The whole I/O Coin blockchain is already focused on privacy and security with features like an AES256 encrypted messaging system and stealth payments but with the announcement of Nighthawk I/O Coin will become a full-blown privacy coin.

On Tuesday 2nd of July Joel Bosh, lead developer of I/O Coin, announced the zero-knowledge protocol for I/O Coin codenamed Nighthawk. We already knew that Nighthawk would bring cold signatures (offline signing of transactions) to the blockchain from a few messages in the Telegram chat but as it turns out, Nighthawk brings much much more. So what is Nighthawk and what does it bring to the I/O Coin blockchain?

Cold Sigs

In short, cold signatures or offline signatures are transactions that are signed on a computer that is not connected to the internet which are then broadcasted using a device that is connected to the blockchain. This technique can be used in several ways, from making a transaction without exposing your computer to the internet to payments via a mesh network in an area with no internet access.

I/O Ring Signatures

You may have heard of ring signatures before. Ring signatures make all transactions fully anonymous and because of that only the sender and receiver of a transaction will know the details. The IOC devs have been looking at other cryptocurrencies that have ring signatures and they have seen some issues with their implementations. That is why they decided to develop ring signatures especially for I/O Coin without taking any code from other projects. They simply called it I/O Ring Signatures. The devs believe they can write the code in a much more secure way than any other cryptocurrency and I/O Ring Signatures will be an additional layer of privacy and security on top of the already private and secure features embedded in the blockchain.

Graduated Staking

Together with the release of Nighthawk graduated staking will come to I/O Coin as well. When a node has consistent high levels of long term staking commitment they will receive additional rewards. Graduated staking will also encourage others to start long term and reliably staking as well which will help secure the network.

The Nighthawk announcement is perfectly timed as more and more people start to realize that privacy coins are the future of blockchain, a few Twitterers with many followers even tweeted about it in the past couple of days.

If everything goes smoothly, all the above features together with a PoS reward halving will go live on 1st of December 2019.

Did you miss the live announcement and AMA? You can watch it back on the official I/O Coin YouTube channel here. Make sure to subscribe and hit the bell to be notified of future livestreams!