancing and moving forward. Even after the infamous market crash of the end of 2017 - the beginning of 2018 didn’t shun people away - on the contrary, more and more people seem to take interest in the world of crypto.

With that, new challenges arise every single day - cryptocurrency platforms and the teams behind them must keep constantly advancing and developing.

One of the best features that Nano coin provides is that it is simple. And by no means do I mean that from a technical standpoint - it’s as complicated as the other cryptocurrencies out there. No, what I mean is that it has very clear goals and tasks in mind, straightforward ways to achieve them, and a good leader and team to back it up. With such a combo, the coin may reach interesting hights in the future to come.

References

https://nano.org/

https://www.coindesk.com/price/nano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(cryptocurrency)

https://twitter.com/nano?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nano/

https://www.coinbase.com/price/nano

https://www.benzinga.com/money/how-to-buy-nano-crypto-nano/

https://www.bitdegree.org/crypto/nano-coin