Hey guys :) I’ve compiled a list of questions with answers that contain all of the information you need to know about the fast and easy-to-use Nano (NANO) cryptocurrency. This piece is just like my other pieces on IOTA, Tron, Binance, and more.
Hope you enjoy!
The list of Q&A is pretty long so first comes the list of questions that I have prepared the answers to:
- What is Nano?
- How can Nano be fee-less?
- How many Nano (NANO) coins are out there?
- Can I Mine Nano?
- Who created Nano?
- Did Nano have an ICO?
- What is the Nano Foundation?
- Where can I trade Nano?
- What’s the best wallet to store Nano?
- Why was Nano previously called Bitrails?
- How is Nano different than Bitcoin?
- Can you stake Nano?
- What is Nano’s transaction speed?
- How does Nano achieve consensus?
1. What is Nano?
Nano website homepage
Nano is a decentralized, sustainable, and secure cryptocurrency that intends to be digital money that improves upon the inefficiencies of fiat currency and the existing financial systems.
It is uniquely designed to empower individuals with monetary sovereignty by providing them with a simple peer-to-peer transfer of value that’s secure, fast, feeless, and global.
Nano is easy-to-use digital money that connects people to the global economy without any trusted third parties or middlemen, enabling everyone to be their own bank.
All that being said, the Nano (NANO) cryptocurrency shares the same vision as many other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), and others – to replace fiat currency.
Advantages of Nano
The Nano cryptocurrency features three main advantages over both fiat currency and many competing cryptocurrencies. See these advantages below:
1. Easy-To-Use and Feeless
Nano is designed to be very simple and easy-to-use by focusing on transferring value as efficiently as possible. The Nano network offers zero-fee transactions, making Nano a viable option for everyday transactions.
Users have access to a variety of simple, easy-to-use wallets that are compatible with all major platforms and devices. As well, a variety of exchanges, services, and merchants allow you to acquire, store, exchange and spend the Nano digital currency.
2. Eco-Friendly
Many cryptocurrency networks such as Bitcoin (BTC) have been criticized for their energy-intensive and wasteful Proof-of-Work consensus protocols. Nano, on the other hand, is designed with a different consensus protocol called Open Representative Voting (ORV) which uses minimal energy.
3. Instant Transactions
Digital currency needs to be quick and easy-to-use if it's going to replace traditional financial systems like fiat currency and bank cards. In Nano’s case, it achieves near-instant transactions that are fully settled on the network in less than 1 second.
This is faster than most other cryptocurrencies as well as traditional payment methods such as credit cards. With Nano, businesses no longer have to wait for credit card or banking network approval, transactions are settled instantly.
2. How can Nano be feeless?
Nano's Block Lattice data structure with the individual account-chains
In Nano, its distributed ledger network is based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology and utilizes a proprietary network called the Block Lattice.
The data structure in Block Lattice enables each individual account to control their own blockchain and each individual user provides the computational power for the verification of their own transactions. This structure is what enables feeless transactions.
Also, Nano’s network employs a lightweight and efficient consensus protocol called Open Representative Voting (ORV) with no direct monetary incentive for nodes, meaning no fees.
Nano’s ability to feature zero-fee (feeless) transactions is one of its most unique attributes that add to its value proposition.
It’s so unique in fact, that most electronic payment rails and most cryptocurrencies require users to pay a fee, whether it’s large or small, to the network.
See how Nano’s feeless transaction compare with them below:
Feeless Nano compared with Traditional Financial Systems:
Since Nano operates on a decentralized peer-to-peer network, there are no fees to be paid to middlemen or centralized third parties for processing transactions.
That way of doing things is the old fee-based model of traditional financial systems, which is exactly what Nano intends to replace.
Feeless Nano compared with other Cryptocurrencies:
Cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum (ETH), and others are decentralized, just like Nano, but they do have transaction fees.
This is because these crypto networks use energy-intensive PoW consensus mechanisms that require transaction fees for mining blocks and processing transactions. (The miners must be compensated for their work.)
All that being said, Nano’s unique DAG data structure and consensus protocol make feeless transactions possible on the Nano network, thus outdoing many other cryptos and traditional payment rails.
3. How many Nano coins are out there?
CoinMarketCap Nano (NANO) Stats
The maximum, total and circulating supply of the Nano digital currency is 133,248,297 NANO.
Nano (NANO) Supply statistics:
- There will never be more than 133,248,297 NANO
- The total capped supply of 133,248,297 NANO was fully distributed and is in circulation
- The Nano development team holds approximately 3,000,000 NANO
4. Can I Mine Nano?
Nano logo
No, you cannot mine Nano’s (NANO) cryptocurrency.
The Nano cryptocurrency specifically avoids the reliance on mining because its founders believe that mining is an unnecessary expenditure of energy. Instead of mining, Nano utilizes a Block Lattice network and a lightweight and efficient consensus protocol to secure its network and process transactions.
Also, Nano’s founders, as well as others, believe that mining can cause centralization over a network due to large companies owning many mining farms and thus having the majority of hashpower.
Moreover, the total supply of Nano’s (NANO) cryptocurrency has already been fully issued and distributed. Therefore, the only way to acquire the NANO digital currency is to buy some from an exchange or receive some from another person.
5. Who created Nano?
Nano was created in October 2015, by Colin LeMahieu who at the time, was a computer engineer at Qualcomm and created Nano as a side project.
Prior to creating Nano and working at Qualcomm, Colin worked for Dell as a software developer, AMD as a software development engineer, and at National Instruments as a software engineer.
That being said, Colin had extensive experience in computer programming and software development, which enabled him to create Nano over 3 years of solo development on over 50,000 lines of code.
When Colin first launched Nano in 2015, he called it Raiblocks and used “XRB” as its ticker. During this time, Colin was very hands and worked tirelessly on its code and development in his spare time.
He was also very active in online forums, Reddit, and other forms of social media where he spread awareness of his project and gained valuable feedback. Even still to this day, it's not uncommon to see Collin actively engaging with Nano’s global community on Reddit.
It wasn’t until December 2017, that Collin quit his job at Qualcomm and began working on Nano full time.
All in all, Collin is a passionate entrepreneur and leader for Nano who works very hard in building what he believes to be the best digital currency in the world for payments.
6. Did Nano have an ICO?
The CAPTCHA Faucet System
No, Nano did not have an initial coin offering (ICO).
Instead, the NANO digital currency was launched and distributed as fairly and as organically as possible through a “faucet” distribution system starting on October 1, 2015. This faucet system allowed anyone with a computer and an internet connection to complete complex CAPTCHA tests in order to earn NANO coins.
Anyone in the world could participate by simply contributing some time and attention, no money and no energy-wasting mining equipment was required. It also made NANO more accessible to those who didn’t have the money to throw into an ICO.
This resulted in a wider distribution than most cryptocurrencies and helped spread coins to all parts of the world. In addition to Europe and North America, NANO coins were largely distributed in Central and South America as well as Southeast Asia. This helped to build and establish active Nano communities on a global scale.
Moreover, the developers of Nano did not receive any amount of coins for themselves prior to the initiation of the CAPTCHA tests. Rather, when a user completed one of these tests, they were provided with the option to select a “checkbox” to donate part of their rewarded nano to the developer fund.
The Nano faucet continued for 3 years until it was decided to be closed on October 20, 2017. The faucet resulted in the creation of 133,248,297 NANO in circulation and out of this amount, 7,000,000 NANO was assigned to the Nano development fund.
Additionally, there was a total of 205,676,479 NANO tokens that were not distributed in the faucet. Instead, they were sent to an inaccessible burn address and removed from the total supply forever.
As of 2020, the Nano development fund holds approximately 3,000,000 NANO.
7. What is the Nano Foundation?
Nano Foundation website homepage
The Nano Foundation is a non-profit software development organization with the aim to empower individuals with the most efficient and accessible global digital money.
To achieve this mission, it supports the work of the core protocol developers and dedicated community members through funding, organizing events, and providing valuable resources.
Nano Foundation Focus Areas
The Nano Foundation focuses on strengthening, supporting and spreading awareness of the Nano network by focusing on three key areas:
Protocol Development
For the Nano protocol, the foundation provides guidance of development efforts to ensure NANO is as complete and robust as necessary for it to be functioning as global digital money. It ensures the Nano network is optimized to be the fastest transfer of money possible.
Supporting Services
The foundation supports efforts to grow and expand the Nano ecosystem by offering connections and assistance to services, both new and established.
Education and Resources
To spread awareness of Nano’s use cases and benefits, the foundation curates educational and supporting materials and makes it accessible by all and distributes it across social media.
Nano Foundation social media following
The Nano Foundation Team
The Nano Foundation team consists of highly motivated and skilled individuals who come from a variety of backgrounds and bring different areas of expertise to the Nano project. The core team consists of 12 individuals and 9 community managers from around the world.
Additionally, the Nano project is completely open-source, meaning that any person at any time can copy Nano’s code and contribute to the project. The Nano Foundation offers a wide array of development resources to help developers build on Nano and join the community.
8. Where can I trade Nano?
Popular Exchanges to buy, sell, and trade Nano (NANO)
Nano (NANO) consistently ranks among the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap and is therefore fairly popular in the world of crypto.
Also, the Nano Foundation strives to make the adoption and use of Nano as a currency a priority, which is why they’ve made Nano’s integration on exchanges a primary objective in the short term.
That being said, Nano can be bought, sold, and traded on many major digital currency exchanges. Typically though, for the majority of exchanges, you will have to fund your account with fiat, buy BTC or ETH, and then buy Nano (symbol NANO).
See below, a list of the top cryptocurrency exchanges to buy, sell, and trade NANO:
- Binance
- Kraken
- CoinEx
- ProBit
- Mercatox
- KuCoin
- Huobi Global
- OKEx
- Wirex
- Crypto.com
- MetalPay
- CoinGate
In addition to the exchanges listed above, NANO can also be bought on numerous other exchanges as seen on NANO’s CoinMarketCap markets page. In total, there are 25 cryptocurrency exchanges to trade Nano on.
9. What’s the best wallet to store Nano?
Featured Nano wallets
Since Nano (NANO) is such a simple and easy to use digital currency, there are a wide variety of fast and simple wallets to choose from on all major desktop platforms and mobile devices.
5 Best wallets to store Nano (NANO):
- Natrium (Mobile)
- Exodus (Mobile, Desktop)
- Magnum (Web, Mobile, Hardware)
- BrainBlocks (Web)
- NanoVault (Web, Desktop, Ledger)
In addition to the wallets listed above, Nano features many other wallets for storing the NANO digital currency:
Wallets
- Natrium (Android, iOS)
- Nanowallet (Web)
- Brainblocks (Web)
- Nanovault (Web,Windows,Linux,Mac)
- Nanovault Ninja (Web)
- Nanovault NCrawler (Web)
- Nanollet (Windows, Linux, Darwin)
- Nanoblocks - (iOS)
Developer Wallets
- Nano Node Wallet (The original one)
- Pippin (High-performance Python wallet)
- KeyTools (Manual Block Handler)
Multi-Asset Wallets
- Magnum (Web, Android, Ledger & Swap support)
- Exodus (Win, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android)
- Trust Wallet (iOS, Android)
- Hodler (Android, Win, Linux)
- Atomic (Win, Mac, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora)
Address Generators, Paper Wallets
- NanoPaperWallet.com
- KeyTools Paper Wallet with Mnemonic
- Paper Wallet Generator
- Nano Gift
- Heytipme
- RaiPaper
- Rai Paper Wallet
- Nano Warp Wallet
- Dropil - Graphical Templates
- Secure Seed Commands
- KeyTools Vanity Generator
- Nano Vanity Generator
- Distributed Vanity Address Generation
10. Why was Nano previously called Raiblocks?
The original RaiBlocks (XRB) logo
Nano (NANO) was previously called Raiblocks (XRB) from its inception in 2015 until January 2018, when it was rebranded to Nano (NANO).
The name Raiblocks originates from the digital currency’s Block Lattice data structure, hence “blocks” in the name. As for the “Rai” part, it’s largely unknown where this came from and there was much confusion about how to pronounce “Rai”. Even the team behind Raiblocks didn’t know whether it was pronounced “ray” or “rye”.
In November 2018, the Raiblocks team gathered together to discuss the future of Raiblocks and plans to further its development and growth. During this meeting, one of the topics discussed was the project’s name.
They later asked the community what they thought about a rebrand and gathered lots of ideas and feedback. Ultimately, the core team decided on Nano as they wanted a name that represented the simplicity and speed of the project, and Nano does just that.
Nano Logo
As for the project’s new logo, it’s a representation of several nodes, playing on the block-lattice design of the network to form the letter “N” for Nano.
Moreover, the rebranding from Raiblocks (XRB) to Nano (NANO) did not require any actions from the users. XRB tokens were simply renamed to NANO tokens and there was no token swap required.
11. How is Nano different than Bitcoin?
Bitcoin (BTC) logo
The Nano digital currency is designed for speed and efficiency and is widely considered to have solved many of the problems that have plagued the Bitcoin blockchain.
That being said, the Primary Differences between Nano and Bitcoin are:
1. Type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)
(Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) vs Blockchain)
2. Number of Transactions per Second (TPS)
(High TPS vs Low TPS)
3. Transaction Fees
(Zero Fees vs High Fees)
4. Transaction Speeds
(Fast Transactions vs Slow Transactions)
5. Scalability
(Massive Scalability vs Hindered Scalability)
6. Consensus algorithm
(Open Representative Voting (ORV) vs Proof-of-Work (PoW))
7. Use cases
(Micropayments vs Store-of-Value)
8. Security
(Less Secure vs More Secure)
1. Type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)
Nano is built atop its proprietary Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology – the Block Lattice – while Bitcoin is built atop blockchain technology. While these are both distributed ledger technologies, they are both very different at their core.
In Nano’s Block Lattice structure, each account has its own blockchain, called an account-chain. These separate account chains allow each chain to be updated asynchronously of the rest of the block-lattice network.
In Bitcoin’s blockchain structure, there is just 1 blockchain in which all the transactions get added to in blocks that are mined. Therefore, each transaction is dependent on a single blockchain for confirmation.
2. Transactions per Second TPS
Nano (NANO) can process up 7,000 TPS with plans to scale to 10,000+ TPS while Bitcoin can only process 3-7 TPS without using second-layer scaling solutions.
3. Transaction Speed
Nano’s transaction speed of just 0.25 seconds is much faster than Bitcoin’s transaction speed which ranges from 10 minutes to over 1 day (depending on transaction fees and network usage).
4. Transaction Fees
Nano features zero-fee transactions while Bitcoin charges transaction fees to pay miners for mining blocks with transactions.
5. Scalability
Nano’s Block Lattice structure achieves far greater scalability in comparison to Bitcoin because all transactions are handled independently from the main chain.
6. Consensus Algorithm
Nano uses a consensus mechanism called Open Representative Voting (ORV) which uses voting to get confirmation on the network instead of mining blocks of transactions.
7. Use Cases
Nano is ideal for fast crypto payments and micro-transactions due to its high level of scalability and Bitcoin is ideal for being a store-of-value due to its reputation, security, and market capitalization among other reasons.
8. Security
Bitcoin’s blockchain has been tried and tested with over 10 years of attacks. It has stood the test of time with 100% uptime and has had no critical bugs executed. Nano is based on newer technology that has yet to fully prove itself to the extent that Bitcoin has.
12. Can you stake Nano?
No, you cannot stake Nano (NANO).
A common misconception with the Nano cryptocurrency is that users can stake their NANO tokens. However, this is not the case.
While Nano does utilize a type of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm, users do not need to “stake” their NANO tokens.
In Nano’s consensus mechanism, every user who simply holds a balance of NANO tokens picks a representative they want to vote on their behalf, without giving up control of their NANO funds or staking them.
Therefore, Nano’s DPoS Consensus mechanism is a unique way to achieve consensus without actually staking tokens like in traditional Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks.
13. What is Nano’s transaction speed?
Nano network stats
Nano’s (NANO) transaction speed is ~0.25 seconds.
The team behind Nano believes that digital money should be quick and easy-to-use which is why they have strived to build Nano with near-instant transaction settlement.
Nano (NANO) transactions are settled in under 1 second with an average transaction settlement time of ~0.25 seconds. These fast transaction times are unprecedented in both the cryptocurrency space and in traditional financial systems.
See standard transaction times for various cryptocurrencies and payment methods below:
Cryptocurrencies (Fully Confirmed & Settled Transaction Times)
- Bitcoin (BTC) - ~10 minutes
- Ethereum (ETH) - between 15 seconds and 5 minutes
- Litecoin (LTC) - 2:30 minutes
- EOS (EOS) - 1 second
- Tron (TRX) - 0.3 seconds
Traditional Payment Methods (Fully Settled Transaction Times)
- ACH Bank Transfers - 3 to 5 business days
- Credit Cards - between 24 hrs and 3 business days
- Stripe - between 2, 7, or 10 business days (depending on domestic or international)
- PayPal - Near instant (PayPal to PayPal) and 3 to 5 business days for others
14. How does Nano achieve consensus?
Nano has a unique and efficient Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism called Open Representative Voting (ORV) which uses the process of voting to get confirmation on the network.
It is designed to allow Nano account holders with a NANO balance to freely choose a Representative at any time to vote on their behalf, even when the delegating account is offline. The Nano account holder (delegator) is not required to stake Nano at any time and they always remain in full control of their funds.
As for the Representative accounts, they are configured on nodes that remain online at all times to vote on the validity of transactions on the network. Their voting weight is the sum of all balances of accounts delegating to them.
Representatives with the most voting weight become a Principal Representative and the votes sent out by them are re-broadcasted by other nodes. Then, all of the votes are tallied up and compared with others and once a block receives enough votes to reach quorum, that block is confirmed.
This lightweight DPoS consensus mechanism enables ultrafast transaction confirmation and enables everyone to participate in the network which makes it more decentralized.
Additionally, Nano’s consensus mechanism is not energy-intensive like mining. Instead, the voting process is very efficient and is a big part of why Nano can have feeless transactions.
Hope you enjoyed that read :) Let me know if I have missed something in the comments.
