Spotlight on Cryptocoins -- Komodo/KMD -- 9th feature "private" coins
Hello Steemians
In this series of articles I want to put a spotlight on a specific cryptocurrency and write about the details in all these aspects:
Aim of the currency
Technical details
Market position
Forecast
The cryptocurrency in focus currently will be one of the so-called "private" coins. Coins that create the possibility to be more or less in private while doing transactions. How private you are is one of the main questions to be answered in this articles.
In this 9th article of the series, the spotlight will be on Komodo.
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Aim of the Currency
What is this currency about? What does it do differently than the rest?
Where is the unique selling point and at what audience is this coin targeted?
All that questions and more will be answered in the following paragraph.
Komodo is one of the rather large private coins and was already foundet in 2016. Distribution of the Coin began with an ICO, in which 90 Million Coins where given out to investors. The coin is capped at 200 Millions from which 10 Millions are held back in a reserve. It is based on the ZCash Core and also brings on ZkSnarks for completely anonymous transactions.
Komodo is a pure PoW Coin using the Equihash algorithm, in trying to keep this coin ASIC resistant and features a new mechanism called dPoW (delayed Proof of Work).
This will be explained a bit more in detail in the next chapter.
Technical Details
Komodo has wallets that support Linux, Mac, and Windows as well as paper Wallet, the source code for them is completely visible on Github.
There is no wallet software for mobile devices currently.
Komodo is a pure PoW coin using the Equihash algorithm (like ZCash, Hush...) for improved resistance against ASIC computation. Additionally, the developers improved the normal PoW to follow a different methodology increasing the security of the whole blockchain. They called this methodology dPoW (delayed Proof of Work) and it is basically introducing a set of 64 notary nodes, that notarizes the block also on the Bitcoin blockchain, which in the end secures the Komodo blockchain also with the hash rate of Bitcoin. These nodes are elected by a community consensus and they can generate once every 63 Blocks a block on easy difficulty as a reward.
Maximum number of coins is 200 Million, Block Time is 1 Minute with 2MB Blocks
Privacy of transaction is achieved using Zk-SNARKs, just like ZCash or ZClassic. This is a proven way of making transaction information anonymous, so I will not explain this further.
There was an ICO, in which 100 Million Coins have already been distributed. 90 Million has been bought by investors and 10 Million have been moved to a reserve as a working capital.
Please see Whattomine.com if you are interested in probable mining revenues, Komodo was a good mining coin lately but take care this changes quite fast.
Market Position
At the time of writing this article (02/01/2018), Komodo is placed 46th in market capitalization, with the total value of $556.730.839 USD . The 24h Volume was $3.129.300 USD which is a rather low number compared to the last month.
January is always a very turbulent month for cryptocurrencies, Komodo is no difference there. The coin had its all-time Dollar value high on December 12th 2017 with 12.89 Dollar per KMD, afterwards, it went down in waves to 5.86 USD yesterday (01-31-2018). Currently, it seems that the downtrend is unbroken and will go on for a while.
We can see a massive spike leading to the ATH in mid December. Partly, this may have been caused by the BTCD swap deadline in January, partly this may have happened due to getting more attention from investors. It is not really clear what drove the prices.
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If we are looking back one year in market history of Komodo, we see that this spikes have happened at least two additional times. But we also see that the Volume that has driven those spikes has increased from one to the other.
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Forecast
Just like all the other private coins Komodo for sure has a valid point in trying to keep the privacy of the sender and receiver.
Komodo is a quite established cryptocurrency with high potential. The team has come up with a complete new idea of securing the blockchain by delegated Proof of Work and is working heavily on decentralised Exchange and decentralised ICOs currently.
If they can create working software for this ideas fast, Komodo will see a huge increase in value.
Conclusion
Komodo is keeping your transaction details hidden by using Zk-SNARKs, IP privacy is currently not guaranteed, you would need to setup a TOR by yourself.
Komodo is managed by a quite big team around JL777, of which some are anonymous and some are not.
Last but not least there are also some drawbacks and they should not be unmentioned:
- Pure PoW coin, can be seen as a waste of electricity - even though dPoW makes it a bit better.
- Privacy of transaction has been also viewed with criticism.
- 10 Millions KMD working capital (reserved by the team) can be seen with criticism (5% of all coins)
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