NIX: A recently announced project that is ahead of Wanchain

Crypto Araz
5 min readMay 8, 2018

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Here follows a comparison between NIX platform and Wanchain:

Roadmap development

Wanchain project research started on June 2016, yet they managed to finally go live on January 2018, 1.5 years later. They have just launched their main-net but do not have the privacy or the cross-chain operability features functional. Wanchain is still in privacy planning phase and working on bridging protocols. Private cross-chain integration is expected to happen on December 2019. It is certainly a lot of time for development and implementation taking into account their privacy set will not be as strong as NIX’s.

NIX announcement was on April 30th 2018, they will launch main-net by the end of June 2018 and have plans to offer private transactions initially through all coins listed in Blocknet’s by Q4 2018. Official webpage was launched on announcement day along with the whitepaper. Core, web and mobile wallet seems to be ready for launch shortly.

The promptness with which NIX platform is being developed says a lot about its team and clearly leaves Wanchain behind.

Interchain operability / DEX’s communication

Although Wanchain will enable cross-chain asset transfer, they have no plans to integrate different DEX’s; unlike NIX, which opening use case is to become the first DEX Manager in the market, the adoption of this newly introduced concept will be enormous; NIX has already partnered with Blocknet to make Block DX the first DEX to be incorporated in their platform.

NIX atomic swaps infrastructure will allow the transfer of data and assets across different blockchains, permitting holders to exchange their shares to another coin without compromising the security properties of blockchains.

Moreover, NIX DEX Manager will make possible the communication with other DEX’s, permitting trades on their exchange via NIX. This means that those integrated DEX’s will be able to perform privatized atomic swaps between coins listed in their platforms. Visualize trading Bitcoin for any other coin, without traceability while rendering other blockchains in an anonymous manner.

Privacy set

Regarding privacy, Wanchain is planning to implement ring signatures and one-time stealth addresses, this privacy set, which has not yet been integrated into their platform, is very weak compared NIX Ghost Protocol, which in turn involves the most researched ZK proof protocol, the Zerocoin protocol, that additionally provides optional privacy; Bulletproofs to offer confidentiality of value, stealth addresses, TOR proxy and i2p compatibility to enable location privacy.

The Ghost protocol encompasses an innovative selection that has not been implemented in the market. This custom protocol guarantees that transactions are anonymous in several ways: Value, traceability and location, allowing atomic swap privacy and side-chain privacy.

With the Ghost Protocol, NIX will basically allow any supported coin to be traded privately for any other coin in a prompt and effortless manner. There are lots of coding involved in the process but it becomes user friendly and simple as it is: Transfer original coin A to NIX DEX Manager, then the Ghost Protocol and the atomic swap architecture take care of those coins and finally swap them into untraceable coin B.

Mining algorithm

Wanchain will be run exclusively via PoS to perform all their transactions, this will happen after 2.0 version gets released, however, mining has been performed only by the team so far, which becomes very prone to centralization.

NIX will be run via PoW, utilizing the Lyra2REv2 GPU mining algorithm, which is probably the best one out in the market. This algorithm is a sequential system which is much safer than those that can be easily paralleled. Even hackers with extremely strong hardware and multiple processing cores could not get through this mode.

Block rewards

Block rewards in NIX will be distributed as it follows: 65% for miners, 28% for Ghostnode holders and 7% for development. A total of 60 NIX per block as initial reward, with a block time of 2 minutes and halving every 1.050.000 blocks.

Wanchain block reward information has not yet been released.

Scalability solution

Wanchain is partnering with research institutions to have them explore into scalability and offer commits to their code, however, they have not determined the technology to be used to face this issue.

On the other side, Nix’s own team will launch NIX as native SegWit, thus reducing transaction size as a solution to scalability; this implementation along with a lightning network integration looks forward to providing users from different existing coins with really fast transactions, forgetting about block confirmation times.

Masternodes

Wanchain is supported by 3 different nodes performing various activities such as receiving deposits, validating transactions, and storing parts of keys for escrow accounts. This is a high number of nodes to perform different operations. Moreover, Wanchain service nodes are being run in a centralized manner since only the foundation is allowed to do so, not permitting users to obtain nodes until Wanchain 2.0 release. Not to mention that, a year after their whitepaper was originally released, they have not announced the amount of coins needed for a node.

NIX has a unique set of nodes called Ghost Nodes that will be in charge of conducting the privacy element for smart contracts in the network; 40.000 NIX will be needed for running a masternode. They will be accessible for public immediately upon implementation.

Financial foundation

Wanchain raised an ICO, they managed to secure 121.500 ETH that were worth 290 USD each at the time: around 35 million USD. Approximately 107 Million tokens were sold during ICO.

Unlike Wanchain, NIX will not raise an ICO nor will it be sold for listing. Instead, remaining unclaimed Zoins from airdrop will be used as development funds. This will generate a very low initial supply which exemplifies an excellent opportunity for investment. Furthermore, NIX will have 7% of the block reward fees for development.

Supply

NIX initial circulation supply will come only from Airdrop plus 7% added coin creation to upkeep the 7% development fund. This results in NIX initial supply being 38 million. As can be noticed, this airdrop reduces NIX initial supply, thus securing mining for next 20 years. Instead of creating an ICO to raise funds, NIX team decided to reward Zoin community with an airdrop for constantly participating and supporting Zoin.

Wanchain has a 107 million coins as circulating supply, they sold in form of tokens more than half their maximum supply, which is 210 million coins. Their market cap is currently 930 million USD. On the other side, NIX, a brand new platform, that also serves as a privacy driven coin, will have a maximum supply of 175M; the initial market cap, coming merely from NIX Airdrop, will leave plenty of room to grow.

Governance

Wanchain has institutional investors in the form of an authority for certain developments and integrations by means of governance voting. NIX will be fully controlled by the team; this way it aims to fulfilling the true vision of cryptocurrency based freedom.

Conclusion

As per all factors discussed above, privacy tech, scalability solutions, governance, masternodes implementation, timing, development along with multiple DEX’s integration, it is possible to say that NIX stands as the global leader in cryptocurrency and financial trading, offering endless possibilities to the crypto-financial world.

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