Nano and exchanges are a tumultuous story ever since Bitgrail hack where Nano holders lost around $150 in a hack of the long closed exchange.
Bitgrail is long-forgotten and the new exchange itch for Nano holders is the largest exchange by (real) trading volume, the CZ led behemoth Binance.
Binance holds around 25% of all Nano in circulation and as such qualifies for a Nano representative node.
The delegated-proof-of-stake method of decentralization allows anyone who owns NANO to delegate voting weight equal to the amount of NANO they own to a representative node of their choice.
The benefit to the delegator is that they do not have to ensure that their own node (wallet) is running 24 hours a day to participate in voting. Voting is a consensus mechanism that decides which transaction is valid whenever a double-spend attempt is made.
You can see how powerful the nodes are here the % total represents how much control they have over the Nano network the goal is to spread out the control.
That is not going too well since Binance holds 25% (around 33 million Nano) of all coins and doesn’t participate in the voting process at all. So Nano holders are between a rock and a hard place since they can’t make up their minds which is worse: if Binance starts exerting its power by voting on Nano network making it less decentralized or if they don’t do it which then leads to low number of Nano coins to participate in the voting process for other representatives.
What you'll learn 👉
Integrity of the network is in question
This tricky situation moved one Nano holder to escalate the issue in their subreddit and urge other coin holders to move their coins from Binance to Nano wallets where they will control the keys and their voting rights.
“Since the 33 million nano does not participate in the network, only 62% (or 85 million) of all Nano in existence even votes at all. Since 60 million Nano voting weight must be online for the network to function, this means that only TWO representatives need to go offline to stop the network. This has happened already, a few times. And all because you store your Nano on Binance. You monster.
So do us all a favor, and move your Nano off of Binance. Choose a nice representative, one with high up time, low voting weight, but is still above 133,000 delegated weight (the threshold to be a rebroadcasting representative). Here is a nice guide for you on what a representative is.
The integrity of the network literally depends on you moving that Nano.”
Wallets where you can store your Nano when not actively trading:
– Official Nano Classic wallet v13 (requires full sync, Advanced) – https://nano.org/en/wallet/
– Canoe (MacOS, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS): https://getcanoe.io/
– Nanovault (Web, desktop): https://nanovault.io/
– Nanowallet (Web only): https://nanowallet.io/
– Official Android Wallet (Beta, testing only): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.nano.nanowallet
What are Nano chances of really becoming THE payment coin of the future?
This is the question asked often by Nano holders on Reddit. They are genuinely wondering how does a coin with great technical predisposition and superior solutions to other leading payment cryptocurrencies lag so much behind in recognition and usage.
Here are couple of answers he received:
As a Nano fan here are some points I think let it down currently and really hamper its potential usage as a currency:
- “Official” wallet, especially the mobile version is awful, bad UX (signup process in particular) and only the basic features (no address book etc.). Canoe is what I use and it’s much better but the average consumer would likely find / download the official wallet first.
- No direct fiat entryways (with any volume* also not including the few card gateways charging 15-20% fees..), this being all methods including consumer entries (coinbase etc.), advanced (no fiat pairs on large exchanges) or offline (Fiat to crypto ATMs).
- No good merchant provider for major / offline merchants. Yes, I know there’s brainblocks and that’s great for small businesses, especially those with crypto-knowledge but for the majority of merchants, they need something like BitPay which enables them to have no risk because the Nano is instantly converted to Fiat and paid to them as such.
- Not a known name – Merchants accept Bitcoin because they’ve heard of Bitcoin and want to capitalise on the hype around it, not necessarily because they like the tech. Nano doesn’t have that buzz around it (frequent media mentions, day-to-day conversion topic last year, generally most people know what it is now) nor does really any other cryptocurrency, even Ethereum or Ripple. The only thing that’s really going to fix that is adoption. If a merchant provider or fiat gateway that focuses 100% on Nano could come into the space, it may then speed things if they do marketing correctly and introduce the general population to Nano in that way.
Other than the reasons enumerated by this well-informed and knowledgeable user, obvious reason for Nano’s struggle is tough competition – payment coins is an arena full of heavyweights, starting from the king itself – bitcoin and followed by a whole bevy of projects like bitcoin cash, litecoin, dash, monero etc.
Nano is also infamous for their poor marketing efforts, or to be more precise complete lack of such. Nano team apparently took an approach “build it and they will come”, fully relying on the technology and neglecting all other business aspects of a project of this magnitude.
