Nano brings an extremely unique blockchain design into the crypto market, as well as some groundbreaking processing speeds that could turn heads. Previously known as RaiBlocks, rebranded to Nano in January 2018.
Recent growth although market has been down, rumors of being added to Coinbase.
Rather than relying on a single central blockchain, which with an open-source network often means needing to reach a massive amount of people to achieve consensus anytime something big is about to happen with the network (e.g., a software or hardware upgrade), Nano sports a block-lattice blockchain. In other words, each user has their very own blockchain that they can control, meaning there's no large consensus that needs to be reached... ever. Because each account has its own blockchain, the network should, in theory, be rapidly scalable without impacting performance.
Nano is capable of processing an incredible 7,000 transactions per second, albeit hardware upgrades in the near to intermediate future are expected to push this figure even higher. Relatively speaking, Visa can process in the neighborhood of 24,000 transactions per second, meaning Nano is closer than any other cryptocurrency at present to the payment processing kingpin. By comparison, bitcoin maxes out at a mere seven transactions per second.
It is worth pointing out that because of the setup of Nano's blockchain, it requires a peer-to-peer payment to be broken down into two separate transactions: one where the sender removes money from their account, and another where the receiver adds the funds to his or her account. It may sound cumbersome, but it's lightning-fast and, perhaps best of all, free.
The downside? Nano doesn't have any major partners as of yet. However, with these processing speeds, it's just a matter of time.
Questions asked by Charlie Lee about Nano with answers -
Question: What happens when there is a netsplit and 2 halves of the network have voted in conflicting blocks? How will the 2 sides ever converge when they start communicating with each other?
Answer: If the network had split and a transaction was somehow confirmed in both partitions, the nodes have a procedure to find ledger differences. They would then request a vote on the conflicting transaction.
Question: I know that validators are not currently incentivized. This is a centralization force. Are there plans to address this concern?
Answer: Nano’s goal is to make the validation process as inexpensive as possible; as higher cost validation requires stronger incentives. We have seen that if validation cost is sufficiently low, vendors & other service providers will be happy to run validation nodes as an inexpensive operating cost in return for lower payment processing fees.
In addition, we have some really cool projects that are being developed which will drive users to run their own nodes and provide turn-key solutions for anyone who wishes to do so.
Question: When are coins considered confirmed? Can coins that have been received still be rolled back if a conflicting send is seen in the network and the validators vote in that send?
Answer: A transaction is confirmed when a quorum of the online vote weight has voted for it and all nodes are programmed to bandwagon to the winning transaction. If a conflicting send is published after quorum has been reached, nodes won’t vote on the new send since a different conflicting one has already reached critical mass.
Question: As computers get more powerful, the PoW becomes easier to compute. Will the system adjust the difficulty of computing the work accordingly? If not, DoS attacks becomes easier.
Question: Transaction flooding attack seems fairly cheap to pull off. This will make it harder for people to run full nodes, resulting in centralization. Any plans to address this?
Answer: We’re exploring a combination of improving our consensus protocol in order to prioritize validating transactions, as well as either increasing our PoW difficulty and/or allowing prioritization partially based on higher-order PoW solutions.