Electroneum is a mobile-first cryptocurrency aimed at mass adoption. The Electroneum team makes acquiring cryptocurrency as simple as downloading an app. By breaking down the barriers around acquiring it, the Electroneum team believes they can spread their coin far and wide.
Electroneum is a blockchain-based payment platform designed specifically for use on mobile devices like smartphones. It’s claimed to be the first Know-Your-Customer (KYC). and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) compliant cryptocurrency. ETN, Electroneum’s native crypto, is virtually mined using mobile devices.
The cryptocurrency has a massively loyal and committed following – its marketing strategy has tended toward virality, which has gained it over 2.7 million registered users (January 2019).
As well as an impressive 129k Twitter followers, the project has attracted 143k Facebook users – interesting because FB is not a platform not known for crypto projects. Many don’t even have a Facebook page. This could illustrate that there is a strong following beyond crypto devotees – which would, of course, be exactly what the team would want to see.
Of course, 2.7 million registered users does not measure active use, just as Bitcoin’s 22 million wallets doesn’t suggest that 22 million people are using Bitcoin today. But it’s a remarkably strong performance – and proves the power of integrating with major players like Google’s Play Store.
The core development team of 12 is headed by SiteWizard co-founder Richard Ells. Its initial goal during its 2017 inception was to replace in-game currencies for mobile games. Gambling platforms were a natural evolution, as were mobile payments. Based in the U.K., the project is also still focused on emerging economies with large unbanked and underbanked populations.
It was initially a soft fork of the Monero code but hard forked on May 30, 2018 at block 307500 to its own code. Part of the reason was to streamline code, and the other was to welcome ASIC rigs to the network, as Monero forked to resist GPU-based ASIC mining.
Now the project is focused on mobile payments and has partnerships including telecommunications payment behemoth XIUS, e-commerce company BMedia, and more. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still true to its gaming roots – its partnership with Mobile Streams PLC’s gaming platform exposes it to the service’s 750,000-strong subscriber base in Latin America.
Is Electroneum the next big chain on the block, or is it all just a great white hype?
We’ll start our research by examining the market performance of ETN, Electroneum’s proprietary cryptocurrency token.
How Does Electroneum Work?
Electroneum, also referred to as ETN, is built off the Monero codebase to allow for transactions on a decentralized blockchain. Like Monero, Electroneum has some built-in privacy features. One of the main criticisms of Bitcoin is that the balance of every wallet address is public and easily searchable. This problem is solved with Electroneum’s stealth address, a one-time public key that “prevents recipient’s funds from being linked with their wallet. That address can be audited by a 3rd party to prove the transaction occurred (with the sender sharing their public view key).
The recipient gets their funds through their wallet’s private view key which scans the blockchain. Once detected and retrieved by the wallet, a single-use private key is created (corresponding with senders public key).
The recipient can now spend those funds using their private spend key. This occurs without the sender, recipient, nor the amount transacted publicly linked. If you’d like to read more about the privacy technology behind Monero and Electroneum, we suggest our Monero guide here.
Transactions are relatively fast with dynamic fees based on the level of traffic on the network. You can check out the recent blocks here. The vast majority of transactions have less than 0.2 ETN in total fees and new blocks are added every minute or so.
The Electroneum codebase tries to avoid powerful ASICs having a huge advantage over CPU miners. The mining utilizes a memory bound algorithm to try and encourage CPU mining, giving average users easy access to ETN. The ability to give everyone access to this coin will be a recurring theme throughout this guide.
