This is the question asked by one Nano holder on Reddit today. He was 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.
Nano is fundamentally very sound project
Nano is the meat & potatoes of what’s the most critically important features of a cryptocurrency. Fast & feeless transactions.
Nano solves the problem of being scalable, decentralized and secure by being the first crypto to use DAG based block-lattice architecture that doesn’t suffer from the same protocol based limitations other legacy blockchain based solutions use.
While Nano does have some infrastructure needed to be a functional cryptocurrency (including merchants, exchanges, payment processors, software wallets, hardware wallets, gambling and betting and games), clearly many other projects have the same/are on their way to achieve the same. Nano is probably one of the most usable coins right now but they need to work on other aspects of their projects as well, not only the technology field. Marketing and building relationships with big players from ecommerce and retail industry is the next task for the team.
Therefore this probably won’t be enough to make Nano a commercially accepted crypto solution, for now at least. Still, there are arguments that Nano is undervalued at the moment, especially if you consider that projects like Bitcoin Gold or Verge are currently above it in market cap. If/when the long-awaited alt season greets the cryptosphere with its divine presence we should expect to see Nano as one of the stronger beneficiaries of it.
Nano will surpass Monero, Dash, Litecoin (but not Bitcoin yet) in MarketCap when people realize that these coins are unable to overcome the scalability problem – too expensive and too slow for transferring money. But the Nano strength will only be visible in the next bull run. Moreover, if Nano is able to decentralize and assure security, IMO it is the only existing coin – technology wise – in conditions to challenge Ripple and BitCoin. Actually Nano is the only existing coin that looks like Bitcoin back in 2010/2011: instant & feeless. However, unlike BitCoin, Nano is better prepared for scaling.
I think most of the problem comes from that stupid approach of “build it and they will come”, they are so wrong, NOBODY will come if nobody knows about it. It’s really disgusting to look at other totally useless shitcoins at better positions than NANO.
The team MUST do some marketing work, partnerships, and help to build infrastructure. NANO is a really good option to use as a cryptocurrency right now, not in years to come (like lightning network), with fast and free on chain transactions, it’s ideal for microtransactions too.