MonaCoin (MONA)

What is MonaCoin?

One of the older altcoins which continues to be tremendously popular in the present, MonaCoin (MONA) bills itself as “the first Japanese Cryptocurrency”, driven largely by community efforts to preserve and enhance its functionality. Though its original intentions were for it to become an in-game currency used by video games produced in Japan, it slowly evolved into more of a broad user base, to be enjoyed by anybody who downloaded its wallet client. Its community is so dedicated that, in order to show appreciation for the coin, a Shinto shrine was erected to it in Japan in 2017.

History of MonaCoin

Originally developed anonymously in December 2013 and announced on New Year’s Eve of that year, the idea for MonaCoin is based off of an ASCII character (graphics out of keyboard text) called “Mona.” One of its core characteristics that the developers still pride itself upon was the fact that MONA enjoyed a very fair launch, having none of its coins “premined,” or issued to any party before publicly launching it. After the collapse of bitcoin exchange MtGOX in 2014, MonaCoin enjoyed an increase in popularity, as a cryptocurrency alternative to bitcoin, advertising itself as “safe and made in Japan.” MonaCoin implemented its own version of SegWit in March 2017 and remains actively updated, making it one of the longest-lasting, most evolved altcoins to ever be created. Upon its last mine block, there will be a total of 105,120,000 coins in circulation. The market capitalization of MonaCoin briefly surpassed the $1 billion mark in December 2017.

How MonaCoin Works

Like Litecoin, MonaCoin was originally designed using scrypt as its hashing algorithm but has since changed to an algorithm called Lyra2RE. Like scrypt, the new algorithm is also Proof of Work (PoW) but is even more ASIC-resistant, meaning it is hard to develop mining hardware dedicated to mining coins with its algorithm. MonaCoin is a fully distributed payment system and relies upon very few third party systems, unlike the vast majority of all other cryptocurrencies. A total of 25 MonaCoins are mined every 1.5 minutes. MonaCoin has proven itself to be very reliable over the years, never having suffered a hacking incident, and the fairness of its launch makes it all the more credible.

Why MonaCoin?

Enjoying the benefits of a large community, MonaCoin users have developed several Mona-based web applications and services to increase its utility. Some of its features include:

Fast transaction processing. The block time for MONA is 1.5 minutes, making it roughly 6 and 2/3 faster for processing payments than bitcoin.

Widespread adoption. As one of the older cryptocurrencies still in existence, MonaCoin enjoys a solid, dedicated user base and considerable merchant adoption throughout Japan. In March 2018, a Japanese real estate developer announced they would soon accept MonaCoin as a payment method.

Dedicated community. Not reliant on a team of “core” developers or third party system, MonaCoin is almost entirely supported by its community, which is very supportive and sizeable, considering the coin has enjoyed an existence of almost 5 years.