I have been absent from my writer’s desk for a quiet a while now – seven months. In that time I have been, among other things, trading in some new and interesting cryptocurrencies, the most notable of which is PIVX.

Origins of PIVX

PIVX , known as DarkNet before a professional re-brand, is a fork of DASH (which also re-branded from DarkCoin). It aims to addresses the centralization and instamine concerns surrounding DASH.

While PIVX was premined to get the ecosystem started independently and without an ICO, the PIVX Development team publicly destroyed those premined coins.

Decentralized Governance

The thing that drew me to PIVX was the Proof of Stake consensus. Combined with reward balancing between the staking and master nodes, PoS offsets the centralization of master nodes with the decentralization of staking nodes.

PoS also avoids the control conflict that Bitcoin is struggling with at the moment because it doesn’t use Proof of Work. Anyone can create a Staking Node without specialist hardware. All that is needed is sufficient PIVX to stake a claim and a constant connection to the network. This results in more individuals running nodes, rather than a few big pools deciding the consensus rules of their miners. Furthermore, the PoS model makes the coin itself more valuable, as less coins are in active circulation.

Features for the Future

While these benefits are compelling, there is much more on the roadmap that will make it a solid investment. It may even be the cryptocurrency that finally makes it to mainstream acceptance.

Key among the planned features are privacy, scaling and governance:

Swapping to private-by-default transactions by using the ZeroCoin protocol for all transactions;

Elastic block size, similar to Monero’s solution;

Masternode voting on fund allocation, protocol changes, and the future of the project as a whole;

As PIVX grows and steps out of the shadow of DASH it will gain momentum. We will see other systems integrating this currency rapidly: Ledger and Trezor support, more exchanges offering trading, and more independent projects built around this new currency.

For more information, checkout the official website