What inspired the creation of Verus Coin, and how long has it been in development?
Late 2017, I was working on a machine learning project (https://github.com/Zimbra/zimbra-ml) and realized that with an unlimited scale protocol that included privacy, financial capabilities, and data, and could create the right incentives for humans to both contribute their real thoughts and opinions, while earning in the process of creating provable data that could be used for many applications, including training machine learning models, we as humans could understand the truth of what other humans really think. We initially forked the Komodo codebase and the lead developer at the time, jl777, was very helpful in getting us up to speed on their technology. We developed a great deal of our own and also pushed back changes that we brought over from Zcash as well.
We finished the first version and announced the availability of mining/staking software and the protocol May 21st, 2018 on Bitcointalk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4070404.0 ) with our goal being the same fairness and spirit as Bitcoin. 15 minutes after a public online announcement, one lucky miner — I don’t know who — won a block, earning the first Verus coins to ever exist. There was no pre-allocation, no-ICO, and there has never been a development fee or tax on the protocol.
June of 2018, we released a vision paper (https://verus.io/papers/VerusVision.pdf) outlining the vision of an unlimited scale network of connected blockchains, self-sovereign identities, and public blockchains as a service (PBaaS). We call our protocol the Verus Internet Protocol (VIP), which is now on mainnet powering on-chain 100% decentralized DeFi, and running on a provable, unlimited scale blockchain network.
The founders and others donated significant amounts from their own mining and staking proceeds to The Verus Coin Foundation, a private community member that has stayed focused on helping realize the Verus vision by supporting community efforts, offering bounties to community contributors, and using its resources to help further education of and support for the Verus Project and protocol.
How does Verus Coin utilize blockchain technology, and what benefits does it provide over traditional systems?
While Verus inherits capabilities from Bitcoin (1st decentralized blockchain), Zcash (zk-SNARK privacy), and Komodo (multi-chain & witness concept), it breaks new ground with its introduction and use of smart transaction primitives such as IDs, notarizations, currencies, and even true DeFi and cross-chain capabilities built into the L1 protocol of the chain.
Verus recently released a fully non-custodial, provable, cross-chain bridge and liquidity basket between Verus and Ethereum (https://eth.verusbridge.io ), all based on the Verus protocol and also an accessible protocol from Verus Mobile (app and play stores).
The Verus DeFi protocol used by the liquidity basket is the only protocol we know of that is both rent-free (no central party extracting a fee percentage) and solves all transactions in any block or cross-chain bundle simultaneously, so it’s MEV-resistant. On Verus mobile, you can easily send from one currency to another at a fee that is between 0.025% and 0.05% for conversion with no price difference between converting in one way or another. This type of liquidity basket is a currency type that anyone can create using commands and no coding on the Verus network, and is not controlled by any company or organization, nor does it send rent to any company or organization.
Can you discuss any partnerships or collaborations that Verus Coin has formed, and how they will benefit the project’s growth and development?
For a long time, Verus has welcomed companies and organizations into the community. While Verus is a community driven project and protocol, partnerships are made between companies in the community, not generally with the whole worldwide community directly. The Verus Project did win a Fidelity Industry Inspiration award in Ireland and stood out as the most disruptive decentralized technology project among 100s of researched projects across Europe (https://medium.com/veruscoin/fidelitys-center-for-applied-technology-recognizes-the-verus-protocol-with-its-inspiration-award-f7843e0c2823 ). There are companies in the Verus Community that have partnerships with a number of other firms and at least one government, including ongoing collaboration with one community member company known as Valu, Ireland and VMWare on a renewable energy and GOO (Guarantees of Origin) provable tracking and markets project, social networking and metaverse efforts, NFT projects, and other applications that I would have to refer you to the companies themselves for more information.