Viacoin in 2018, Why it’s worth keeping an eye on.

5 min readJan 6, 2018

A brief history of Viacoin

Viacoin was released to the public in mid 2014, birthed from a key political debate over Bitcoin’s true ‘purpose’.

Although it is possible to encode data into normal Bitcoin transactions, there is quite a few objections to this as this ‘non-standard’ use of Bitcoin can lead to something known as ‘blockchain bloat’. OP_RETURN is a script opcode which can be used to mark a transaction output as invalid, used to prevent transactions that exceed a certain amount of data. Bitcoin Core 0.9.0 saw the introduction of a 40 byte OP_RETURN, to deter the use of Bitcoin as a form of data storage. This made Counterparty, a financial trading platform built on the bitcoin blockchain, unable to operate, since they required an OP_RETURN of 80 bytes.

In the years following, Bitcoin core developers BTCDrak and Peter Todd worked on creating Viacoin, originally used as a platform for ClearingHouse, with a fast 24 second block time and an 80 byte OP_RETURN (Later extended to 120 byte support).

In Autumn 2016, a developer from the Netherlands, a flamboyant crypto-twitter personality known as Romano (@RNR_0), took over the project as the lead developer. Although at the time he was only 21 years young, Romano had a clear vision for Viacoin.

2017

This year, since being handed the torch from BTCDrak, Romano has worked on many baseline features for Viacoin, building a strong foundation for some of the upcoming features we will see in 2018. Given the recent releases and sentiment from the Viacoin team, it seem’s Viacoin’s original focus on asset issuance has been expanded upon with a new focus on micro-payments, cross-chain integration and privacy.

Some of the implementations from the 2017 roadmap completed this year included Segregated Witness (SegWit), which was implemented to solve malleability issues, allowing the implementation of new features on Viacoin much easier. SegWit also removes signature data from transactions, freeing up block capacity and allowing more transaction volume. This was it’s primary purpose for it’s implementation in Bitcoin.

As of recent, the Lightning Network was implemented in Viacoin with a primary focus on Atomic Swaps. Atomic Swaps for Viacoin have successfully tested against the Decred and Litecoin blockchains.

This is a large focus in the space today as forthcoming regulations can make trading between cryptocurrencies increasingly difficult. Atomic Swaps allow for payment channels to be created with 2 distinctly different blockchains. This process is fast, secure and trustless, and relies on a feature called ‘Hashed TimeLock Contracts’. altcoin.io is an upcoming decentralized exchange (DEX) which is currently developing a user-friendly cross-chain atomic swap client. This means that Viacoin will be able to be swapped for other coins like Bitcoin and Litecoin without having to be sent to an exchange. This greatly increases Viacoin’s utility as Bitcoin’s viability as a cheap and fast payment platform is no longer present today.

swap.altcoin.io/swap — alpha Atomic Swap client

Other important milestones for Viacoin this year,

A new whitepaper, which describes Viacoin’s key features and upcoming implementations, available in English, Chinese and Korean
Ledger wallet support, to allow safekeeping of Viacoin on a secure hardware wallet.
Coinomi, a 3rd party mobile wallet, which facilitates a point of sales solution
General Bytes, a cryptocurrency ATM with over 1000 ATMs in over 39 countries. (code has reviewed and merged with General Bytes Repository)

2017 has been a rock solid one for Viacoin, Romano and Mike have done a plethora of work on both the core code of Viacoin and various facets of adoption. The community continues to build behind Viacoin, with an nice increase in /r/viacoin readers, and the Viacoin twitter breaking 30 thousand followers.

What’s to come, 2018

Although 2017 is now done and dusted, 2018 is to be the year where Viacoin will most likely see some of his most important features.

One of the earlier releases that we will see this year will most likely be the new website and roadmap. As of now the current website lacks the polish and sharp design that other cryptocurrency websites posses. The devs have responded to this by doing a complete overhaul of all graphical assets, which will be used for the new roadmap and website. This means we can expect a completely new redesign of the Viacoin branding.

A new release of Viaelectrum is currently being finished, which is a light wallet client that does not require the user to download the blockchain. This client will feature TOR servers for increased privacy, which will not log IP addresses or detailed session data.

An anticipated release of Viacoin is 0.15.0 core, which would see the implementation of Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST). MAST, quite simply, allows for smaller transaction sizes, which facilitates better for smart contracts. This is a key release required for Rootstock (RSK) smart contracts, which will give Viacoin Ethereum-like smart contracts. RSK recently released its first beta for a bitcoin smart contracts platform.

Styx is the name of the upcoming privacy protocol that Viacoin will implement. Styx will be based off of TumbleBit, which allows users to make anonymous zero knowledge proof payments using off-the-blockchain cryptographic computations. Over 2017, we have seen a big rise in privacy orientated coins like Monero, Zcoin and PIVX, the Viacoin developers recognized this trend early and since then have been working to implement the fundamentals required to build a safe and anonymous payment platform. In November, Stratis announced Tumblebit™ which will allow for Bitcoin tumbling for added anonymity for users who choose to use the tumblers. Masternodes will act as the tumblers for this and receive the fees paid by the users for the tumbling service. This suggests Styx may also include Tumblenodes, which may allow users to stake Viacoin, allowing them to receive fees for tumbling Viacoin transactions.

Other priorities for the Viacoin team this year are,