A year ago; while looking for new cryptocurrencies to mine, we came across this coin called Turtle coin. Even though Turtlecoin was one of the profitable coins to mine at that time we didn’t mine it as it was priced below 1 satoshi and the 24 hour volume was not that appealing. So we moved on to mine coins like Ravencoin and Stellite which now rebranded to Torque (XTC). But slowly in November 2018 the price of Turtle coin moved on to 1 Satoshi and in yearly 2019 it hit an all time high price of 5 Satoshi which is impressive for a coin that has a supply of 1 Trillion. This is when it got our attention. So we decided to dig through a little to find out what this coin is all about.

So what is Turtlecoin and how to setup Turtlecoin wallet. Here in this beginners guide we’ll explain all of its features, specifications and additionally will share all the useful links for you to help get started with this project.

What is Turtlecoin?

While there are many projects in crypto space with no real product but with lots of pre mine and tons of funding, the developers of Turtle coin decided to do it the opposite way. The goal is to launch a project that is simple, easy to use and let it grow all on its own without much funding or marketing strategy. That’s how it all started. Turtlecoin was started as a fun project. Being in this space you might have stumbled upon many cryptocurrencies that are meme based and Turtlecoin is one of them. It all started as a “Meme” coin. But currently Turtlecoin has strong community, cool products and a number of features that makes it much more than a meme coin.

Turtlecoin was launched on December 2017 by two developers. This project had no premine, no ICO nor a huge marketing budget. Turtlecoin is a fun, fast, easy and a private cryptocurrency that allows you to send money to friends and businesses. The project is open source, simple, accessible for everyone and is one of the few coins that can be easily mined using CPUs. Turtlecoin is a fork of Bytecoin so it is technically based on CryptoNote. So basically Turtlecoin includes all of the privacy features that you find in coins like Monero and Aeon.

Alright! Let’s now take a look in to the project and see what this coin offers.

Turtlecoin features

Some of the main features of Turtle coin includes: Fast transactions, on chain privacy, only two decimal places, user centric developers, easy to mine, easy to use and moreover has an amazing community.

Fast transactions:

The block time of Turtle coin is only 30 seconds meaning every 30 seconds a new block is created in the Turtlecoin network. With short block times the block confirmation becomes faster and hence the transaction will be processed much quicker than many popular established coins.

Privacy:

Since this coin is based on CryptoNote technology it has got privacy features same as Monero, Aeon and other CryptoNote coins. It features Ring signatures so basically all transaction that you send via Turtlecoin network are private by default. Nobody sees your money except you.

Apart from these two main features the coin offers user friendly wallet, has two decimal places, like USD and moreover has a welcoming community.

Community driven cryptocurrency

One thing that we found out interesting about this project is that its community is super helpful. It is one of the most interesting community driven cryptocurrency currently around. Not only the community is active but also the development team. There are full-time developers available for this project who keep regularly pushing new commits to the Github repo. Also since Turtlecoin is an open source coin anyone can help contribute and improve the project.

As we said there was no ICO and there is no marketing team. There are wide range of people in the community who not only contribute to the project but also help in spreading the adoption of this coin. While there are many projects raising millions in ICO for project development; Turtlecoin does it through the power of community. This is what makes Turtlecoin community great.

Turtlecoin is focused on ease of use and ease of accessibility so getting into this coin is also quite easy. To mine this coin all you need is CPU power. Turtlecoin uses cryptonight_turtle as a Proof of Work algorithm and it is easy to mine on both CPU and GPUs. Soon we’ll make a separate article on how to mine Turtlecoin, its mining pools and other aspects related to mining. For now let’s take a look at the coin specifications and get straight into wallet setup.

Turtlecoin technical specifications

Coin Name : Turtlecoin

: Turtlecoin Ticker : TRTL

: TRTL PoW Algorithm : CryptoNight_Turtle (ASIC resistant, fair mining, CPU, GPU mineable)

: CryptoNight_Turtle (ASIC resistant, fair mining, CPU, GPU mineable) Block Time : 30 Seconds

: 30 Seconds Decimal Places : Two decimal places

: Two decimal places Max Coin Supply : 1,000,000,000,000 TRTL

: 1,000,000,000,000 TRTL Network Transaction Fees: .10 TRTL per transaction

Alright! But why the supply of Turtlecoin is too big? A trillion coins. That’s a lot and won’t that make the coin less valuable? True, but here is the thing. While Turtlecoin has huge amount of coins in supply it only has 2 decimal places (0.00 TRTL) unlike Bitcoin which can be further divided down to 8 decimal places (0.00000000 BTC).

Turtlecoin was built this way and to know why there are so many TRTL check out this article that explains Turtle coin supply and unit economics. https://medium.com/@turtlecoin/one-trillion-turtles-coin-supply-and-unit-economics-5bfbea0aa1f1

In addition to the above mentioned features Turtlecoin has got cool products like Turtle pay and Turtle services.

Turtle pay and Turtle services

Turtle pay (https://turtlepay.io/) network is a payment processing feature that is designed to help developers integrate Turtle coin payments into their existing applications. It is a fast, fun & Easy Payment Integration Services for developers. Developers believe that incorporating Turtlecoin payments into more applications will drive the adoption of this project to new heights.

Turtle coin as a service (https://trtl.services/) TaaS is another platform that is designed to provide the tools and infrastructure for developers to build on-chain apps on TRTL network. It’s totally easy, fun and fast.

So is that it or there are more to come? There are more to come but not yet. Turtlecoin roadmap seems promising and what we noticed is that there are features like Karai smart contracts, Mobius fast block with no sync (making blockchain smaller) which are all planned in the future. Now Karai is nothing but a character from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and it has nothing to do with the project.

Alright! Since we’ve discussed enough about this coin let’s see how to setup wallet.

Turtlecoin wallet

Whether you wish to mine Turtle, catch Turtle or trade Turtle you first need a wallet address. Turtlecoin offers multiple types of wallet like GUI, CLI, web wallet, paper wallet and mobile wallet.

Among them GUI and CLI is the most recommended wallet type as they offer full control. Anyways if you are looking for cold storage then setup paper wallet which is simple and easy to manage.

Head to https://turtlecoin.lol/wallet/ and click on create a wallet. Then copy all the information that is generated in the page such as public address, seed phrase, view key and spend key. Store them in a safe place and most importantly do not share the information with anyone; specifically the one that is highlighted in pink such as mnemonic seed, view key and spend key.

Also note that this paper wallet is used only to receive funds and to spend funds you’ll need to import wallet to GUI or CLI using the mnemonic seed.

Alright! lets now see how to setup Turtlecoin desktop wallet.

How to setup Turtlecoin wallet (GUI / CLI)

Turtlecoin offers both GUI (Graphical User Interface) and CLI (Command Line Interface) wallets and both are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. To download them head to the following links.

Turtlecoin Zed wallet (CLI wallet): https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/releases/

https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/releases/ Turtlecoin Nest wallet (GUI wallet): https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtle-wallet-go/releases/

https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtle-wallet-go/releases/ Turtle coin Shell wallet (GUI wallet): https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtle-wallet-electron

Download the appropriate wallet, verify checksum and complete the wallet setup. Once the wallet setup is over you can start using Turtlecoin. Since everyone of us are using crypto wallets in our day to day lives here we won’t go through the basics again like for example installing wallet, creating wallet address, sending coins etc. If you are new and do not know much about wallet then we suggest you to go through the Turtlecoin wiki page which has detailed information on wallets.

Guide to create Turtlecoin wallet: https://docs.turtlecoin.lol/guides/wallets/making-a-wallet/

Now since you’ve completed the wallet setup you might be wondering whether or not the coin is worth it.

Final thoughts

Turtlecoin is an year old cryptocurrency and even though if it is an year old; it is still in its initial stages and there are features like smart contracts which are yet to be implemented. And even though it is a relatively small project that is still in its development stage it has already been listed on several exchanges and even on some popular exchange like for example Kucoin. The current market cap is around $5 million USD and the daily trade volume is at $200,000. Being a small cap altcoin these numbers seems great. Moreover the roadmap of Turtlecoin seems quite promising so there could be a huge potential in the future.

With all that said remember that this is not a financial advice. This post is just a beginners guide explaining the coin features. If you are really interested and wish to learn more about this project then join their Discord channel. As we said the community is super helpful and so they should be able to answer all your questions regarding Turtlecoin. Also remember that whether you wish to mine or invest directly; do your own research and invest at your own risk. Hope that helps.