What Is Skycoin?

Quite a few different cryptocurrencies exist in the market today, although not all of them will have use cases. Whether or not Skycoin will gain traction as a cryptocurrency remains to be seen. Its blockchain application platform, known as Skywire, will certainly attract a lot of interest on a global scale.

What is Skycoin Exactly?

There are many aspects of Skycoin which make it appealing, even though it is the Skywire ecosystem which will get most people excited. Skywire is designed to be the new internet by offering an incentivized mesh network with a strong focus on privacy features. Making corporate ISPs a thing of the past will not be easy, but the Skycoin team is confident they can make this happen in the near future.

Under the Hood

The Skywire protocol focuses on privacy, anonymity, and peer-to-peer decentralized mesh-internet. There is also the Skycoin blockchain for free instant and infinite transactions between Skywire users. The Skyminer is essentially an internet access point which pays users for their bandwidth.  

It seems Skywire was designed by some of the original Bitcoin and Ethereum developers, which lends a bit more credibility to this particular project. It is also interesting to note that this ecosystem uses the Obelisk consensus algorithm. It was built from the ground up to achieve a truly decentralized cryptocurrency, and it is worth one’s while to look at the whitepaper for a more technical explanation as to how all of this will work exactly.

The Skywire Miner will undoubtedly get a lot of attention, as it is a custom-built hardware unit for the new internet. These are actual mining devices, although they are far more energy-efficient than ASIC devices. The information these machines transmit is sent to the mesh network as a way to earn Skycoin. Since there is no actual mining involved, the “mining” name is pretty interesting, but it seems these units will be a valuable addition to the overall ecosystem.

The Skycoin use Cases

Even though it’s clear how people can earn Skycoin, spending it is a different matter altogether. This cryptocurrency is more than just a traditional digital currency, as it will serve as the default cryptocurrency for digital bandwidth. Anything sent over the Skywire network will earn Skycoin for users in the process. Spending this currency is usually done for the purpose of accessing bandwidth provided by the network. It seems the network can handle thousands of transactions per second without too many problems.

The Future for Skycoin and Skywire

As of right now, the Skycoin team is focused on implementing DEX support and launching the Skywire test network. We will also see the listing of Skycoin on a few additional exchanges, and the Skywire Miner is expected to be released in the next few weeks as well. It will be interesting to see whether or not the team can adhere to this roadmap, even though they have been rather successful in doing so over the past few months.