Viacoin Investment Analysis

Introduction

Before reading this content, please make sure that you have read and understood our General Disclaimer below, this is not investment advice. https://medium.com/@PrimusResearch/general-disclaimer-7083e14bd5a

This article is going to be a short walkthrough and explanation to why we believe Viacoin is a good investment with an emphasis on comparable coins.

Disclaimer: Primus Research owns Viacoin.

History

Before going too much into detail, let’s first address the history of Viacoin.

Viacoin was released in the middle of 2014 by Bitcoin core developer BtcDrak who started the initiative out of frustration with the core developer team. Moreover, Peter Todd, another Bitcoin core developer joined BtcDrak at the end of July 2014.

Romano took over the development in 2016.

There’s no need to describe further as there are already two great articles out about the history, please find them below.

“Short intro to Viacoin and its history” credits to El Mago https://medium.com/@goosenoble/short-intro-to-viacoin-and-its-history-2217ed51247a

“Viacoin in 2018 why its worth keeping an eye on” credits to Sam https://medium.com/@camelk/viacoin-in-2018-why-its-worth-keeping-an-eye-on-a6807c2b2a45

People

Romano (https://twitter.com/RNR_0) is the Viacoin lead developer. Despite his rather young age of 21, he is one of the more experienced personalities in crypto having made commits to coins such as Litecoin.

Romano is a firm believer of crypto, and thus also buys coins with developers and technology that he believes in.

Other than Romano, Viacoin has a part-timer developer and a person in charge of marketing.

Outlook

Instead of describing what’s already been implemented such as segwit, atomic swaps, new whitepaper etc., let’s jump straight to describing some of what’s to come in 2018 and possibly beyond.

Colored Coins

Colored coins could be seen as tokens to verify ownership of a real world asset such as real estate, a car or commodities. Another use case is for companies to actually issue IPO’s through the protocol. This can be done faster, cheaper and more efficiently than in the regular stock market through an investment bank.

Lightning Network

The lightning network has already been implemented and tested with Atomic Swaps. Atomic Swaps are essentially coin transactions from cross-chain that allows transaction of two different coins without an intermediary such as an exchange.

RSK Smart Contracts

RSK aims to deliver technology that allows smart contracts based on non-ethereum build coins. Essentially this means, that Viacoin could be used to create smart contracts, just like Ethereum.

Tumblebit & Styx

Styx will be implemented as a privacy layer on Viacoin. Styx is going to be built on Tumblebit that allows for anonymous transactions. Moreover, Tumblebit allows a masternode-like staking called tumblenodes. One could speculate if we could possibly see tumblenodes in 2018 or at a later time.

MAST

MAST is an addition to the Viacoin protocol that allows for smaller transactions, larger smart contracts and more privacy. MAST is going to be an addition right up Viacoin’s alley as it synergises nicely with the other technology that is going to be implemented.

Context

This section is meant for assessing the market for Viacoin with a top-down style analysis.

In general, we can divide cryptocurrencies into three categories as seen below.

Crypto Market Categories

Currencies should be viewed as means of payment rather than tokens or crypto securities that may solve a specific problem such as cloud storage or represent a value of an asset. Think about it this way, would you value the stock of Chipotle the same way as you would value Facebook or Real Estate? The answer is No. Different assets require different valuation methods.

According to coinmarketcap, there are a total of 901 coins, where 285 are non-minable. As Viacoin is mineable, we end up with a total market of 616 coins that compete to be the preferred choice.

Now, actually all of these 616 coins are not competing as they are different in a lot of ways. We need to assess the coins that are similar to Viacoin and filter out any other coin. Filtering out at this level, we take into account some of the abilities we noted in the abilities section. Here, we use a simple framework to map out the possible competitors, choosing privacy marketed coins with fast to semi-fast block-times.

Viacoin Competitors

A table is then created to compare the fundamentals in an easy fashion.

Comparison of fundamentals

Next, let’s look at the market capitalization of the coins we assessed as possible competitors and compare it to Viacoin. Note that Bitcoin and Litecoin have been added for reference, even though both of these are not privacy coins.

Viacoin Comparable Market Caps as of January 8, 2018

Of all the coins we defined as competitors, Viacoin is the fastest coin measured in block-time and quite possibly the most technically advanced in terms of privacy when the new protocols has been added in 2018. The supply of Viacoin has almost reached its cap of 23.000.000 coins meaning that there’s very little inflation left. And lastly, Viacoin is the coin with the lowest market cap by a large margin - almost half of the next coin on the list, NavCoin.

Round-up

The future for Viacoin indeed seems bright with lots of technicalities to be added to the platform within a short amount of time.

Moreover, the valuation compared to the peers seem undervalued, especially when taken the outlook into account as well as the rather limited supply.

Disclaimer: Primus Research owns Viacoin.