Why should I be considering it?
Lauded for many years as the next big thing– it is essentially a faster, more secure version of Bitcoin — DigiByte really did make a reentrance to crypto enthusiasts during the height of the disruptive Covid-19 lockdown, rallying more than 900% to approximately $USD 0.03 in a six-week period through mid-May.
So far, so good: Since that break-out, DGB has relaxed somewhat, with a pull-back by one-third as its founder Jared Tate withdrew from day-to-day activities tied to the original blockchain project that he began but has now publicly stated on the record as having been co-opted by corrosive greed, short-term thinking and wrong-minded forces insufficiently concerned with greater decentralization.
DGB from early June appeared to have established a foothold of technical support around the $0.02 mark (approximately 220 satoshis) whilst attracting an extremely outspoken torch-bearer for Digibyte with investment banker Rahul Kumar (touting DGB while trolling Ethereum on Twitter). This $300-million-in-market-cap, fast-moving Top 35 contender is worthy of some closer attention, even if (or even because of) the big breakout — potentially even up to ten cents — which still looks around two years away.
The Myriad project focuses on payments, asset issue facilitation/tokenization, with some deployment of distributed ledger technology across the business sector, with networks aiming to deliver best-in-class use cases with a combination of these services; however, it has a lofty vision, DGB appears to be trying to create a DLT ecosystem that can, according to Altcoin Explorer’s Osato Avan-Nomayo, harmonize payment, smart contracts, and broader interoperability needs. “The stated goal remains to make the DGB payment gateway at a level or even superior to mainstream payment channels like VISA,” Osato Avan-Nomayo said.
The very first DGB token was mined in 2014. Supply is finite; if schedule holds, the 21 billionth and final token will be mined in 15 years time. In April 2017, Digibyte became the first altcoin to upgrade to Segregated Witness (SegWit) protocol, even before BTC did. Throughout the pandemic in 2020, DGB helped drive a privacy-focused and potentially future game-changing contact-tracing project (potentially tying a crypto with some government adoption) while also widening its core capabilities from payments to financing and beyond, according to BTCManager. Kumar’s EGW Capital recently announced plans to use Digibyte to tokenize $100 million in Indian real estate. Then in late May, DGB partnered with a peer-to-peer ecosystem ThreeFold to build out developer and user projects anchored to new technologies and efficiencies with a rather majestic and questionable conclusion: a less centralized internet.
What the bulls may have seen:
1. Speed. In terms of transactions per second (TPS), DGB is nearing 600 (compared to Paypal’s 130) with a goal of 2,000; that, if met, would put it on the level of Visa, something of a major pursuit from the early days. Digibyte blocks are created every 15 seconds for a transaction throughput time that is 40 times faster than BTC.
2. “Ethereum killer.” That’s what EGW’s Kumar dubbed BTG, signaling a new dance partner in blockchain finance, citing ongoing concerns about congestion in the Ethereum network.
3. Security. DigiByte operates on three layers responsible for different functions within the project’s ecosystem, Avan-Nomayo points out. Comprising five synergistic algorithms, DGB’s open-source mining system is considered to be among the most decentralized on earth. Its own newest mining algorithm, Odocrypt, rewrites itself every ten days. Real-time adjustment mechanism DigiShield was followed by MultiShield, and both are considered, in cybersecurity circles, to be hugely groundbreaking.
4. Scalability. DGB can support over 48 million transactions a day — that’s 10 times the current transaction capacity of the top 50 blockchains by market cap, stated London-based Cassiopeia, which runs Digibytes’s public relations.
5. Community-driven. DGB has attracted followers due to its “genuine intention to create a financial system centered on people and social value,” Cassipeia said. “The community-driven effort and the huge amount of faith that all those involved in DGB have in the project are the core factors that make DGB so unique and compelling.”
Are there any risks with Digibyte?
1. What Cassipeia doesn’t mention is that with an unwillingness to conform to the mainstream (e.g. refusing to pay to list on big exchanges) in favor of grassroots altruism has come at a cost — name recognition — something of a requirement for value storage trustworthiness, resulting in an uphill climb on the payment front. Does a move away from a pure-payment use-case toward the packed realm of digital asset issuance signal an admission of defeat for a platform that for all of its cache couldn’t set itself apart in a crowded space? This was a question raised by a Captainaltcoin analyst, Felix Kuester. Although in fairness, DGB’s founder to his credit never wanted the word “coin” in the name, looking to transcend the limitations of such a label; it could be fair to say that pursuit of a breadth of scope has always been part of the plan and that DigiAssets is less of a pivot and more of a natural evolution.
2. As DGB entices developers to join its open-source community, how will the founder’s publicized disillusionment with a large segment of the community’s sense of reality (being in it to do good and enrich themselves) come to the fore — will incentives i.e. bounties and the promise of treasures cause animosity within the volunteer community? Tate’s departure, which he announced on Twitter May 18, subsequently caused a 20% decline in the value of the currency on rumors (unfounded) that he was done then totally cashing out.
3. Extreme volatility: The alarming part of a 930% upswing in less than two months is the inevitable bear trap that comes with it. Such is the territory, though for the industry and isn’t exclusive to Digibyte one could say.
4. With a successful project in this industry, would you really want to make enemies? Laying out all of his cards on the table and revealing the unseemly underbelly of an industry he helped create, Tate revealed in his Twitter kiss-off just how many countless people “stabbed him in the back and/or tried to use him or his project to try and make a quick profit,” a group which even included close friends and confidants. Watch the company but be mindful to keep an eye on the company it keeps moving forward into the future
5. The hype train. Empowering true economic freedom would seem the right mission for these times and is quite timely with what is going on in the world right now, but yet almost at the precise second a new shiny crypto screamed out some Madness-reminiscent instructions (“hey you don’t watch that, watch this”) it indeed went one step beyond i.e. the moonboys piled in — and DGB cratered.
Heavyweight endorsements: Even though it was introduced five years after Bitcoin, the Digibyte blockchain grew into the longest in the world, stated the Cambridge-based Blockchain Board of Derivatives (BBOD) in a 2019 report calling DGB “opportune” at a medium risk. A report from Wallet Investors (WI) suggests that the current level (0.016) is as good as it gets for 2020.
Having a goal of decentralizing the Internet’s global architecture should in and of itself be a reason to sustain momentum or even see an uptick in it, for, as BNT’s Bogdan Vinogradov said in June, “it seems that DigiByte is able not only to succeed, but also to stand its ground, especially important for the highly volatile crypto market.”
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List of sources
https://www.dgbwiki.com/index.php?title=DigiByte
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1QbTv2y10U&feature=youtu.be
https://cryptodeva.com/2020/05/31/rahul-kumar-calls-digibyte-as-ethereum-killer/
https://bitnewstoday.com/news/digibyte-stands-ground-what-s-the-flip-side-to-its-success-in-2020/
https://roseferro.com/2020/06/egw-capital-to-test-digibyte-on-real-estate-tokenization/
https://medium.com/@cassiopeiaservicesltd/digibytes-5-year-journey-and-what-lies-ahead-3c07cd3d3bb4
