NXT

Launched in late November 2013, NXT is a new cryptoplatform written entirely from scratch in Java.14 The platform has the ability to natively track “colored coins” – tokens that represent a specific asset based on their “color” (e.g., using a fraction of NXT to represent a car or house).  It also includes a decentralized asset exchange, which means you can buy and sell assets without going through a 3rd party.  For instance, one of the problems that impacts centralized exchanges and online stores today is that both your fiat and tokens are vulnerable to theft, hacking and other abuse.  In one notable instance, in December 2013, an online commerce site called Sheep Marketplace was hacked and 96,000 bitcoins were removed from its web-based wallet making it the largest known cryptoheist.15 This type of abuse is nearly impossible in a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange because there is no single centralized point of attack.16

In February 2014, I exchanged messages with “Uniqueorn,” contributor to the NXT development team.17  In his view, “the best way to compare NXT to the other cryptocurrencies is basically to not do it. NXT is not an altcoin at all.  While most of the cryptocoins being circulated are typically clones of the Bitcoin codebase with a few slight variations, very few of them bring anything new or substantial to cryptocurrency functionality.  On top of this is a built-in encrypted messaging system (like BitMessage) and anonymous payments (similar to Zerocoin) which adds an additional layer of privacy to protect confidential information and trade secrets.  Yet a lot of work still needs to be done both with our platform and the rest of the industry.  You cannot expect that your mother and father are going to sit down and understand this. For them it is supposed to be a tool to make their lives easier, not harder.”

Another key difference is that unlike Bitcoin and Litecoin which utilize proof-of-work mechanisms that scale in difficulty with network hashrate (i.e., additional hashrate added to a cryptoledger proportionally increases the block difficulty level); NXT instead utilizes something called ‘Forging,’ which is basically recirculation of NXT (Proof-of-Stake).18 “Uniqueorn” noted that, “proof-of-stake allows ‘miners’ to generate NXT without requiring the use of relatively large sums of electricity that other cryptocoin proof-of-work systems currently do.”  In other words, the barriers to entry are significantly lower as user does not need to utilize a top-of-the line ASIC machine which is discussed later in Chapter 7.  Therefore, a user can “forge” tokens on a smart phone, a solar powered Raspberry Pi, or a laptop computer.  In practice, an algorithm randomly picks one node to process all of the transactions and all other machines know this system is the sole transaction ‘forger’ – thus all other erroneous transactions can be discarded.  All machines participating in this ‘forging’ effort are rewarded according to the proportional amount of NXT they have; thus if you have 1% of the tokens you have a 1% chance of being selected to forge the next block.  Because the transactions nodes are known, this provides increased security, an estimated 90% of the NXT tokens must be controlled by one agent in order to compromise the network via a double-spend (e.g., 51% attack).19

I also corresponded with ‘Graviton’ who is the Nextcoin.org community founder.20 According to him, one of the motivations for why the core team decided to move beyond Bitcoin was, “there certainly seemed to be demand for a technically advanced cryptocurrency with a completely new codebase that puts away the requirement for energy expensive Proof-of-Work once and for all.  The environmentally green and attack resistant Proof-of-Stake algorithm, plus the important fact that NXT is not only a payment instrument but a new generation platform natively supporting a suite of services such as decentralized trading and encrypted messaging, seems to have filled gaps that were shining open wide with the existing old school cryptocurrencies.”

He is also looking forward to the deployment of a decentralized asset exchange as well as colored coin functionality on the NXT platform and believes that these will “become a popular standard for quite a bit of trading applications, for both – cryptocurrencies and assets denominated in them.  The rest of the industry will integrate seamlessly to that, so the distinctions between various crypto brands will start to dissipate.”  And like several other developers interviewed, “the killer app would be to have available the simplest possible means to pay for merchandise & services in fiat nomination but from one’s cryptocurrency wallet, to be able enjoy the fiat price appreciation with the same wallet, and to flip your wallet contents to another crypto with a push of a button.  Preferably on mobile.”