Nano is the only coin in the top 30 by market cap to have gained significantly on a day when most cryptocurrencies have fallen by high single-digits. At the time of writing, Nano (XRB) is up almost 20 percent to the US dollar and almost 25 percent against Bitcoin.

At the time of writing, Nano is priced at $8.82. According to coinmarketcap, all top thirty coins have fallen except Nano, Populous, and Tether, the latter two only marginally in the green.

The coin is currently the 24th largest, with a market cap of $1,166,932,553. Nano was rebranded from RaiBlocks on the 31st of January. It boasts transaction speeds averaging just over one-and-a-half seconds, making it one of the fastest cryptocurrencies to send and receive.

The sender and the receiver conduct Proof-of-Work using a “block lattice” structure. This unique structure means that each account, as determined by its public key, is itself a blockchain. XRB is fast, free, and minerless. Each user effectively mines the coins as they use them. Nano boasts unlimited scalability, theoretically, and operates on a lightweight protocol.

The currency has endured a tumultuous start to the year. Given its unique structure, the ability for large-scale exchanges to support it was limited. While now listed on kucoin and binance, some 30 percent of Nano volume was exchanged on Italian-based BitGrail. The coin represented roughly 85 percent of BitGrail’s trading volume.

A hack of BitGrail of $170 M worth of Nano was revealed on February 9th. The exchange was operated by a controversial figure in the crypto-space known as Francesco ‘The Bomber’ Firano. The incident resulted in a very public falling out between Firano and the Nano Core Development Team. BitGrail blamed the security breach on bugs in Nano’s code. Firano suggested a fork to recover the funds.

The Nano team refused to fork the protocol, accusing BitGrail of being at fault. On a medium post dated 10th February, they also argued that BitGrail had been insolvent for a number of months, with suspicious transactions occurring as far back as October last year:

“We now have sufficient reason to believe that Firano has been misleading the Nano Core Team and the community regarding the solvency of the BitGrail exchange for a significant period of time.”

Nano’s priced plummeted at the news of BitGrail’s insolvency and the loss of Nano coins, but has since bounced back amid amid a wider mid-week slump. So why is Nano bucking the trend? The Nano team recently announced the launch of a Beta version of Nano wallet for Android:

The team tested the first Nano transfer using the new app only last week. Perhaps this development will help propel Nano’s price further. Now being traded easily on binance and kucoin, an Android wallet might prove a further boost to XRB’s usability.

It is also possible that Nano attracted opportunistic buyers with its depressed price in the wake of the BitGrail hack and the January crypto slump. Having said that, amid a market correction, it is not unusual to see one or two coins in the green. For the enthusiastic Nano community, let’s hope the currency continues to hold firm against a backdrop of red.

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