Privacy coins have always been a hot topic of debate with each new generation producing new hype. One of the newest and most talked about coins is Haven Protocol. That hype was due to the coin’s offshore storage concept (no they don’t give you a bank account in the Caribbean) and the coin’s price action that was exposed as a possible pump and dump scheme by prominent community members on Twitter. Today, I’ll be giving an overview of XHV looking at its offshore storage concept, its most recent fork, and its delisting from Nanex.

Your Privacy Haven

Haven is one of the new kids on the block in the privacy world. A fork of Monero, Haven hopes to introduce the feature they call “Offshore Storage” into the crypto world. This offshore storage model is made possible through a dual coin set up and hopes to add in a new way to retain USD value without having to go through a stablecoin such as Tether.

Offshore Storage

Offshore storage is Haven’s big idea for their coin to say the least. The idea behind the feature is to combat market instability by allowing users to preserve the value of their coins. That is made possible through the “Mint and Burn” functionality that is built into Haven that doesn’t go through any of the current stable coins like Tether.

How offshore storage works in practice is with a dual coin structure for the Haven blockchain. With Haven there’s well Haven (XHV) and also USD Haven (XHVD) where XHVD acts as a decentralized cryptocurrency backed version of Tether (which has its own mysteries surrounding its USD backing). At this time there is currently a closed community testnet for the offshore storage feature.

Burning, Minting, and Oracles

For the burning process, a user will burn XHV and convert it into XHVD. Those XHVD coins will “represent the USD value” of your burned XHV. In other words, XHVD is a way to store the dollar value of your XHV at the time without having to worry about the price fluctuations or sit in XHV. The value of your XHVD is set based on the USD value of the XHV burned and because of that converting $10 worth of XHV into XHVD is the same as straight up buying XHVD with $10. XHV is a middleman in that process but it adds a very important component to the equation: privacy.

When you’re using XHVD or XHV you have all the privacy advantages with Haven Protocol. Haven believes that as crypto progresses the desire for a stable coin that has these privacy features will be highly desired. The example brought up is with bank accounts and blockchain today. Bank balances aren’t available to the public for the privacy of the user. If someone wants to or I put it there publicly they can view my metamask account balance and see all the tokens I own and how much ETH I have.

In addition to burning coins in order to create XHVD, users who hold XHVD can convert XHVD back into Haven through a process called minting. With minting the user is returned a USD equivalent of Haven for the XHVD they have. For example, Haven is worth $1 and I have 200 XHV. I can burn that and receive $200 worth of XHVD. Later, I want to convert that XHVD back to XHV but the price has risen to $2 per coin. I would receive 100 haven from the minting process or the USD equivalent of what I had in storage. This process insulates the user from price movements to that they retain their USD value at the time of burning.

An end goal of the system as stated by Have is to have XHVD/USD pairings available on exchanges. With that in place the need to mint back XHV from XHVD wouldn’t be required necessarily and would significantly reduce the hassle of going from XHVD back to USD.

Lastly, the USD value of one’s XHV is set by the Haven oracle. For a blockchain an oracle is a component that looks at data that is available off the blockchain and makes it available for use on the blockchain. In practice this process will take outside data and make it so that a smart contract is able to use information for execution. The Haven oracle looks at the USD value of Haven across exchanges and incorporates that amount into the smart contract that burns the XHV and gives the user XHVD.

V3 Fork

Haven Protocol has gone through a couple hardforks already with the most recent being their V3 hardfork back in June of 2018. This hardfork brought with it three main changes. The first was a modification to the CryptoNight Haven Algorithm. For those who aren’t aware CryptoNight is a proof-of-work algorithm and this modification to the Haven version of it will make it compatible with nicehash. Nicehash is a large cloud mining marketplace so this change opens up Haven to be mined by a greater number of individuals.

Second there was an addition of a governance fee. This fee is a 5% charge on the block reward that goes into a fund to be used by the development team for well governance. Those funds can be used for a variety of things including paying for listings of the coin on different exchanges, paying for lawyers, and developers in order to help advance the project.

Lastly, there was an adjustment to the difficulty algorithm. This was the least major of the three changes with some modifications to the algorithm to help ensure better block timings but also increased security against attacks on the network.

Outlook

Haven has a simple roadmap with one goal per quarter for the year of 2018. At the moment they are behind on that roadmap as they were scheduled to have iOS and Android wallets released by the end of Q2. For Q3 their goal is the testnet for their offshore storage and Q4 aims to launch the mainnet for the Offshore Storage.

Delisting and Protocol Issues

Most recently, Haven was delisted from Nanex after the team at the exchange noticed inconsistencies with its wallet and withdrawal requests. After a brief investigation, trading of the coin on Nanex was halted but the team has stated that around $36,000 worth of XHV was stolen before the exchange could respond.

The cause of the hack was an exploit that exists in the Monero code that Haven had forked from. The Haven team had responded to the exploit and released an update to patch the vulnerability on July 6th of 2018. That patch and the vulnerability were not communicated to the Nanex team by the Haven team as it had been with the June 7th fork. Nanex was also not aware of the exploit existing as Monero had been listed on Nanex after that exploit had been patched in the base Monero code.

Nanex has stated that they are seeking ways to compensate those who lost funds due to the exploit. The Nanex team stated in an update to their blog post from August 22nd that nothing had been decided on as of yet but the reimbursement of members through siphoning of a portion of the trading fee would be conducted if no other options were possible.

Price

XHV is currently trading at a price of $0.568 or 8602 Sats. The circulating supply of the coin at this time is 4.3 million. Given those numbers the current market cap of the project is at $2.4 million. Daily volume for the coin is $10,500.

Exchanges

Haven is currently traded across two exchanges Nanex and TradeOgre. Nanex offers a NANO pairing for XHV and TradeOgre offers a BTC pairing for XHV with similar volume for both with Nanex at 52% and TradeOgre at 48%. (XHV is delisted from Nanex at this time due to the issues explained above)

Nanex — https://nanex.co/

TradeOgre — https://tradeogre.com/

Community

Website — https://havenprotocol.com/

ANN — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2989487

Twitter — https://twitter.com/havenprotocol?lang=en

Whitepaper — https://havenprotocol.com/static/media/haven_protocol_whitepaper_v3.0.0.cb09c183.pdf

Blog — https://medium.com/@havencurrency

Conclusion

Haven looks to introduce a novel concept with its offshore storage feature. That feature is still in its infancy however and further development must be made for it to be fully realized. At this time there is a lot of hostility towards this project due to the pump and dump scheme from back in April and negative reviews from other publications. At the time I would consider Haven to be a riskier investment than most in crypto and I myself will be on the sidelines until more releases are made in regards to the Offshore feature.

Thank you for reading today’s article! This is my last article for this week and I’ll be releasing an update to my schedule tomorrow! As always follow me on here or on Twitter @thant1194 or on InvestFeed @thant11 in order to stay up to date on all my articles as I release them. I am not associated with the Haven project and am not a holder of their token. Thank you again for reading. I have to return some video tapes.

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