Since the beginning of 2017, Viacoin’s price has raised from $ 0.03 to $ 3. That is an breathtaking growth, which didn’t come out of nowhere, but is result of a surprising rebirth.
Let’s find out a bit about what it’s history and features are. The history of Viacoin may be relatively unknown to many of the new crypto traders and investors, though surely many older traders in the crypto community are familiar with it.
Viacoin is an original digital currency with its own source code and its own network. It’s not a token circulating on an existing network.
Genesis
Viacoin was released on July 18, 2014 with a pre-sale of 10 millions of VIA for 610 Bitcoins, or $ 380,000 at the time. It was launched by BtcDrak, a known player in the crypto scene and he was quickly joined by Peter Todd, one of the developers of Bitcoin Core.
The main goal of Viacoin is to enable blockchain technology as a service, to go beyond the “simple” monetary transaction. Viacoin came with a certain state of mind:
“A lot of people go through stages when they learn programming. One is sort of….’it’s my idea and I want to be the first. I want to present this software to the world and [have people] see how clever I am’. As time goes on you see that maintainability of code creates a big issue, and there are already things that have been done well.” -Drak
First, one identifies how to technically achieve a goal and then the project can promotes its purpose publicly. This approach is quite different with many cryptocurrency projects.
First steps
VIA continued with a protocol, Clearing House, and a token, XCH, in order to store additional information on the blockchain and an online portfolio, ClearWallet, which allows to simply use this protocol. The first services developed are now widely used today: token creations, token exchanges, dividend issues and even betting.
In terms of security, the private key remains client side and is composed of a passphrase with 12 words. This system makes it possible to exchange coins without a centralized exchange, being the only one able to access its coins.
If it reminds you of something, it’s normal: it’s totally identical to CounterParty (XCP). The main difference is that CounterParty has to cope with Bitcoin pace, chain and protocol when Viacoin has a lot more of liberty on its own chain.
In the year that followed, developments on the VIA allowed to add a capability to timestamp digital documents, BlockChain Notary, to the protocol. This virtual notary makes it possible to securely and reliably publish, transfer or escrow structured information such as documents.
Through the desert
In its early days, they were not many technical differences between BTC/XCP and VIA/XCH. During the 2015–2016 period, CounterParty developers went further to integrate the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) while taking advantage of the Bitcoin Core’s breakthrough on which CounterParty runs.
On Viacoin side, Todd contributions where mainly the implementation of CLTF feature, which was taken over by BTC-core and Drak doesn’t shows any interest to go further on Viacoin, due to conflicts with members of the community
On June 6, 2016 the XCH token was removed from one of the main exchanges: Poloniex.
During this period, there was no news, release or official roadmap.
The history of Viacoin could have stopped here.
Transition
Like any open source project, external contributors can come to support the project. A handful of people did not want the story to stop there and so took hold of it.
This is the case of Romano, a then 20 years old developer, who started in summer 2016 to facilitate the deployment of a Viacoin node on Azure. This news has been very favorably received by the markets with a doubling of the price of Viacoin in less than 24 hours.
Following various work done by Romano, Drak agrees to give development rights to Romano. Romano says he wants to invest heavily in it, integrate the lightning network and add privacy features.
On September 9, 2016, Drak entrusted the project keys to Romano and formalized its abandonment of the project. Romano now has his hands free to give the VIA a new life.
Rebirth
Romano invites another developer and begins to talk about further evolutions of VIA, taking the time to consult his community beforehand.
What emerges from the survey concerns the privacy of transactions, which encourages them to work in depth on this point. After a thorough study, they choose cryptography on elliptic curves as a support. They decide to call this feature Styx, just like the river that makes the connection between the earth and the underworld. The white paper details their implementation project.
On the ambitious roadmap, besides Styx, we find the lightning network, hardware wallet support, SegWit, conditional payment and many optimizations on memory, encryption, storage or balancing transactions.
From this moment, everything goes faster. The developers are working hard and the results came sooner than expected. In March 2017, just five months after the publication of their roadmap, they implemented most of improvements.
Also in March 2017, they also optimise the Viaelectrum server to make it ten times faster and with the support of SegWit (Bitcoin will do it only 6 months later). It’s now called Viaelectrum X, since it’s ten times faster that the previous one.
A third developer joins them in May 2017 and activation on the SegWit network takes place on August 3:
One year after the takeover by Romano, the result is impressive. Everything, except Styx (planned for 2018). Atomic Swap were added at the same time with Vertcoin and Litecoin.
The crypto community noticed all those facts. For instance, the power of the network has increased from 200 GH/s in September 2016 to 35 TH/s on December 8, 2017, 175 times more power allocated to this coin.
There are now 5 exchanges listing Viacoin and there are more to come in the near future. Viacoin has also benefited greatly from otoh, a well-known trader.
What’s next ?
Romano and his team are now focusing on advanced features around blocking technology:
- Smart Contracts, Turing-complete, native or Ethereum-compatible, thanks to RSK
- Token / ICO thanks to Colored Coins feature
Making VIA strengths more powerful and more accessible:
- The decentralized exchange of digital elements in all its forms: coins, documents, images
- A portfolio accessible on all media, smartphones included
- The possibility to withdraw or buy them in GeneralBytes ATMs
While taking the time to do that properly, unlike a lot of coins that are very hype right now. There is more under the hood :
- Schnorr Signature: Improving the Effectiveness, Scalability and Confidentiality of Transactions
- M.A.S.T. : Merkel’s Abstract Syntax Tree, which can be used to store smart contracts in a clever way by avoiding the situation in which is ethereum, where a simple crypto-cats Android application is able to put the network on its knees.
- Optimizations on P2P exchanges, memory or data exchange
Is ViaCoin on its way to becoming, in 2018, “The future of crypto-currency”?
It’s probably too high for this small team that competes with giants. By putting effort on development before marketing ads, the Viacoin team clearly projected themselves into a business approach for the long-term.
NB: If you seek an article with more technical detail about VIA history, El Mago wrote one. He helped me to improve this article.
