What Verus Did (and What It’s Doing)
Verus ($VRSC) is an innovative, fast moving cryptocurrency project that has already completed an enormous amount of work and has some truly mind-blowing stuff on testnet and in development right now. This article will focus on what’s already on mainnet, but if you follow crypto and blockchain tech at all, you owe it yourself to dig deeper.
Recently, in response to a post on a Verus Discord channel, someone asked what useful tech Verus already has on mainnet. Here’s a partial answer. There are at least three big, distinct user groups for whom cryptocurrency tech might be useful:
1. Miners
2. Early adopters
3. “Grandparent” users — late adopters
We’re going to talk a little about each group. These are all observations and opinions, and some of the reasons that I think this project is really outstanding — unique, and truly significant. After this, you should read a little more and come to your own conclusions!
One of the compelling things about Verus is how it addresses concerns at each level of the current blockchain stack. At the base level, cryptocurrencies rely on the health of their mining networks, so beginning a project by ensuring that the most miners possible have an incentive to participate and can trust the project’s integrity and security is essential. Among its first innovations, Verus added options for how projects manage their coin emissions schedule by developing coin locking technology that incentivized early adopters while simultaneously locking out the risk of them dumping coins early. This move proved to be characteristic of the project, which has had its long-term development firmly in mind from the very beginning.
Verus also rolled out VerusHash early, making the project attractive the greatest number of miners by creating a hashing algorithm that worked hard to balance potential contributions from CPU and FPGA miners without putting useful hash power beyond the reach of GPUs. It’s a real testament to the forward looking and long-term commitments to decentralization, integrity, and security that the project began by innovating at this fundamental level. (And of course, in the spirit of the larger cryptocurrency movement, Verus’ innovations, including VerusHash, are open source — other projects can adopt them.)
In addition to VerusHash, Verus added Proof of Power — a hybrid Proof of Work/Proof of Stake consensus mechanism that provides the best of both worlds by aggregating the protections of each and, importantly, the project published a paper describing how Proof of Power protects against a long term plague on crypto, the Sybil attack. Verus also created its ‘cheat catcher’ tech to protect against specific mining attacks. VerusHash, Proof of Power, cheat catching — that’s an excellent start, but the project also extends the lineage of Komodo (KMD) and takes advantage of Komodo’s notarization mechanism. Komodo recruits all of Bitcoin’s proof of power history — the most substantial in the world — as added protection against forgeries.
As for useful tech that will be immediately available to the “early adopter” end users, Verus was the first project to port ZCash’s (ZEC) Sapling technology. Sapling made Z transactions (a very effective kind of privacy transaction) efficient enough to be much more practical for exchanges and much more useable in wallets. And Verus didn’t just port Sapling for itself. Komodo commissioned Verus developers to contribute Sapling code to the entire Komodo ecosystem, which made projects like Pirate (ARRR) much more efficient, and made Pirate’s pitch that exchanges should support Z to Z transactions — totally private coin transfers — much more compelling. So, thanks to ZCash, Pirate, Komodo, and Verus, all of the projects in the Komodo ecosystem have the ability to implement much faster Z transactions and we all have options for exchanges that support Z to Z. That’s pretty useful.
Having done so much useful, foundational work, the Verus project’s devs did something absolutely mind blowing with self-sovereign IDs. It is amazing to find a project of this size that has made such a significant leap in a capability as fundamental as IDs/addresses. Seriously, VerusIDs are amazing. Namespaces, revocability, and recoverability all at the protocol level.
A brief summary of just some of the benefit here: a VerusID can be used to send and receive coins just as any other cryptocurrency address. But revocability and recoverability mean that a VerusID can be protected as well. After you set them up these features, if you lose the private keys for an ID, you can revoke access to it and also recover access by associating that ID with a different private key. This is a sea change in how cryptocurrency addressing works and a big step forward for the whole space.
I’m not an expert on blockchain IDs but I don’t know of any other project that has such an elegant, capable solution. And to tease a single feature that’s currently on Verus testnet — it will soon be possible to configure Verus addresses so that it’s very unlikely that coins will be stolen or lost. That’s about as useful as current blockchain tech gets.
So, all of the above is useful tech. One challenge for general adoption right now, however, is that many of these are innovations at the protocol layer. It may take a while for the UI layer to catch up. I believe the UI layer will catch up though, and the Verus team is currently hard at work on that challenge. Before the UI catches up, IDs are already useful early adopter tech for many use cases. For example, they’re already a significant improvement in terms of cost and efficiency for cryptographic signing — which may seem like a small use case but it’s not. Verus doesn’t focus on it much but that one use case could, in itself, justify a mega blockchain project.
But Verus also isn’t done yet — not at all, not nearly. When you add IDs to what’s currently visible on testnet, the implications are mind-blowing again. A future, decentralized vision of the Internet — a future Internet of blockchains — requires a micro payment system to account for costs. Such a system requires identification for all actors — humans, software microservices, hardware resources — everything. The VerusID + the financial technologies that are being developed right now (a suite of equally innovative DeFi capabilities that deserve their own series of articles) are the basic building blocks for all of that.
It makes sense that people want to see innovations at the late adopter/grandparent level right now. Though it’s changing rapidly, at this moment, in the whole blockchain space that level is only being addressed by a small handful of services, for example, many projects are making cryptocurrencies useful for financial services. Verus will contribute there as well, but from what I’ve seen the long-term vision is even larger, and the pieces required to realized that vision are in the process of being built.
**
· This article has more detail about how Verus feature sets such as its DeFi capabilities and VerusID will work and complement each other.
· There’s a Verus channel with a lot more information on specific features.
· The Verus website is a fantastic resource.
· Join the conversation on Discord!
Verus is a truly decentralized, *community* driven cryptocurrency project. It had a fair launch without a premine and the brilliant team working on it is dedicated to a vision of a better future for all of us.
