Nano (NANO)

Nano

Consensus mechanism	DAG
Total supply	133,248,289 NANO / XRB
Website	http://nano.org/en

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on: 2014
• Mainnet release: 2017
• The Nano Foundation was created in 2018
• Coin, zero fees, instant tx
• Nano uses a unique DAG that the team calls a block-lattice. Which is a DAG combined with DPOS to solve the 'Cordinator Problem' which IOTA still hasn't fixed..
• Claims to be infinitely scalable.

History

• Formerly RaiBlocks (XRB), rebranded in 1-2018.
• Nano was started in 2014 as a side project by Colin LeMahieu. The project took three years to complete and a fully functional main net was launched in 2017.

Token

Token Allocation

• From this deep dive done by Store Of Value:

"The Nano team didn’t conduct an ICO and instead distributed Nano for free through a web faucet. 7,000,000 XRB was retained as a development fund."

• According to Messari (10-2019):

"Nano supply is originally capped at 340 million but fell to 133 million after unclaimed coins were destroyed. NANO are distributed via a captcha solving where anyone can solve captchas to earn Nano. Only 133 million tokens (39%) of Nano’s original supply were claimed during the original distribution event."

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found here.
• Code can be viewed [insert here].

Implementations

• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• Seems like there were 330 nodes on the network as of 12-10-2019
• Uses blake2 as a hashing algorithm

• From this deep dive done by Store Of Value:

“All transactions are free and they are confirmed within 5 seconds. Nano has an extremely high network throughput capacity and is only limited by computational speed and data transfer delays.

Consensus is maintained through a voting mechanism. Validator nodes vote on a world state that they believe is true. The number of votes each node has is the addition of the number of XRB owned plus the number of XRB delegated to the node by other accounts.

While traditional blockchain-based cryptocurrencies maintain a single, global blockchain, Nano maintains a blockchain for every Nano account. Each blockchain can only be updated by the its owner. (This is called Block Lattice)

To send funds, the sender needs to issue a “send” transaction in its own blockchain and the receiver needs to issue a corresponding “receive” transaction to its blockchain. This is why Nano is so fast. Because the account is the only entity that can update its blockchain, each blockchain can be updated immediately and asynchronously. This results in really fast transactions. Once a blockchain update is made, the transaction is propagated across the network and as long as no validator discovers a conflict, the transaction is confirmed.

The Nano network consists of wallets and validator nodes. In order for a wallet to issue a transaction, it must send it to a validator node. The node validates the transaction and then broadcasts it to all other validator nodes that it’s connected to. Every subsequent validator node performs the same validate-and-relay process until the whole network has seen the transaction.

A validator node keeps track of the state of the entire network by storing every address’s blockchain. Conflicts or “forks” happen when a published transaction conflicts with a validator node’s internal state. To resolve the conflict, the node initiates a voting process by announcing the conflict to other nodes. The voting process occurs over a predefined period where each node votes on a state of the network it believes is correct. The number of votes a node has equals the amount of Nano it owns plus the Nano delegated to it from other accounts. When a state has more than 133,248,289/2 votes (133,248,289 is the total number of XRBs in existence), it’s automatically accepted as the real state of the network.

The Nano network provides no rewards for running a validator.

To mitigate spam, an account needs to perform an easy proof of work problem to add a transaction to its own blockchain. This is, of course, not a cure-all as transactions can still be created within a few seconds.”

• According to Messari (10-2019):

"For consensus, Nano uses Open Representative Voting. In this system accounts can freely choose their representative at any time by updating their account chain, providing more control for users to decide who validates transactions. In addition to securing the network, this consensus mechanism uses less energy compared to other popular blockchains."

• From CMC (10-2019):

"Each component of the protocol was created with the long term goals of decentralization and accessibility in mind. By creating a system where representatives are not paid to operate, the incentive to participate in the network is shifted to indirect, operational cost savings. The team claims that this change in incentive model is more efficient and removes one of the factors driving centralization in other systems because participants are not encouraged to interact beyond their direct needs and supporting the network, and thus economies of scale become less critical."

From their own website (10-2019):

"One transaction fits within a single UDP packet, and transactions are handled independently, eliminating any block size issue."

Privacy Method

• When discussed in a Reddit thread (10-2019), the sentiment was that Nano will not adopt layer 1 privacy functions:

"Banano are experimenting with trustless mixers, and while we won't have total privacy anytime soon, the privacy of nano with mixed balance by default is very good, all withdrawals from exchange are equal."

And

"Another reason to avoid development of a privacy layer is that there are other coins (Monero, and a bunch of others) which are primary layer privacy coins and serve that function better than any second layer on nano likely ever could."

Another project called Tixl seems to use the Nano tech setup but then with added privacy.

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

• Plans to do a big upgrade, called V20 Lydia, where their current spam mitigation PoW algorithm will be changed into what they call Nano PoW. At the moment Nano is in V19 (9-2019).
• Update (10-2019): "After taking feedback from these Nano PoW discussions our team has made some adjustments to our plans for V20. We will not be including the algorithm in this release to allow more time for research and validation of ideas to overcome the no memory alternative solution suggested above." No new date has been given for the new update.

• From an AMA (27-7-2019):

"We would need several things in order to be DEX compatible: A compatible hashing algorithm, we use blake2 and many don’t, signature changes / multi-sig, scripting changes

Comparing the list of requirements to how much of a value-add users get on a DEX versus a normal exchange, I don’t see this compatibility as worth the effort. I don’t see this as significantly increasing adoption."

Audits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].
• From their own website:

"Nano protocol passes (1-2019) third-party security audit from Red4Sec, a leading cybersecurity firm. Penetration testing on the node software and official representative servers, along with audits of the consensus and cryptography methods, resulted in no critical vulnerabilities found."

Bugs/Hacks

• Its major source of liquidity, the Bitgrail exchange, got extremely hacked in February 2019. This wasn’t a trivial hack, either — approximately $150m (at February prices) went missing. That was a mammoth 13% of the entire supply.
• From Messari (18-3-2021):

"The Nano team has released Nano node v21.3. This update contains a series of low-risk patches to mitigate the ongoing DoS attacks affecting the network. The team has identified that the DoS attacks appear to be a resource-exhaustion attack aimed at denying service to normal users either partially or entirely by filling the network with accounts and transaction volume. There are no breaking changes or major impacts to integrations to consider with this upgrade."

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Its major source of liquidity, the Bitgrail exchange, got extremely hacked in February 2019. This wasn’t a trivial hack, either — approximately $150m (at February prices) went missing. That was a mammoth 13% of the entire supply.

Team, Funding, Partnerships, etc.

Team

• LeMahieu, Colin; Founder
• George Coxon; CFO (at least as of 10-2019)
• Nano Foundation, formed in 2018, located in Santa Monica, California

Funding

• According to Messari (10-2019):

Anmi OECD, DU Capital and Parallax Digital

• From an AMA (27-7-2019):

"The developer fund has spent 1,150,000 Nano in 2019 so far. At the current burn rate of Nano, the developer fund will be fully utilized in 15–20 months time. Do you think Nano will be in a self-sufficient/ community-led environment by this point? If not, how will the project progress in the future?

The beginning of the year incurred some larger fixed-costs and our burn rate has greatly decreased in the last quarter. Last fall and this spring we’ve been working heavily on making sure our costs are streamlined. Our exchange and media payment policies reflect our focus on making sure the protocol is developed to a point of of being self-sustaining as an open source project. We’re in a really good position right now and development is progressing well.

What is the plan for once the development fund is exhausted?

The goal has always been to keep the scope of the protocol focused and get it into a maintenance cycle like any of the other major open source projects out there. Limiting our feature scope and focusing on being the most efficient currency also ties in to this as it gives us a solid core feature people want to maintain."

 (:

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