Why Only Nano, Iota and Byteball?

Out of the total 1545 (as of the time of writing) cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap, they have the best odds of becoming the de-facto payment systems in the future.

Nano, Iota and Byteball share a common architecture, namely a DAG, but each one has its own unique features.

Nano (XRB)

A strong project, with a focus on peer to peer payments. Launched in 2015, it has since proven to be a solid tech, as it does exactly what it says: instant and feeless transactions, up to 7000 per second.

We applaud Colin LeMahieu & the team for their ingenuity & collective effort. It’s a beautiful piece of software and it would be a lie to say we weren’t inspired by their motto:

“Do one thing and do it well”

In Nano, each user has his own blockchain, and each transaction is a block. There are two types of transactions:

Send

Receive

Intuitively, we can observe how the DAG is formed: when you send XRB, the recipient’s wallet generates a receive transaction, thus creating a directed edge between your blockchains.

The network’s security is handled by a delegated Proof of Stake voting mechanism. This means a trusted account from this list, called a representative, votes for the validity of your transactions, if conflicts arise. The cost of an attack is proportional to the market capitalization of Nano, which means that you’d have to own at least 50% of all voting weight (i.e. power to make decisions for others) if you’d want hack the network.

Observation: Nano is the new name of the coin, as the project rebranded on the 31st of January 2018. It was previously called RaiBlocks.

Iota (MIOTA)

As you might’ve guessed, it’s a project focused on IoT(Internet of Things). Iota believes in a world where machines talk to each other and perform a plethora of micropayments.

Would it make sense to pay a two-digit fee each time a self-driving car uses an API? Or to create a bank account for each drone in the world? Not really, and these are exactly the type of problems Iota aims to solve.

At DagHub, we believe in David Sønstebø’s vision and we wish to thank him, Serguei Popov, Dominik Schiener and Sergey Ivancheglo for spearheading a revolution in IoT.

We know the wallet had a couple of UX issues in the past (0 balances, rebroadcasted transactions), but we’re confident the future is bright. We’ve been in touch with Charlie Varley, who’s working on the Trinity Wallet, and development is going great.

In Iota, the Directed Acyclic Graph is called the Tangle and consensus is reached in a very interesting way: when you issue a transaction, you are the miner, and you perform Proof of Work on two other previous transactions.

Byteball Bytes (GBYTE)

Although this is the only in the list not being feeless, it still remains a fast, minerless and scalable cryptocurrency. That’s because fees are deterministic and you cannot jump the transaction queue (as compared to blockchains, where anyone who pays more is verified faster).

In February 2018, the fee per each transaction was around 541 bytes or $0.000037. Even if the project would hit a one trillion market cap, fees will still remain under a cent at roughly $0.0074.

This is the first DAG project to implement smart contracts. They have a cool bot store, where you can do things like purchasing flight insurance or sports betting.

The network is secured using a “12 witness” approach, which basically means you pick 12 addresses from a list of trusted participants (with their real-world identity verified) who will watch over your transactions. The main chain will always be polarized to their decisions, thus avoiding double-spendings.

Byteball is not as popular as Nano and Iota, yet we believe is a fantastic project with true intrinsic value and a top lead developer. Some might not see it clearly, but smart contracts will become a fundamental technology for our daily lives in the not-so-distant future and it’s great to have multiple implementations.

Further Documentation

We’re fully aware that we barely touched the tip of the iceberg with the previous presentations, so in the following months we’ll write a dedicated article for each cryptocurrency.