Nano (NANO) has been one of the most interesting Cryptocurrency projects that was launched in the past few years. Previously known as RaiBlocks, the project was built by a single developer before gaining traction and on-boarding many more volunteers and team members. Now Nano has been added to Huobi Global, a major cryptocurrency trading platform and home for many quality projects, so we wanted to re-visit what we know of the project and how its development progressed.

What is Nano?

Nano uses a novel blockchain construction called block-lattice (similar to the Tangle in IOTA) to deliver instant and zero free transactions, while keeping the chain decentralized. Block-lattice is technically a DAG (directed acyclic graph) structure.

The construction of the block-lattice allows the network to allocate a new blockchain to every account (accounts are created in a wallet). This means that each user will have an own blockchain and these update asynchronously with the rest of the network.

This means that the chain can reach higher TPS (transaction per second) as the network moves together instead of having to wait for every node to validate a single transaction over the network. According to latest stress-test rounds this resulted in 750 TPS.

Another novel approach is the fact that instead of transactions holding exact amounts in the blocks, here transactions only keep account of balance changes. This allows the network database to store less information and scale better, while resulting in less security concerns.

How is Nano secure?

Nano uses a hybrid PoW/PoS mix to protect a chain, but in a different way to what other projects use it for as Nano has zero inflation. The currently circulating and also the maximum number of tokens is 133,248,289.

Nano uses a Proof-of-Work feature to avoid a possible huge attack surface: spamming the chain with almost empty zero fee transactions. When sending or recieving blocks every account has to do a share of PoW to validate the transaction or attach it to the block-lattice. This is lightweight work for most users meaning that you can do the PoW even on mobile devices, but work-load on exchanges can be pretty rough.

Proof-of-Stake is used to deal with double spending, confirmation and fork resolving. Every node has a weight according to several factors including up-time and coins under ownership. This weight or stake helps with resolving potential attacks, in Nano if an invalid existing block is voted out all dependent blocks are rolled back in to accommodate the winning block. Unlike with traditional cryptocurrencies, here the rollback only affects accounts involved in a fork instead of punishing every account.

Why Nano?

Our opinion is that Nano has been a strong contender to the most interesting blockchain project after coins such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Features such as instant transactions favor traders with arbitrage between exchanges, while free transactions make the project well suited for transactions and service industries.

Development-wise the project has outclassed many similarly valued project in the space, the latest release of Universal Blocks has brought a peace of mind to several believers of the project. The UB update consolidated the 4 block types (send, receive, change and open) into 1 single block type within the Nano protocol. This helped with several scalability issues and will also favor blockchain prunning.

Another recent feature that got added to the development is Epoch Blocks. Here the developers argued that since Nano’s chain is asynchronous it can’t be updated from a certain block height so there was a need for an alternative method. These blocks offer the ability to checkpoint the chain and will be generated to move forward on it and every account following them will move vertsion from Epoch 0 to Epoch 1.

Below you will find a few links if the article got interested you in Nano.

Nano website: Nano.org

Nano whitepaper: Nano.org/en/whitepaper

Nano roadmap: Developers.nano.org

Trade Nano on Huobi: Huobi.com

Images are taken from the Nano Whitepaper.