As a part of our collaboration with Nano Foundation, we’re going to provide you with a step-by-step guide to becoming a Nano Principal Representative — a role in which you can participate first-hand in maintaining the network.

Running a Nano Representative

Running a representative node on the Nano network is affordable and easy. Participating in the Nano network offers excellent opportunities for institutions, services, businesses, and individuals to contribute to the world’s fastest, fee-less and decentralized cryptocurrency.

Many entities who share the vision of a more equal and empowering world economy can contribute towards making it a reality but supporting the Nano network.

Pushing for Decentralization

The Nano distributed ledger runs on a unique consensus mechanism called Open Representative Voting (ORV).

The voting process is comprised of three steps:

Representative accounts are configured on online nodes and vote on transactions Account owners freely delegate their voting weight (based on their balance) to representatives — no staking involved Principal Representatives (those with significant voting weight) have their votes counted and rebroadcasted

This unique voting process ensures the concept is distributed by its nature, and that the incentives of Principal Representatives are aligned with the participants of the network. The key benefits of this framework are:

Free delegation of weight allows easy redistribution of consensus worldwide

Avoids governance complications and centralizing forces caused by transaction fee structures

Lightweight, low energy usage and fast — meaningless barriers to the world’s unbanked

Opportunities for exposure

Social Media

Social media is an important tool for services within the crypto space to reach their regular and new audiences. You can attract strong engagement from the Nano community when announcing and launching a capable representative. This helps to draw attention to your service and can create ambassadors for your brand.

Nano also works with Principal representatives to help them increase their exposure within the Nano community and can provide a platform for them to present their service.

Leveraging their long-running blog series, theCommunity Spotlight, and regular re-sharing of Nano orientated marketing materials, the Nano Foundation help drive additional engagement to participating services

“Mining incentives are not the end-all, be-all. Everyone who uses Nano benefits from the natural incentives of the Nano blockchain. Being able to send transactions instantly without a fee outweighs the benefit of receiving mining rewards for the majority of people…Nano has the ability to truly transform digital payments with the natural incentive model.”

- John Hicks, CEO of AnchorX and Nano Principal Representative

Community block explorers

The Nano community has a strong ecosystem of network tracking services and all of the block-explorers track representatives. These sites receive a lot of traffic and are used for selecting new representatives: https://repnode.org/ https://nanocrawler.cc/

Decentralization services and built-in wallet lists

Well-developed and popular ecosystem services like the well-received Nano wallet Natrium use a representative list. The representative list is taken from the community-based My Nano Ninja service, which scores representatives based on uptime and performance — helping users choose a representative extremely quickly.

All in all, Nano is a great protocol to run a Representative Node and has a consensus mechanism that provides assurances of network stability to all participants of the network. In the coming weeks, Nano will be available for use on our POS machines. Meanwhile, make sure you have a stash of these coins to see this technology in action!