In the past few years I have researched and scrutinized quite a few altcoins. I have seen excellent projects with incredibly unique and interesting ideas with some amazingly talented teams. However none have given off the same aura as NYZO. There has been a lot of hype surrounding NYZO in niche crypto communities. But does it live up to the hype? Here is our NYZO altcoin review.
To give you some background. The project was founded back on the second of April 2018 by a team of anonymous developers. These developers silently worked away on the project in the background. Without a single piece of advertisement or promotion. No marketing teams, no PR agencies. Eventually through word of mouth the project began to spread to a small niche of people within the crypto sphere. This diffusion of information is by no means an accident either. People are genuinely excited about this projects new take on blockchain technology, and the future potential of it.
Technology
Bitcoin brought us Proof of Work (mining) back in 2008. Peercoin brought us Proof of Stake back in 2013. A few months later we got Masternodes. Then we had hybrids of all three. Then finally we had DAGs. This is where NYZO turns a new page in our story with the invention of Proof of Diversity. Proof of Diversity uses a collaborative verification system that requires neither proof of work nor proof of stake. NYZO is built on the idea of the mesh. The mesh is simply a network of computers known as verifiyers all running NYZO and communicating information to each other. In return for securing the mesh these computers are given a 10% reward of transaction fees for each block they secure as well as the following 9 blocks. The great thing about the mesh is that unlike other consensus mechanisms it has an incredibly low barrier to entry. You do not need to spend hundreds of dollars on mining equipment. If you wanted to you could set up a NYZO node on a simple VPS or even your own home computer (This is however not recommended) and have it up and running within an hour.
Proof of Diversity
This brings us on to another crucial element of Proof of Diversity. NYZO is not secured by raw hash or computing power, but rather by time and probability. In order to join the mesh one must wait in line. Every second you wait in line your probability of joining the mesh and earning rewards increases. You would be right to ask the question of why there is this queue to join the mesh? Is that not counter-intuitive? The queue itself is where the security of NYZO lies. In order to attack the network a bad actor must control more than 50% of the verifiers. The queue through time and probability prevents someone from deploying 50% of nodes instantly onto the mesh. At the time of writing there are currently 6872 nodes waiting to join the network with 1227 currently in the mesh. For each verifier that joins the network its security increases. The downside to the vast number of verifiers in the queue is how long it takes to join. Right now it could take many months to join the mesh and earn NYZO. However that is the opportunity cost of network security. Whether that investment is worth it is completely up to you.
The security and efficiency of the network is also maintained through radical democracy. If there is an under performing verifier who for whatever reason is slowing down the network other verifiers can vote them out of the mesh. They are then replaced by a new verifier who joins from the queue. This is why I recommended earlier not to run your verifier on a home computer. Network performance is essential to ensure that you stay in the mesh. The network is ruthless. If your verifier is substandard it will be removed and be sent to the back of the queue. We recommend using Vultr if you are looking to host a verifier.
Community
NYZO is an open source project. Anyone can contribute to their codebase on their Github. Their is also a large community run Discord server which currently has over 1100 members who are constantly discussing NYZO and cryptocurrency in general as well as providing tech support to those who are encountering issues.
The NYZO developers have previously said that they will at some point leave the project entirely in the community’s hands. There was an air of contention within the community up until recently. The developers do hold a large premine of coins and there was uncertainty surrounding what these coins would be used for. However the NYZO developers came up with a unique an interesting strategy to deal with this large premine and put nerves at ease. Half of the premine will be locked up and purely used to incentivize developers for building on the NYZO blockchain as well as rewarding developers who responsibly disclose bugs and potential vulnerabilities with the chain. The other half will remain in the hands of the developers. However, the coins locked in developer wallets will only be released as NYZOs blockchain grows in transaction volume. This essentially incentivizes and rewards the NYZO developers to continue to develop and better NYZO.
The Future of the Project
NYZO does not have a typical roadmap like other altcoins. There is no graphic showing what the developers plan for the project 3 months down the line or 2 years down the line. The developers are focused on purely making NYZO the best it can be. They concentrate their attention on bug fixes and ensuring protocol stability. The only current tasks on their roadmap are to create a basic general software client that provides basic functions such as transaction creation and submission, balance lookup, and transaction history lookup and improving the resilience and recovery speed of verifiers.
In conclusion I am very optimistic about the future of NYZO. It is one of the most innovative projects I have seen in quite a while. The developers are incredibly hardworking and though they hide behind the veil of anonymity they are transparent about what their goals are. The good vastly outweighs any issues I have with the project. There will be stumbling blocks along the way for NYZO, the same as every other coin. But if the community can rally behind the coin and the developers I forsee positive things.
Buying NYZO
If you do not want to set up a verifier you can alternatively buy it on qTrade.io this is currently the only trustworthy exchange which has a NYZO market. You can read our full review of qTrade here.
