Nano is decentralized digital money which focuses on tackling current inefficiencies in financial systems. It features simple peer-to-peer transactions in which every user has its own blockchain.

NANO Explained

Nano differs from other cryptocurrency’s design by not keeping a full record of transactions but keeping track of its users account balances and their respective associated transaction amounts instead.

Account owners who wish to make a transaction will see it recorded on their own ledger and promptly broadcasted to Nano’s network. Nodes will then see the necessary confirmations and validate the transaction which will then be deemed irreversible as their copy of the ledger is updated reflecting that change.

This methodology is completely different from the standard practices by major players in which all transactions are recorded into blocks which capacity is limited and thus they put up a bid for inclusion.

In what concerns governance, nodes vote on whoever is entitled to create new blocks but given the low to no cost of the operation, users don’t need to pay for their transactions to be included in Nano’s blockchain.

The idea behind this approach is to encourage more transactions and greater adoption of the NANO crypto.

NANO Consensus

Nano uses a consensus algorithm called Open Representative Voting which is a derivate of the delegated proof-of-stake (or DPoS). Nodes are assigned different voting weights which are based on their current account balances and are free to allocate votes to another node of their preference within the network.

Principal Representatives are nodes with a lot of voting weight behind them and can vote proportionally to the sum of the funds in their account and the ones which have been allocated to them.

The Block Lattice

Nano’s data architecture system and key feature is called Block Lattice. Under the Lattice, each account has its respective blockchain (or “account-chain”) which can be updated without the need to wait for the whole network.

Each transaction made will have its own respective block and each of the new blocks will replace its previous one on the user’s account.

Each transaction is its own block, and each block replaces the previous one on the account. Much like a bank account, each block in the lattice will have a record and keep an update state so that transaction amounts are seen as the difference in the account balance between blocks.

As such, transactions will occur when the sender publishes a new block in which his account is debited the amount he’s about to send, and, other side of things, the receiver will publish a matching block, charging his account with the same amount.

Spam transactions are dissuaded by having a small proof-of-work component incorporated in each new Nano block.

The History Behind Nano

Nano was created by Colin LeMahieu, CEO and founder of The Nano Foundation. It launched in 2014 but at the time it was named RaiBlocks. Rebranding to its current name was done in 2018.