Introduction
COTI have been working with merchants since the launch of our MainNet, increasing the utility and organic demand for our native COTI coin.
The monthly volume of merchant processing has already reached over $5M USD and is steadily growing. This week alone we have announced two new merchants (MyFirstWallet, Blockchain Dollars) and have also recently launched credit card processing activities, that allow us to onboard a host of new merchants, significantly increasing our processing volume on the COTI network. This Explorer upgrade is just the first upgrade designed to bring greater transparency to our network and network operations.
All activities, including merchant transactions, can now be tracked on the new Explorer, alongside other activities such as staking, bridge movements, and all other network transactions.
TLDR of COTI network operations on the new Explorer -
The Trustchain Data Structure
The Trustchain is COTI’s ledger and holds our entire network activity as a whole Cluster in a DAG data structure.
The transactions on the Trustchain can largely be broken down to: (i) standard wallet-to-wallet transactions; (ii) merchant’s transactions (as explained below); (iii) bridge transactions (interoperability); (iv) staking transactions; and (v) zero-spend transactions (own-initiated transactions for network maintenance in order to help facilitate faster consensus).
Occasionally, the Trustchain undergoes a cluster stamp, an automated process which prevents the growing Cluster from becoming unmanageable in storage size. Following the creation and verification of a Cluster Stamp, the whole cluster is stored in the COTI History Nodes.
COTI’s Explorer (https://explorer.coti.io) is the tool that allows viewing all current and past transactions of each cluster on the Trustchain, as well as other useful information.
New Explorer Tool
We’re proud to announce that a new version of the explorer is now live with new added features. The key feature is the ability to filter the transactions according to their type:
(i) Merchant’s transactions — the latest transaction associated with merchants
(ii) Bridge transactions — the latest transaction associated with the conversion to the interoperability tokens (ERC-20 + BEP2)
(iii) Staking transactions — the latest transaction associated with COTI’s staking
(iv) All transactions (standard transactions) — no change, as it is today
Detailed Explanation of The Type of Transactions That Can Be Tracked
Merchants’ Transactions
COTI provides technological infrastructure for payment processing operation and adheres to various regulations protecting transactions’ privacy, therefore it is not in a position to make its merchants’ identity public, unless specifically requested to do so by a merchant. Additionally, as a fast growing start-up competing in the highly lucrative payment sphere, it makes a better business practice to protect trade secrets like rates and clients.
That said, we have now made it easier to track merchants’ volume/activity on the Trustchain, by introducing two types of merchant transactions that appear in the block explorer:
- Merchant revenue transaction: COTI mirrors a real world fiat or Crypto transaction that it processed between a consumer and a merchant, such as credit card processing for example. Recording the entire transaction on the Trustchain adds transparency to all parties involved, while maintaining necessary privacy. It serves as a proof of transaction and a basis for an instant settlement. Furthermore, the transaction and the data it holds could potentially serve as the basis for an array of financial instruments like working capital loans, saving accounts and more. Thus, if $1,000 were processed through a credit card transaction, the equivalent amount of COTIs will appear on the Trustchain as a merchant transaction. The benefit for coin holders is obvious, of course, as the entire volume of the transaction is processed on the Trustchain, generating fees for node operators and stakers.
- Merchant fee transaction: COTI’s merchants pay transaction fees in COTI coin for the service rendered to them, like in the case when COTI processes a cryptocurrency transaction for a merchant in exchange for a small fee. Merchants are required to pay their fees only with COTI’s native coin, which are acquired from the open market. These fees appear on the Trustchain as merchant transactions. Thus, for example, if 1 BTC (at a $10,000 value) was processed for a merchant in exchange for a 1% fee, then a transaction of 100$ worth of COTI (5,000 COTI at a value of $0.02, for example) will be created in the Trustchain. The added value for COTI holders is obvious, as merchants add fresh demand for the native coin in the market.
Bridge Transactions
COTI’s application is built in a way that provides the flexibility in supporting the core level and ledger layer of today’s most popular and promising infrastructures, such as Ethereum and Binance Chain. In the COTI ecosystem, the core application layer supports more than one infrastructure through a dedicated bridge that can be embedded as an off-the-shelf solution independent of COTI’s core infrastructure and solutions. We have now made it easier to track all our bridge activities on the Trustchain and differentiate the transactions associated with interoperability and cross chain activities.
Please refer to the following links for more information on interoperability and COTI bridge:
Staking Transactions
COTI’s staking model was designed and built according to a decentralized finance (DeFi) income model by incentivizing network participants such as node operators with a competitive compensation for their contribution to the transaction approval process in the network.
All nodes (Basic/Advance/Community) are required to stake a certain amount of COTI native coins to participate in the network, as per the specific requirements of each type of node. We have now made it easier to monitor the staking-related transactions on the Trustchain by differentiating them from the other transactions.
Please refer to the following links for more information on nodes and staking at COTI:
Summary
Our predicted growth in merchants’ activities and overall usage is a great opportunity to coin holders as it grows demand and staking rewards. We are introducing a new Explorer tool to allow tracking the Trustchain activities to grow our transparency accordingly. The introduction of credit card processing is expected to significantly grow the usage and holds a great opportunity to our community.
Stay COTI!
For all of our updates and to join the conversation, be sure to check out our channels:
Website: https://coti.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/COTInetwork
Telegram: https://t.me/COTInetwork
Github: https://github.com/coti-io
Discord: https://discord.me/coti
Technical whitepaper: https://coti.io/files/COTI-technical-whitepaper.pdf
Discord: https://discord.me/coti
Technical whitepaper: https://coti.io/files/COTI-technical-whitepaper.pdf
