Nano (NANO), a crypto asset described by its developers as “a currency for the real world”, has surged nearly 35% is the past 24 hours according to data from CryptoCompare. Notably, Nano out-performed the top 30 digital currencies by market capitalization last month as its price increased by over 70% (for the August period).

Nano (NANO) 24-Hour Price Chart via CryptoCompare

The “trustless”, low-latency cryptocurrency’s significant price increase comes less than two weeks after newly established Singapore-based digital asset exchange Coinbene announced that it would begin listing Nano on its platform.

Commenting on Nano’s potential for increased adoption, Coinbene’s Global VP, Feng Bo, noted:

Nano is a crypto asset with real-world use cases that solves many of the problems with other digital currencies, like low transaction speeds and high power consumption.

Directed Cyclic Graph (DAG) Architecture

Nano Foundation’s newly appointed official advisor, Andy Woolmer, who formerly served as a senior executive at Citibank, pointed out that Nano’s block-lattice structure would allow for faster, or “instant”, transaction settlements.

Woolmer added that Nano has the potential to remove the inefficiencies found in the traditional foreign exchange trading markets, as its Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based architecture significantly improves the performance and security of its payment network.

As explained in Nano’s whitepaper, its block-lattice architecture allows each account to operate on its own (separate) blockchain, which enables each user to update their transaction history “asynchronously to the rest of the network.” This type of network design, according to the crypto’s whitepaper, leads to (or results in) “near instantaneous transaction speed and unlimited scalability.”

As covered, Uber research engineer, John Chen, recently referred to Nano as “The New Global Currency.” Chen also predicted that “everything will be digital” in the future while noting that Nano and bitcoin (BTC) have the “best chance” to be “universally” accepted currencies.

“Critical Design Flaw”

While many crypto enthusiasts have expressed positive views about Nano, there are a few who’ve noted that its payment network architecture has “a critical design flaw.” According to a Medium post by Piotr Włodarek, Nano’s block-lattice design allows for the “unconstrained growth of [transaction] data to be processed by full nodes”, or its transaction validators.

Włodarek acknowledges that Nano does deliver on its promise of “free transactions” and “instant confirmations”, however, its developers have “kept a blind eye on the consequences.” Going on to explain what an “obvious” consequence might be, Włodarek says “anyone can infinitely spam Nano with valid transactions.”

There would also be no way (apparently) to distinguish authentic transactions from the spam, the crypto blogger noted. Although Nano’s whitepaper has identified this potential “attack vector”, Włodarek argues that the crypto network’s “minor mitigation”, which involves users having to perform a “lightweight” proof-of-work (PoW) before sending a transaction, does not adequately resolve the potential problem.

The blogger also mentioned: