The cryptoverse came into being because of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin, dated 2009. Safe to say it is the father of all cryptos. And after that, the cryptoverse just kept on getting bigger and there was no turning back. But have you ever wondered which cryptos were the OGs of that brand new, decentralized universe? I’m going to go on a limb here and say that Ethereum popped in your mind, considering its popularity and coin market standing. But you will be rather surprised to know that famous dApps platform is in fact not a part of the original crypto gang, it only came out in 2015.

But here is a platform that is an OG of the crypto world and one of the oldest cryptocurrencies, founded way back in 2013; Nxt. It was developed to be a completely open-source payment network all the while being flexible enough to cater to application building and financial services. Interestingly enough, it was one of the first blockchains with an aim that went beyond the classic record keeping of transactions; it was more developer centric to be precise.

What’s so notable about Nxt is that the team behind it didn’t stick to following the Bitcoin, like most altcoins were doing at that time by merely modifying the original Bitcoin source code. The developers actually went through the arduous task of writing an original code for Nxt in Java and that too from scratch.

Nxt: Blockchain 2.0

The developers put so much of hard work in the coding of the platform because they were looking to actually improve on the existing Bitcoin blockchain by providing, crowd funding and governance. Morover, it was also the first blockchain to introduce a Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol without the need for energy-intensive mining. But it also implies that the supply of coins shall remain fixed, meaning the 1 billion coins initially created is all there will ever be.

The developers of Nxt seem to be over ambitious as they went a step further and introduced to the world a modular toolset. Which is more of a gift to developers really, because it provided them with a space to create a variety of additional applications. This took the functionality of Nxt up a notch.

The Key Features of Nxt

Assets and Asset Management

On the platform, you can have an asset represent anything from bonds, trademarks to even reservations and movie tickets. And you can also trade them via peer-to-peer exchange.

Monetary System

This system gives you the power of creating your very own cryptocurrency and also trading it on the Nxt platform. It can also be traded on other exchanges however they should support the Nxt Monetary System.

Marketplace

A middleman free market place is the specialty of the blockchain tech, its USP if you will. And the Nxt platform provides just that, a safe space to sell digital goods without the involvement of a third party. The moment a purchase is made, you receive a link to download the digital good.

Messaging

It gives the feature of including a message with every transaction. You can rest assured that the messages will be secure as the Nxt platform encrypts the messages by default.

Voting

Nxt also comes with a voting feature, through which you can have an account require the approval of multiple parties in order to make a transaction. This comes extremely handy within organizations particularly, such as cooperatives or charities.

Coin Shuffling

This feature helps practicing anonymity with the origin of coins. But everyday shuffling is not the forte of the Nxt blockchain system. Furthermore, owing to the blockchain’s transparency feature, “every transaction can be seen and traced.”

Data Cloud

Google Drive and Dropbox are so ‘2000 and late’. Keeping up with blockchain’s trend, you can use decentralized storage on the Nxt Data Cloud.

The Next Token

The Nxt token is the cryptocurrency of the platform that serves as fuel for all the transactions on the Nxt network. In addition to being used as transaction fees during the transfer of funds, it also can be used to create “colored coins” or assets to represent other digital and even real world physical assets. The token also powers the voting and even the storage of data.

Current Situation of Nxt

As Nxt continues to be developed supported, the founding company of Nxt has been focused on their new project called Ardor and its child chain Ignis. Ardor was launched as an improved version of Nxt, being more lightweight and scalable.

You can read the Nxt whitepaper here.