| Vertcoin | |
|---|---|
| |
| Introduced | 2014-01-08 |
| Symbol | VTC |
| Hash function | Verthash |
| Block time | 2.5 minute |
| Block reward | 25 |
| Coin cap | 84 million |
| Diff. retarget | Kimoto Gravity Well |
| Halvening | 840k blocks (~4 years) |
| mintxfee | 0.001/kB |
| Premine | 3 blocks (150 VTC) |
| Announcement | https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404364.0 |
| Website | https://vertcoin.org/ |
| Repository | https://github.com/vertcoin-project/vertcoin-core/releases/ |
Vertcoin (VTC) is an open-source cryptocurrency created in January 2014 that focuses on decentralization. Vertcoin uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism to issue new coins and incentivize miners to secure the network and validate transactions. Vertcoin has hard forked four times in order to reject specially designed hardware known as ASICs as well as CPU botnets from contributing to the peer-to-peer Vertcoin network and allowing consumer grade hardware such as GPUs more incentive to secure the network.
History[]
Vertcoin was released via a client on GitHub on January 8, 2014 and remains an open source software project under the MIT/X11 license. Vertcoin was created in response to Scrypt ASICs being developed and adopted for use on the Litecoin network. Vertcoin introduced what was known as "Adaptive N‐Factor" to the Scrypt algorithm. The N‐factor component of Scrypt determined how much memory was required to compute the hashing functions and increased with time.
On December 13, 2014 (block 208301), Vertcoin forked from Scrypt-Adaptive-N to Lyra2RE, a NIST5 based chained algorithm with customizable parameters, as a proactive defense against emerging Scrypt-Adaptive-N capable ASICs.
On August 10, 2015 (block 347000), Vertcoin forked from Lyra2RE to Lyra2REv2 due to an assumed CPU botnet controlling more than 50% of hashing power on the network.
On May 10, 2017 (block 715,680), Segregated Witness (SegWit) was activated in the main network.
On September 20, 2017, the first on-chain atomic swap was performed on the Vertcoin network, exchanging 55 vertcoins for 1 litecoin.
On December 12, 2017 (block 840,000) the block reward was cut in half (50 to 25 vertcoins).
On October 20, 2018, the hashrate of Vertcoin more than doubled as an ASIC was created for its hashing algorithm, Lyra2REv2. This led to numerous reorganizations of its blockchain between October and December 2018 known as 51% attacks.
On February 1, 2019 (block 1,080,000), Vertcoin forked from Lyra2REv2 to Lyra2REv3 in order to prevent v2 compatible ASICs from contributing to consensus and to act as a stopgap measure while the Verthash algorithm was in development.
On December 1, 2019, a reorganization of the Vertcoin blockchain known as a 51% attack occurred. Before and after the attack, it was assumed that specialized hardware such as an ASIC or FPGA was controlling more than 50% of hashing power on the network.
On January 30, 2021 (block 1,500,000), Vertcoin forked from Lyra2REv3 to Verthash.