Callisto is a project that was originated by a team that was working on Ethereum Classic back in 2017 and decided to split away in 2018. Team Saturn was one of the first to cover creation of Callisto Project.

The chain is code compatible with ETC at the moment of the fork with an additional feature of cold staking - you can lock your CLO if you don't plan to sell it immediately and receive more CLO funded by miners. Unlike BTC, ETH, ETC, where the miners get full reward for performing proof of work, CLO has taken more of a ZEC approach of taking a portion of mining reward (10% in case of ZCash and a whopping 30% in case of Callisto) and using it to fund the dev team and the cold staking.

Callisto $CLO

Ticker : CLO

: CLO Consensus : Proof of Work

: Proof of Work Block time: 15 seconds

Essentially, the dev team receives passive income for as long as someone is mining the chain and regularly dumps these coins on the market (look at the price charts on CoinMarketCap for ZEC and CLO confirms that). In Callisto's defense, they do indeed manage to provide some free smart contract audit services to developers but they are yet to establish a brand whereby their audit would convey any trust in its outcome.

While criticism of such funding approach is valid, and it does create a sell pressure on the blockchain native token CLO, it also allows the core dev team to have sustained funding so they can focus on dev and promotion work and not worry about fundraising, and aligns incentives - the dev team's income is proportional to CLO price. Furthermore, thanks to Cold Staking mechanism long term CLO holders can benefit from the 30% mining subsidy.

The mining subsidy is split further. Out of those 30%, 10% goes into the so-called treasury - Salary for the team, the smart contract audit work, promotion funds and further development of the project, as well as the proposals program where any member can suggest a proposal and get funding. The remaining 20% is allocated to the cold-staking smart contract.

Another problem that we foresee with Callisto is that since it is a hash minority chain it is very vulnerable to 51% attacks. Even much larger Ethereum Classic network has once been the victim of such attack which has caused exchanges to increase confirmation numbers to thousands in order to protect themselves. If CLO's price ever goes up to significant levels, exchanges that trade it will have to increase CLO confirmation numbers to perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of confirmations in order to obtain same security guarantees, which would lead to e.g. CLO deposits taking days!

Thanks to Callisto's active community, and especially twitter user spigfish, we found out that there is ongoing work in the form of PIRLGUARD, which does make it much harder and costlier to execute a 51% attack. At the moment given substantial hashrate (too small compared to ETC and especially ETH, but much larger than most of mineable currencies) and activated PirlGuard 51% attacks on Callisto would likely be unprofitable and thus the chain is reasonably protected. If you still think it is risky it is worth remembering that in a truly decentralized cryptocurrency it is impossible to remove this threat completely (unlike centralized coins like such as Binance Chain or Facebook Libra).

Where do other EVM blockchain stand when it comes to 51% attacks?

We have put together a whole catalog of overviews focusing on various EVM blockchains for you. All chains that one day may dominate the dApps space and feature Saturn Network, such as CLO, RSK, ETC, TRON, ADA (Cardano) and many others.

Future is bright!

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