*obligatory not financial advice*
What is Nano?
Nano is a cryptocurrency with instant and fee-less transactions. Bitcoin can have huge fees and it can take forever for a transaction to be confirmed, this makes it practically useless for smaller transaction. Nobody would want to pay $5 for sending $10 and then also wait at a store for 30 minutes to make sure the merchant really got his money. Nano doesn't have such problems and can easily be used for sending small amounts of money instantly, that’s why it is so popular for tipping in online forums or games.
Transactions with Nano are practically instant. It takes at most a few seconds for a transaction to be processed and confirmed and there are no fees whatsoever. You can try that out yourself by creating 2 Nano wallets, getting some coins from a faucet and sending them from one wallet to other one. This is possible thanks to its unique consensus mechanism called Open Representative Voting (OPV), which is similar to proof of stake in the sense that it is faster, more scalable and less energy consuming than proof of work. With OPV Nano holders can delegate their coins to different nodes and the more coins a node has the more power it has over the network. However, nodes do not earn anything for processing transactions, there are no fees and there is no inflation that they can earn, they do what they do out of good faith. The idea here is that since businesses that relay on credit cards payments have to pay fees to the credit card companies, they could save that fee by supporting the Nano currency and eventually use it instead of the cards.
Nano was founded under the name RaiBlocks, but they rebranded after a centralized exchange that supported it stole the cryptocurrencies of their users, this wasn't the fault of RaiBlocks but they got a bad reputation for it anyway. Until recently the coin used to be traded under the ticker NANO, but they rebranded that again and changed it to XNO. They also changed the logo, here is what the old one looked like:
How to earn Nano
Due to being feeless and fast it is the ideal cryptocurrency for tipping small amounts. The Nano community is incredibly wholesome and is willing share some of their coins. The r/nanocurrency subreddit member are regularly tipping each other Nano, often times for no reason at all and sometimes there are posts where the op sends crypto to everyone leaving their address in the comments.
There are also multiple games where players can earn Nano. Quake 3 can be played on the browser without downloading anything and you get small amounts for each kill. CS:GO has a Nano server were the winners get some coins. There is also a Minecraft server where players use it as currency and a few other games. There is also a faucet game similar to Pokemon Go, where players can drop Nano at any location and players can earn it by going there. All of the coins for that come from donations of Nano holders. None of these games will make you filthy rich or anything, but they are fun and the free crypto is just a bonus.
The Nano Coin
Nano has a max supply of 133.248.290 coins and they are all minted. 5% of that supply is in a development fond, the rest is circulating. It has no utility other than sending value, so it has no smart contracts or the like and is only used for transactions. This means the blockchain is competing with coins like DASH and Litecoin, but none of them are as fast or cheap to use as Nano.
Nano also has a little brother called Banano, which is a meme coin and the cryptocurrency with the highest amount of potassium. It too is feeless and near instant. People that hold Nano in non-custodian wallets can sometimes earn Banano from airdrops.
Despite all of its perks, Nano has some flaws too. It is not seen as a store of value like BTC and the only use case for it is to send value. Nano is one of very few coins that have no fees but this can be exploited too, there have been spam attacks where people were sending large amounts of transactions at once just to overwhelm the network. There is also not much incentive for people to run a node which could lead to issues. Flexa, The Lightning Network, Litecoin and many other are also cheap to use and more accepted than Nano even if it’s feeless. Nano could gain a lot of value and it has a lot of room to grow, but there are more promising projects. However, Nano is definitely fun to use and it has quite a wholesome community, and their willingness to spread Nano coins could be good for its network effect.
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