Get daily crypto briefings and weekly Bitcoin market reports delivered right to your inbox.

Share this article

The Nano price has doubled in value: the coin went from $0.80 last Tuesday to around $1.80 today, a 125% increase with over $100m added to coin’s market cap.

Although a fraction of the peak price of $37 it reached in December, this week has been the first significant step in reversing a three-month downward spiral for the coin. Nano fell by 92% from just under $10 in early May to its $0.80 last week.

Rather than a legacy blockchain, NANO uses its own block-lattice architecture; each user effectively with their own blockchain, interlinked with the rest of the chains on the network.

This creates the lattice-like structure that enables fast transaction times and confirmations. Data collected by Binance’s servers shows Nano has a confirmation time of three seconds, faster than both Stellar Lumens (XLM) and XRP (XRP).

Nano has instant and feeless transactions, suitable for peer to peer and micropayments. The network was able to process 75 transactions per second (TPS) for 30 minutes during beta stress tests last week, with its highest rate reaching 756 TPS.

A big THANK YOU to everyone who participated in the beta network stress test. Users reported an average sustained TPS of 75 over 30 minutes with a reported peak of 756 blocks/second.

Want to find out more? Join the conversation at https://t.co/Vrn9hJW8Zr$Nano #v15isComing pic.twitter.com/YXyH8nIMlU — Nano (@nano) August 17, 2018

Scalability

One of the main obstacles for mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency is scalability; many cryptocurrencies cannot sustain high enough levels of usage to be a practical alternative to centralized institutions.

Some of this stems down to blockchain architecture. Older cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), use a legacy structure, transactions processed and presented linearly. When these networks experience high-levels of throughput, as Crypto Kitties and FCoin demonstrated on ETH, confirmation times and transaction fees increase.

Core-team developers are working at addressing this bottleneck. Bitcoin implemented a Lightning Network that effectively processes transactions off-chain; Ethereum is looking into sharding, where the workload is shared between small consensus groups, as well as a plasma protocol, to introduce sidechains easing congestion on the ETH mainchain.

None of these solutions have so far been fully implemented and patience is wearing thin. The blockchain-based game Etheremon announced early in July it would partially move off Ethereum, citing high transaction costs that had damaged the gaming experience. Until ETH could scale, Etheremon’s development team would “explore options” with Zilliqa (ZIL): a platform already using sharding technology.

Increasing NANO Price Is A Strong Sign

For rapid payments, Nano does what it says on the tin: it confirms payments quickly and with no transaction fees. There is still room for improvement, the Zilliqa development team claimed a few months ago the ZIL network had a rate of 2,000 TPS; Visa, which is the largest payments processor in the world, has a confirmation rate of 8,000 TPS.

Cryptocurrencies are closely correlated, they move in tandem. Nano’s price has been affected by the bear market that pulled almost every cryptocurrency down: the total cap falling by $200bn over the last three months.

Nano is becoming far more accessible, the Ledger Nano S (not affiliated) integrating the coin into its hardware wallet and the Bitcoin superstore adding the coin as accepted tender to purchase gift cards for retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Starbucks.

That the Nano price doubled in less than a week shows returning market confidence and investors moving into the coins considered to have the most potential. NANO does not have imperial dreams to enter and dominate every identifiable use-case for blockchain: what it does, it does well.

This simple mantra is its making.

The author is invested in BTC, ETH and ZIL, which are mentioned in this article.