Stegos is one of the most unique platforms in the crypto space which combines the principles of scalability and anti-surveillance.
Stegos announced that they will be doing an Initial Exchange Offering to gather enough funds to finish their product. Stegos is one of the most promising projects in the crypto space since it combines the principles of scalability and anti-surveillance. Along with being a payment token (STG), Stegos also provides a platform for developers to build privacy dApps.
Stegos and Anti-Surveillance
Stegos’ main value proposition is to provide people around the world with a platform where they can express themselves without the fears of government surveillance. Stegos is a privacy coin and platform for the next generation. While there have been previous versions of privacy coins before, they all suffered from specific design flaws that prevented them from imparting full privacy to their users. Some of the more common design flaws include:
- Transaction initiation: To initiate a transaction, you will need to contact the receiver one way or the other. The problem is that the moment you do so, you risk exposure to surveillance. Stegos works around this issue via their private chat feature. Users will be able to secretly communicate with each other to initiate a transaction.
- Exchange interfaces: Going through an exchange’s KYC process can be more cumbersome than opening a bank account. As such, if you plan to buy privacy coins from an exchange, they will have exhaustive records of all your purchasing records. To negate this, Stegos will implement on-chain peer-to-peer trading, allowing users to buy and sell crypto using atomic swaps. Atomic swaps will allow two users to swap cryptocurrencies via smart contracts without having to go through an exchange.
Unlike other privacy coins, Stegos is not just a payment coin. It is an actual platform where developers from around the world can gather and build their privacy applications. If you want to download and use some of these applications, then you can do so by going through their App Store. The best part is that Stegos will maintain your privacy while you browse through and download the apps.
Stegos and Scalability
Privacy coins are notorious for their lack of scalability. These coins are usually bound by multiple layers of encryption, which makes them extraordinarily bulky and slow for practical. Stegos realized that there was no point in offering an anti-surveillance environment if they were going to be too slow for actual usage. As such, Stegos has incorporated three interesting innovations to ensure high speed and scalability:
Gamified Proof of Stake (gPOS): Stegos uses POS instead of the more established proof-of-work (POW). POW requires cumbersome calculations that utilize computer resources and can be highly detrimental to the environment. POS makes the mining process virtual and is a lot faster and efficient. Plus, the gPOS model improves upon the classic POS model and makes the reward distribution fairer.
Cryptographic Pruning: The Stegos blockchain is kept small and compact via the use of cryptographic pruning. Pruning removes spent coins and consumed data safely from the blockchain. This makes sure that you can maintain a Stegos node on your cellphone if you want to since there are no unreasonable storage requirements.
Sharding: Stegos uses transactional sharding to scale. Separate groups of Stegos validators keep the whole blockchain state but verify only a subset of incoming transactions, using cross-shard atomic commits to eliminate double-spending. Sharding has been looked upon as the most effective layer-1 scaling technique.
Token Sale Details
According to the Stegos Team, the Token sale is scheduled to commence in the month of November on a soon to be announced Exchange. The project is looking to raise a modest amount of $300,000 through the sale of 12 million STG tokens – to be sold at an initial price of 0.025 USD per token. For more information regarding the IEO, reach out to the team via their Telegram channel. Please keep in mind that only investors from non-restricted countries are allowed to partake in the sale, and they will need to be whitelisted and pass the KYC procedure. Stegos will only be conducting an IEO with no further private placement rounds planned. Keep your eyes open for more announcements and the latest news surrounding the IEO.
Conclusion – The need for Stegos
There are millions of people around the world who are living under oppressive regimes or in sub-optimal conditions. For these people, freedom is a luxury and not a human right. With Stegos, they will get a platform that will enable them to reject surveillance and to embrace their freedom. Stegos has been carefully constructed with a code that has received rave reviews from various publications such as CryptoBriefing. As you can imagine, a platform as ambitious as theirs must be robust from end-to-end and must hold up against all failure scenarios. This is why they are holding this IEO to get the remaining funds needed to see their product to completion. Stegos is one of the most promising projects that has come out of the space in a long time, and one can only hope that they live up to their ideals.