Project Update: Nano (NANO) the Global Currency with Instantaneous Transactions and Zero Fees
Basics
The aim of the NANO project is to provide a global currency with instantaneous transactions and zero fees over a secure, decentralized network.
This makes the project stand out from other cryptocurrencies since instant and free transactions are extremely unique.
Thee are currently around 10 team members on the Nano team.
The project has been in development since 2013 as Raiblocks and was listed on exchanges in March 2017. In January 2018 Raiblocks was rebranded to NANO
Tokens and usage
NANO is the token used on the Nano network. The tokens are divisible and the transactions are processed without fees. Keep in mind that Nano is a pure payment cryptocurrency - it doesn't have any smart contract capabilities (at least for now)
It focuses on solving scalability, latency and power inefficiency issues through usage of its novel block-lattice architecture where basically each user has their own blockchain talking to other blockchains.
Every time transaction is performed the sender's device does a little bit of Proof-of-Work (using computing power) which acts as anti spam prevention.
Recent News
The most recent development is new version of the NANO node (V16.3). This release addresses network issues resulting in high amounts of CPU and memory usage when operating a node on the Nano network.
The team provides weekly updates that focus on what is happening with the project. For example Nanochina.co was recently launched with the aim of creating a hub for Chinese speaking community and the team also took part in Bitcoin Conference in Brazil.
Nanoodle.io project was also recently launched - it focuses on providing tools that allow accounting, time stamping and transaction monitoring for businesses using Nano. Overall it seems that there is a lot of development activity.
Roadmap
There biggest upcoming update to the Nano is the Boulton release which incorporates series of improvements, appears to be a very major release and includes:
improvements on how nodes work
dynamic network conditions (transaction priorities)
network voting improvements
better testing environment
client and wallet improvements mostly for developers
The further developments mostly include more merchant services, fiat-nano exchanges, point-of-sale Nano usage, hardware Nano wallets and protocol upgrades.
Availability and price
Listed on few major exchanges with:
Binance (91% of volume)
Huobi (3%)
Mercatox (2%)
Kucoin (1%)
also on Bitinka, CoinEx, OKEx and more.
Overall volume around 5M
Current price as of 22nd of November is around $1.16 with NANO being ranked on 34th place in terms of the market capitalisation and market cap of around $155M.
All 133M tokens are in circulation - so no new tokens will be introduced - important since it won't increase the mcap and devalue the tokens already in the circulation.
Price graph
NANO has been very dissapointing this year with price decreasing in all aspects significantly. Altcoins has been doing very badly this year but NANO has been especially bad (mostly due the Bitgrail hack). The ATH is 37.62 and was achieved on 2nd of January. This means loss of almost 97% which is very high even when compared to majority of the altcoins.
How is it doing?
Due to extremely quick growth, Bitgrail hack and then then dramatic decrease in price Nano has lost a lot of legitimacy.
On the other hand the development of the project is doing very well with a lot of community developers working on it.
The biggest issue is whether Nano can find use cases since it's only used as currency. I do think Nano is superior to Bitcoin (it is everything that cryptocurrency should be) but Bitcoin is already established and used.
Without merchants accepting Nano the use cases are limited. The question is whether Nano can take off as currency and I personally find this a big if because without this use case the token will be useless.