Crypto
What is NANO ?
NANO officially rebranded from RaiBlocks at the end of January 2018. The team behind the cryptocurrency, RaiBlocks announced that the coin is rebranded to NANO.
NANO follows Bitcoins‘ original plan which is to replace traditional currencies, making it digital money for day to day use.
In the quest of taking over Bitcoin, NANO addresses vital problems posed by Bitcoin network which are:
- Scalability problems which give users concerns about the increase in transaction fees on the Bitcoin network.
- Computational issues which have to do with the latency of transaction times which stands at an average of 164 minutes.
- Energy consumption is soaring high with Bitcoin mining consuming more electricity than 159 countries.
Addressing these challenges, NANO provides a solution which gives the cryptocurrency and edge over Bitcoin with its block-lattice structure which delivers zero-fee transactions and consumes way less energy than that of Bitcoin.
How The System Works
Unlike other blockchain technologies many cryptocurrencies adapt, each account has its blockchain. Each account-chain, as its also referred to is updated by the account owner and in turn, asynchronously updates the rest of the block-lattice resulting in fast transaction times. Since each user updates its block sending and receiving funds requires two transactions; a sending transaction which deducts the amount sent by a sender from his balance, likewise the receive transaction which adds amount gotten from sender to its account balance. These two transactions don’t have to be at the same time; the receiver can accept the transaction anytime.
Explaining Block-Lattice Architecture
As every user controls their blockchain, protocols such as proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS) in deciding on the state of the ledger is not needed.
To Create An Account
Users need to initiate an open transaction. This transaction is the first of every account-chain and is created upon receiving the first transaction block.
Account Balances
All balances are recorded within users account-chain. Instead of recording the amount of transaction, verification process requires checking the difference between the previous send block balance and the current one. The new block increases or decreases with the final balance on the new receive block. This is to improve processing speed when downloading high numbers of transaction blocks.
Sending From An Account
The sending address must already have an opened block, and therefore a balance. Once a transaction is initiated, it cannot be reversed once confirmed. Once the transaction is broadcasted to the network, funds are immediately deducted from senders balance and are pending until the receiving party signs the block to accept the funds. Pending acceptance, the funds should be considered spent on senders account though it hasn’t been received as the sender cannot revoke the transaction.
Receiving Transactions
To complete the transaction process, the receiver creates a block on its account to accept a sent fund. Once the block is created and broadcasted, the account balance is updated with the new balance.
What’s Interesting About The Block-Lattice Infrastructure
Because of its lightweight protocol and cost of running a node next to nothing, transactions are processed without fees. Each transaction on the network is fitted in a UDP packet and handled independently, eliminating block size issues.
Also, wallets are pre-cached for the next transaction once a transaction is sent, making transactions instant as both sender and receiver have proof of work ready to go.
NANO’s Price Over Time
The NANO (represented as XRB symbol on most exchanges) has been stable, almost static at its lows since inception. Not until recently, the latter part of 2017, did we see a spike in price as it made a high of $4.02 on the 12th of December, 2017. It has since continued to make huge gains with all-time highs at $33.14. Currently at $13.27 after a pullback.
It is clear that after the rebrand announcement, the NANO has come into limelight and has had a good number of people adopting the cryptocurrency. The NANO currently has a market cap of $1.76 Billion.
Where To Buy NANO
NANO has since been added to significant exchanges after its rebrand. The NANO can be exchanged for major cryptocurrencies like the Bitcoin, Ether, Binance Token, Tether USDT, Doge, and fiat currencies.
NANO can be exchanged on Binance, Kucoin, RightBTC, Bit-Z, Mercatox, OKEx, and CoinFalconexchanges. You can also purchase NANO using cash on the BitFlip exchange.
NANO Compatible Wallets
There are a few options for storing and transacting with the NANO cryptocurrency. You can hold your NANO in the following wallets:
- There is an official web wallet, hosted on raiwallet.com.
- RaiWalletBot is a telegram bot which manages user private keys allows users access, send and receive NANO coins on the telegram app.
- You can also use the Ledger Hardware wallet to hold your NANO cryptocurrencies.
Plans For The Future
The NANO is aimed at revolutionizing the blockchain architecture itself and will undoubtedly have a bright future.
The community has helped get the cryptocurrency on quite a few exchanges, and we should expect even much more shortly.
Mobile wallets are currently under testing and would be released for iPhone and Android mobile devices early 2018.
Conclusion
What NANO aims to achieve is simple. To replace the conventional shared memory data structure with the message passing model in which users have their blockchains that only syncs with the main network. The NANO is the only cryptocurrency which employs the block-lattice (multi-dimensional blockchain) freeing users from paying fees to miners, waiting for network ledger update and also avoiding long transaction confirmation times.
With the solution NANO presents, cryptocurrencies, most especially the NANO will be that digital currency that replaces fiat currencies for everyday use.