Those of you who have been involved in the crypto world ever since 2014 may remember a particular crypto project called ViaCoin. Regarded at the time as being the fastest digital coin on the market, ViaCoin is still being actively developed today.
What is ViaCoin and how does it work?
ViaCoin is an open source cryptocurrency that shares its routes with the Bitcoin protocol, from which it is derived. The first thing worth noting about ViaCoin is the interesting set of technologies behind it. The cryptocurrency boasts an OP-RETURN protocol of 120 bytes.
In fact, it’s worth noting that ViaCoin was developed in response to an update to the Bitcoin protocol that reduced the capacity of the OP-RETURN script from 80 bytes to 40 bytes. ViaCoin was created to supplement this shortage and to address some of Bitcoin’s fundamental issues such as the network delays.
According to CoinMarketCap, the circulating supply is of 23,087,627 VIA out of a maximum supply for 23,176,392 VIA, and the mining rewards occur at regular intervals, every six months to be more precise.
One of the defining features of ViaCoin is the fact that it uses Vialectrum and Viacoin Core wallets in order to allow users to connect to Tor nodes. The block time is 24 seconds, and the network boasts 175 transactions per second, cross-chain atomic swaps, technologies such as Seqwit, Lightning Network, and an AuxPoW mining network with 93 TH/s of hashing power on the network.
The use of the SegWit technology has empowered the cryptocurrency which is today a lot faster than most other cryptocurrencies.
Features of ViaCoin
ViaCoin uses a modernized code (when compared to Bitcoin, at least) which makes use of C++ and Python 3. One of the most noteworthy developments is the fact that the team behind the project have created a hierarchical deterministic key generation technology making it easier for currency users to reset and secure their wallets.
The coin is now compatible with the B19P program, a feature that miners will surely appreciate. Another positive aspect is the hash time lock in the coin’s smart contract. This feature allows secure payments to be made from one party to another without any middleman or any outside party. In short, it means that any other transaction will be forestalled until a certain time change occurs.
ViaCoin also uses Sicache, a UTXO cache that accelerates and optimizes transactions, as well as an algorithm specifically designed to increase the output from mining. The algorithm is designed in such a way to prioritize low fee transactions over transactions with higher fees. As mentioned before, anonymity is one of the project’s main focus. Hence, by offering TOPR support, the development team ensures that the identities of the platform’s users are kept safe.
Coming back to the UTXO cache, this has been optimized for faster transaction times. The blockchain is also optimized to save disk space and memory thanks to a technology called mempool transaction filtering.
Roadmap
The platform has seen its fair share of innovations and changes over the past few years. However, there is still a lot of work to be done and, according to the official roadmap, the team recently finished working on finalizing all the details regarding the support for Trezor. The next step involves work for the Lightning Network Daemon implementation in order to bring the Network Wallet to the masses. For more details on this matter, you can check out the project’s updated whitepaper.
Future plans include support for the VIA currency by the ATMs produced by General Bytes and various new exchange listings. The company also hopes to broaden its team as well as to introduce the Zap Viacoin wallet which is a Lightning Network wallet based on Jack Mallers’ Zap wallet. The team is also working on developing the bespoke Vialectrum iOS Wallet (the Android version is already available).
Last but not least, the team plans to include Schnorr signatures and M.A.S.T., but both features still require a lot of work until they will be ready.
How to buy VIA
Purchasing VIA is not complicated, even though it’s not what you would call a very popular cryptocurrency. According to CoinMarketCap’s markets section, some of the most popular exchanges from which you can buy VIA are Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex, Coinroom, and Upbit for BTC, ETH, and BNB.
Conclusion
To conclude, ViaCoin is an innovative project that has a lot of things going for it such as super-fast transactions, enhanced versatility, and security, plus a great team behind it. ViaCoin seems to be highly lucrative for both users and miners. Whether ViaCoin is a good investment opportunity, we can’t say. However, it might be worth investing in the coin now while prices are low. As the Lightning Network will inevitably become more mainstream, so will the coin’s popularity. Some of the best things about this project are its clear policy towards the technologies it uses and its solid roadmap which, at least from an investor’s point of view, should be a plus.
