The developers of Vertcoin have announced their plan to upgrade Vertcoin’s encryption algorithm from Adaptive-N Scrypt to Lyra2. This move renews their commitment to ASIC and Multi-Pool resistance and decentralization of network power, which is desperately needed in the altcoin mining community.

What Other Benefits Does Lyra2 Bring To Vertcoin?

Lyra2 is a more efficient password hashing scheme that offers excellent performance against custom mining hardware as it allows separate control over memory and processing difficulty. In Scrypt hashing these two factors are tightly coupled. Vertcoin will be the first electronic currency to adopt Lyra2.

From their blog at vertcoin.org

“Vertcoin has always been and will continue to be the leader in decentralization of cryptocurrency. Lyra2 is a natural successor of Scrypt providing an improvement on the same fundamental purpose – scaling hardware difficulty. The decision to move to this algorithm comes as a preemptive strike against ASICs and a move against Multipools. As many of you know, we have several concepts in the hopper to remain in step with the Vertcoin charter – Vertcoin’s [algorithm]is designed to resist the development of custom mining hardware and multipool mining, ensuring that transactions are validated by a widely distributed network and avoiding the selling pressure when large mining pools indiscriminately flood the market with freshly mined coins.”

When Will Vertcoin Adopt The New Algorithm?

The development team estimates that the move will take several months to test and roll-out. A Q4 2014 launch is planned.

The move to Lyra2 comes as Vertcoin has suffered heavy losses in market cap in recent weeks. The change in algorithm has met with great enthusiasm from the Vertcoin community, which has continued to praise the developers of Vertcoin for their addition of new features and vigilance against ASIC mining. The news also comes only a few weeks after a Stealth Address feature was added to Vertcoin by the developers. Stealth Addresses allow for a completely private exchange of funds between payer and recipient, which gives it functionality that can compete with Darkcoin Darksend, Dark Wallet, and other anonymous cryptocurrencies that have been developed. Vertcoin was the first electronic currency to add a Stealth Address function to its wallet.

Vertcoin is trading at 0.000269 btc at the time of posting.