Short intro to VIACOIN and its history
There are lots of new traders and investors entering the crypto scene who don’t know much about Viacoin and its history. For them I wrote a short introduction.
Viacoin (VIA) was initiated by Bitcoin-Core developer BtcDrak. During the Spring of 2014 there was a raw and furious debate between developers of Counterparty(XCP) and BtcCore about the Op_return limit. XCP-devs where desperately aiming to get it higher, due to lack of speed and the high costs of transactions, but Core devs refused (for legitime reasons). Frustration of XCP devs was high and it all made clear how dependent XCP was of the BTC development. XCP is a second layer platform on the bitcoin blockchain for creating Token.
Based on this bad experience and dependency, Drak decided to create Viacoin, where these problems for a major crypto platform like XCP would belong to the past. He saw the huge potential of second layer crypto (called BTC 2.0 at that time). VIA started in the Summer of 2014 and received lots of attention in the crypto sphere. Drak hired illustrious Core developer Peter Todd for some months, who introduced CLTV (CheckLockTimeVerify) on the Via blockchain, which became later an important feature on BTC. Because of this, Via was branded as a ‘Try out’ blockchain for improvements on the BTC code. After over a year, Drak had contact with Overstock and rumors came that it could result in Overstock using the Via blockchain. That didn’t happen. Drak created a new token on the VIA blockchain, XCH, with similar features as XCP. It got hyped due to the news that XCP would get Ethereum’s ETM machine, but when XCH got removed from Poloniex, it was basically dead.
Drak had the opinion that blockchain should be fully decentralized, taking bitcoin and its anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto as an example, and was aiming for contributors. He stopped coding, waiting for other developers to participate. When nothing happened for over a year (a century in crypto terms), some holders got disappointed and abandoned VIA. A big holder dumped a million of coins what resulted in an ATL. Big holder OTOH (who had hoped VIA would become a serious competitor for BTC and VIA could become a top crypto, like his other favorite DASH) gave up on his stack but kept them all. Basically, I assume, with the right work done in VIA his plans likely where to contribute to make VIA a huge top crypto project.
2016 was an important year for VIA. One of the brightest and most beloved BTC traders, Romano, a now 21 years young man, started working on VIA. It may be that he had bought VIA and had the wish it would come back to life. His initial contribution was successfully coding VIA into Microsoft’s AZURE project. Some cryptos got massively pumped after joining Azure and also VIA got its first serious bounce. After this initial success and finding out that the VIA code needed some serious updates, Romano decided to dedicate his full time to Viacoin. He took over the main-developer position from Drak and started coding on a daily basis, quitting his school, where he was bored with academic protocols in programming. VIA became his decentralized learning school. Soon it became clear that Romano took his new role seriously. There came update after update and the price went to a new ATH during Spring 2017. His experience as a day trader in crypto and his knowledge of different sorts of crypto projects is very useful. Romano is developing a bright vision for the future of Viacoin. In his tweets he made clear that he is studying all kind of aspects and possibilities of crypto-coding (‘80% studying and 20 coding’). As a result, Viacoin is becoming a front runner in crypto. Having segwit, lightning, Mast and integrating colored coins, it seems that Viacoin is building a tremendous foundation for all kind of blockchain features. Viacoin will become a platform as well as a currency and I get the impression, there is lots of work done behind the scenes, also on marketing and building an infrastructure for greater adoption.
Romano has contributed more to VIA then bright core-developer Drak ever could have done, and due to his coding work, he has contributed to BTC Core and Litecoin Code. Beside all his coding work, recently a marketing expert was hired and other developers occasionally contribute to VIA.
Time will tell, but the future seems bright for Viacoin! VIA is currently receiving lots of attention by crypto supporters, and they might see some amazing surprises in the near future! Let’s wait and see!
