DigiByte is a cryptocurrency project that went live in 2014. According to its creator, Jared Tate, it was made as something of a response to perceived weaknesses in Bitcoin.

Particularly, it’s a response addressed towards concerns about mining centralization due to ASICs among other things. Despite being around for such a long time, and even being offered on Shapeshift, the currency has in some sense fallen out of the public eye.

It’s market cap is worth over $350 million (putting it in the top 50-60 currencies on coinmarketcap.com), and it has tens of thousands of highly active supporters, miners, node operators and contributors.

We checked in on a few of the official Telegram chats for DigiByte and they were simply buzzing with activity, ideas, and content. Today, units of DigitByte are trading at around $0.035 each.

So what is DigiByte all about?

More than just currency

While many blockchain projects that appeared around the same time that DigiByte did are purely focused on monetary transactions, DigiByte is different. The currency is looking to evolve into something with many real-life use cases. In a talk given at the Texas Bitcoin Conference, DigiByte creator Jared Tate gave a riveting speech in which he explained his plans for DigiByte.

Specifically, he wants the project to grow in such a way that it can support international trade and become more of a security-focused cryptocurrency. He also aims to have the project be able to support Dapps and smart contracts in the near future. According to the official site, DigiByte is already “smart contract ready” with “multiple Dapps in development”.

From a technical perspective, DigiByte has a highly advanced system in which miners can use any of five different mining algorithms including the popular SHA-256 and Scrypt, which are the algorithms used by Bitcoin and Litecoin respectively among others.

This choice in algorithm, as well as the unique way in which mining rewards are divided among the algorithm choices, means that both Bitcoin ASICs and CPU miners can both mine the currency side by side.

And yet, many people perhaps have never heard of DigiByte, or know what it’s for exactly. That’s why we reached out to the DigiByte development team and spoke with Josiah Spackman, the official DigiByte ambassador to learn more about this project and the ever-growing following behind it.

Our interview with Josiah Spackman

We spoke with Spackman on February 27th, and we had a few questions about the growth and plans for DigiByte.

Robert DeVoe, Coin Bureau: DigiByte has been around for quite a few years now. What are some of the accomplishments that the team is most proud of?

Josiah Spackman, DigiByte: Some of the things we are most proud of include having the longest UTXO blockchain by over a million blocks.

This has presented us with some interesting challenges that other coins haven’t yet had to deal with. Things like syncing that many blocks in the wallet, a lot of other Blockchains don’t realize it’s not JUST about the raw size of the chain.

The combination of DigiShield (MultiShield) and our MultiAlgo provides some immense security and stability on the blockchain that many others take for granted, and on a personal level I’m probably most proud of this winning combination. A look at Jareds talk at the recent Bitcoin Texas Conference on YouTube explains why this is such fantastic breakthrough for the security of the blockchain.

RD: Where do you see DigiByte going in the next five years? And what are some of the major milestones that you hope to achieve in that time?

JS: DigiByte is very much going to be part of the security space. So many people look at the blockchain and cryptocurrencies as just that, currency, when there are so many more amazing uses for this. The up-coming mobile wallets and the subsequent improvements to them later on in the year are our primary milestone we’re going to need to complete to achieve this, and there are a number of additional exciting things coming.

…we could take all the transactions from the Top #50 blockchains combined and still not have any issues.”

RD: I understand that DigiByte is looking to support decentralized apps on its blockchain in the same way as Ethereum. Has this feature already been enabled? Are there any projects using it already? What are some of the advantages of using DigiByte instead of another blockchain?

JS: Many people presume that Ethereum is the only blockchain that can do decentralized apps because of their full turing language support, when often times the majority of what people want done can be accomplished on a faster, less congested blockchain. We’ve already seen the likes of CryptoKitties have a severe impact on transaction times and Gas, but thankfully with the 560 transactions per-second that DigiByte supports, we could take all the transactions from the Top #50 blockchains combined and still not have any issues.

RD: Does DigiByte currently have any real life use cases as a currency? For example, are there any businesses that accepted as payment directly or indirectly?

JS: DigiByte has been used in real-life for years now, one of the earlier use-cases was acceptance in House of Blue Jeans in the Netherlands. There is also DiguSign which is used by many companies, with things such as securing international shipping manifests. We’re also seeing Loly building on us with some ground-breaking uses around sexual consent and utilizing the immutability of the blockchain.

RD: DigiByte is designed to have a very large number of tokens at a comparatively smaller price per token. How does DigiByte compare to other tokens that have similar economic model, such as Dogecoin or Bytecoin?

JS: DigiByte was intentionally designed with a 1000:1 ratio compared to Bitcoin, in order to be more “manageable” in size.

RD: If DigiByte is able to accomplish all of its most fantastical and far-reaching goals, where would it be in the cryptocurrency world in comparison with the current industry leaders today? Would it be bigger than bitcoin, or would it be better suited to more specific niche markets?

JS: If DigiByte accomplishes its goals, it won’t just be the cryptocurrency world that will be changed as a result. We also don’t see this as a winner / loser scenario, nor are we trying to dethrone anybody on an arbitrary list. However, with that said we see ourselves as having a global audience that wouldn’t necessarily apply to the likes of other cryptocurrencies, and our versatility is also a huge strength.

Final thoughts

Some in the cryptocurrency sphere have referred to DigiByte as a “sleeping giant”. With a market cap of over $350 million, and the veritable hordes of supporters behind the project, DigiByte may already be awake. Or at least on its way to standing up on its own two feet.

The project certainly has some lofty goals. If it’s able to both achieve them and see adoption, it could certainly change the way people view the project.

Featured Image via Fotolia