The Current State of Crypto
In 2021 news about cryptocurrency has been dominated by meme coins. It is without a doubt that cryptos 2021 bull run has been thanks to the hype around coins with zero utility besides the ability to rapidly shoot up in value due to carefully constructed tokenomics 1. The hype surrounding coins with actual utility has been disappointingly low in 2021.
The current narrative of the largest coins is that bitcoin is going to change financial infrastructure and keep governments from taking our freedom. Ethereum is going to be the backbone for everything from the internet, to art, to the mortgage on your house. The rest of the top 10 (and most of the top 100) coins by market cap are either smart contract platforms with little community gunning for Ethereum’s spot or meme coins promising valuations that challenge the wealth of the worlds economy.
Return of the Utility
The coin I want to talk about is Nano (XNO). As of writing it is ranked #169 by market capitalization. Nano does one thing and executes on it perfectly: being a currency. The current market capitalization is far lower than other coins with similar amounts of development and community. This is likely due to the lack of a network effect. Most coins have feedback loops that drive transactions. The only way to increase demand for Nano and increase the price is to get it used for everyday transactions. In the world of meme coins it can be very hard to get attention to a project that isn’t made to have massive swings in price but hopefully I can explain by the end of this post why Nano is worth using.
In order to be used for transactions a currency needs to be exchanged in seconds. Above is all the coins listed on Kraken along with the confirmation time. Confirmation time is the amount of time that Kraken recommends waiting before you can be sure that a transaction has been cemented by the blockchain and can not be reversed. Kraken’s times are a bit conservative but considering they use the same time for all sizes of transactions I think the values are accurate and a trusted source to rely on for the information. To be fair, most of the coins on this list were never designed with buying coffee in mind but I think the comparison is still important since it is commonly believed that the only thing holding bitcoin and its derivatives back from being used everywhere is hitting a critical mass of adoption among retail. There is some progress being made but Bitcoin today is far from being capable for use as a currency.
Above are all of the coins that are capable of settling in less than 1 second which is about on par with a credit card. Solana stands out the most since it is the only smart contract on the list and has the highest market cap. Solana has a ton of potential but I don’t believe that a coin with a smart contract platform can compete long term with a coin specifically designed to be a currency. The DeFi and Parachain coins are more governance tokens than actual cryptocurrencies so they aren’t designed with the scale required for use as a currency. That leaves Ripple and Nano which have wildly different market caps. Ripple is quite controversial since it is centralized to the point that I would argue its closer to Visa than Bitcoin2. I personally think that Ripple is ran by a fraudulent organization so I don’t want to justify it by talking about it too much here. However it would be unfair to no at least compare the performance and tokenomics since they are the only two serious projects with the goal of becoming a currency.
| Nano3 | Ripple4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Ticker | XNO | XRP |
| Symbol | Ӿ | N/A |
| Market Cap5 | .650B | 46B |
| Transaction Speed | <1 second | 3+ seconds |
| Transaction Fee | 0 | 0.00001 XRP6 |
| Minimum Nakamoto Coefficient7 | 10 (“NanoLooker Representatives” n.d.) | 1 |
| Supply | All coins minted, no mechanism to remove coins from network. | All coins minted, transactions reduce overall supply. |
| Foundation Ownership | Ӿ7 million Developer Fund | Ripple foundation and the founder own well over half of all the coins.8 |
| Initial Distribution | Faucets | Initial Coin Offering |
What is Nano
Nano is fast because there is no concept of block times. Every wallet has its own unique blockchain and each “block” only contains a single transaction. Since the block is only needed when a transaction is made it means that wallets can pre mine a block and hold onto the proof of work until the next transaction is created. So when a transaction is made it is instantly propagated to the network and the nodes that govern the network only keep track of the balance of each wallet.
Nano is free to transact because it does not rely on paying miners and it is designed to be efficient. Bitcoin requires 1900 KWh of power for a single transaction9 whereas Nano is only 0.111 Wh per transaction10 which is a difference of about 17 million percent.11 There are many arguments to be made that without proper incentives no one will run the nodes required to keep the network healthy. Nano is able to work around this by keeping the requirements to run a Node very low. The Nano whitepaper goes into great detail about the types of nodes.