What Is DigiByte? Introduction to DGB Token

Digibyte into a bad apple? It wasn't this hidden crypto gem.

There’s not shortage of altcoins, but Digibyte was one of the first, hitting the market in the pre-ICO days of 2014. It boasts a secure infrastructure that’s faster than Bitcoin. Because of this, DGB boasts the longest blockchain currently running.

Still a genuine altcoin, DigiByte’s pricing is very much tied to Bitcoin, but it’s much more of a blockchain 2.0 project. Its three-layer blockchain network separates smart contracts, processing, and decentralized applications. It also features cross-chain compatibility, making it a capable competitor in the blockchain arms race.

Viable as both a crypto asset and a blockchain, Digibyte may be a hidden gem in the crypto world.

Breakdown of DGB

DigiByte has a market cap of $270,254,204 as of August 18, 2018. This is based on a circulating supply of 10,678,573,602 DGB (approximately half the maximum supply of 21,000,000,000) and an exchange rate of $0.025308. Its peak price so far occurred on January 5, 2018, when it reached $0.138940.DGB is widely accepted on crypto markets, with Bittrex, Poloniex, Sistemkoin, HitBTC, Kucoin, Upbit, and YoBit all having significant daily trade volumes.

Its trading pairs include BTC, USDT, and ETH, with occasional fiat currencies.

DigiByte offers wallets for all Operating Systems, and there’s third-party support from Coinomi, Ledger, Trezor, Guarda, Exodus, Satowallet, and more.

That Other Bitcoin

Throughout Bitcoin’s meteoric 2017, DigiByte had the good fortune to ride the cryptocurrency wave into several new investments. As a legacy crypto that existed in the pre-spike days, it was soon found by crypto media and analyst upstarts looking for the next new thing.

Like Bitcoin, DigiByte uses UTXO to verify balances through each crypto coin rather than the wallet address holding them.

DigiByte is open-sourced and aims to be more decentralized than Bitcoin. It’s also faster, boasting a more secure and anonymous infrastructure. It supports 43,000 nodes, nearly 6 times the 7,400 nodes supported by Bitcoin. It also supports 100 times the coin supply.

John McAfee proclaimed DigiByte is a coin to watch, but that’s not the token’s fault. MultiShield and DigiShield, DigiByte’s security implementations, definitely rival the paranoid playboy’s own security namesake.

DigiByte is especially gaining popularity among gamers through DigiByte Gaming, which offers DGB as rewards for playing certain games. We’ve mentioned on multiple occasions the importance of tokenization and gaming in cryptocurrency.

While slow to be adopted, this red-headed stepchild of the crypto world may see sustainable success in the long term.

Rise of the Auxcoin

Rather than an altcoin, I like to call DigiByte an auxcoin. It’s an auxiliary form of payment that will ultimately sustain a market because of its cross-chain compatibility. Segregated witness (SegWit) makes it a valuable coin that can be used as an intermediary on market trades to easy congestion to assets like Bitcoin.

A new DigiByte block is mined approximately every 15-18 seconds vs 10 minutes for Bitcoin. It also uses 5 proof-of-work algorithms to encourage decentralization among ASIC and GPU miners. Because of these extra algorithms and improved transaction times, DigiByte’s blockchain is already the longest in existence.

It’s 40 times faster than Bitcoin, and its four-year lifespan so far easily outpaced Bitcoin’s transactions in throughput alone. At 280 transactions per second, DigiByte hasn’t slowed in its old age, proving it’s a more scalable payment and mining option than Bitcoin.

Like Ethereum, DigiByte’s network has multiple layers. One is the core protocol layer, followed by a digital asset layer and decentralized application layer. Keeping these separate, along with running five algorithms on them, makes DigiByte’s tech state-of-the-art and future-proof for possibly a long time.

Even if it fails to be adopted by the mainstream, DigiByte is sure to continue receiving valuable community support for years to come.

Summary

DigiByte wasn’t the first blockchain, but it has first-mover advantage over most projects by having an active community with an existing platform already up for four years. DigiByte may never be as popular as Bitcoin as a digital asset, but it’ll surely remain in use based on its key advantages.

It’s not the Belle of the Ball, but DigiByte checks a lot of the right notes in a cryptocurrency. Its proven to be scalable and capable of processing much faster in real-world usage than many popular choices. It just doesn’t have as much publicity and adoption, but those that have it hodl with firm conviction.

 

The author is not currently invested in any cryptocurrency mentioned here.