BANANO: a Feeless, Instant, Rich in Potassium Cryptocurrency Powered by DAG Technology Disrupting the Meme Economy

1. Introduction

In the year 2009, we saw the introduction of the first ever decentralized payment network, the mother of all coins, Bitcoin [1]. In the years that followed, global interest grew and Bitcoin inspired the genesis of numerous cryptography based projects that also worked towards trustless secure payment systems and storage of value.

Bitcoin uses blockchain technology where a distributed ledger records transactions chronologically and publicly. Subsequent advancement in the space gave rise to second generation projects like Ethereum, Litecoin, EOS, Stellar, Monero and many others, which built on this concept by adding new features, and sometimes by acting as platforms for dApps - the execution of decentralised applications. Then finally in 2015, Sergio Lerner published a paper describing the applicability of so-called Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) to the field of cryptography [2]. This concept was adopted by multiple third generation cryptocurrencies. One such project originally developed by Colin LeMahieu emerged by specifically targeting the scalability issues plaguing generations one and two: Raiblocks. Raiblocks rebranded to NANO in January 2018 [3].

BANANO is a feeless, instant, rich in potassium cryptocurrency powered by DAG technology disrupting the meme economy. It is the first fork peel of NANO, the genesis block redefining the memeconomy on 1 April 2018. Oh, did you know that Colin Lemahieu, the founder of Nano, likes us? Yea, that’s right (Figure 1)!

Figure 1: “I think memecoins are hilarious, we have one, we have BANANO, I like those guys!” Colin LeMahieu, Nano Founder

Similar to NANO, BANANO has quite more properties and advantages over classical cryptocurrencies than simply being high in potassium, obviously (Table 1).

Table 1: Feature comparison: BANANO vs. Bitcoin

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2. What is BANANO?

BANANO started as a joke between a devoted group of NANO contributors and resulted in a coin being the product of a considerable amount of effort (without taking itself too seriously). While it's true that BANANO kept big portions of the original node code to keep cross-chain compatibility between existing code libraries, many parameters have been fine-tuned, such as work requirements and units. As it progresses, the node code will likely diverge further. NANO has the mantra of ‘do one thing and do it well’. BANANO, however, is more open to feature additions, e.g. on-chain messaging or privacy. BANANO doesn’t aim for drastic modifications of the reference implementation of the node at this early stage: it’s more about improving the ecosystem and ensuring we have the best developers to do so!

It’s hard to overlook the exceptional tools and utilities that our hard working developers monkeys have contributed thus far. Take a peek at BANANO’s mobile wallet, Kalium (Figure 2). It’s a modern mobile wallet designed to be efficient and effective when transferring BANANO between you and your banfam - that is to say, your BANANO Family. With it, you can send instant transactions to anyone, anywhere, for free! On top of this and in line with the overall philosophy behind BANANO, Kalium is easy-to-use to ensure anyone will be able to get started with BANANO in minutes, without requiring any crypto-related knowledge whatsoever.

Figure 2: Kalium - BANANO’s mobile wallet (Download).

We also haven’t forgotten the roots of our BANANO tree. We made the tech from Kalium Wallet available for NANO users with Natrium, a mobile wallet for NANO based on Kalium tech! Adding features and helping other developers to create feasible concepts are just some of the few things we do while hanging in our BANANO hammocks. Most importantly, we work on the BANANO ecosystem and second layer solutions such as CAMO BANANO, our super-secret privacy layer, which is currently in development (Phase 1 announcement).

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BANANO prides itself in its active development and pro-active community. BANANO community members have created fascinating projects, such as an implementation of BANANO into Minecraft, guild rewards in mobile games and apps, and even faucet bots on popular streaming platforms and highly used tipbots on major social media platforms such as Telegram, Twitter, Discord and Reddit.

One of the most impactful differences between NANO and BANANO is that we started with billions of newly minted coins (Figure 3), 3.4 billion to be exact, that we use to continually run faucets that propagate DAG technology, fuel the tipping economy, and fund community projects. In that way, our objectives are similar to those of the NanoCenter—a community of NANO fans, investors, and contributors who operate parallel to NANO core.

BANANO follows a gamification approach and strives to also get into the hands of people who have never interacted with crypto before. Given its (apparently) silly and potassium-rich nature, BANANO is friendly and somewhat forgiving to new users. Let’s be real, losing “some memecoins earned from sh*tposting” is not half as bad as “suffering a stolen” on a large investment. After all, making the start with cryptocurrency as easy as possible through a fun attitude, gamification, and education is a main aim of the project, finally enabling everyone to finally handle crypto assets in general in a responsible way.

ALSO, it’s important to note: behind all the memes and sh*tposting, the BANANO operation has a highly skilled team dedicated community, and it is very, very, legit.

Figure 3: BANANO is the first peel of the NANO cryptocurrency and adheres to the open-source spirit. In the figure above, NANO in its raw form is remodelled through a combination of proof-of-work optimisation and potassium doping, resulting in unprecedented performance..

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3. BANANO Specifications

3.1. Accounts

In order to keep your precious BANANO safe, you'll need a wallet. A wallet can be accessed using a public key, also known as a wallet address; and a private key, also known as a seed. Together, the public key and the private key form a key-pair. The wallet address is its public key, it’s basically like your bank account number. You can share your wallet address with anyone in the world and your BANANO will remain secure. Every BANANO wallet address begins with the prefix, "ban_" (Figure 4).

Figure 4: A BANANO public address, starting with “ban_”. The QR code shown contains the exact same information and can be read by applications such as Kalium.

A wallet seed is known as its private key because it absolutely must be kept private. It’s the equivalent to your bank account login information. Never share your BANANO seed! Anyone that has your seed can access your delicious pile of BANANO, which can lead to a potassium deficiency.

To join the other jungle MonKeys and get a BANANO wallet of your own, you've got several options (Figure 5):

• Mobile Wallet: Kalium (Android & iOS).
• Desktop Wallet: The Banano Stand Web Wallet.
• Hardware wallet: Ledger Nano S model is supported with The Banano Stand.

Figure 5: Overview of main BANANO wallets.

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3.2. Rise of the Block Lettuce

How is BANANO developed to offer feeless, almost instant transactions? Enter the Block Lettuce.

Figure 6: Block Lettuce.

BANANO uses a Block Lettuce (Figure 6) architecture to achieve lightening-quick transfer speeds. Each account has its own blockchain. Transferring funds from one account to another requires two transactions: a send which deducts value from the sender's balance and a receive adds the same amount to the receiver's balance. An account encodes its accumulated total balance when it makes a transaction, therefore nodes only need to keep track of the latest block rather than expend larger resources to track an account's full transaction history. Correctness is maintained, however there is a vast reduction in time and work versus a single-blockchain architecture used by other cryptocurrencies.

3.3.BANANOdes

The BANANO ledger is secured through Open Representative Voting (previously called ‘delegated Proof-of-Stake’), a powerful decentralization mechanism that has no strong analog in Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (POS) algorithms. In conventional PoS systems, the account owner's node must be running to participate in voting. By contrast, BANANO account holders choose a representative node to vote on their behalf in the event of conflicting transactions. Continuously running a node is impractical for many everyday users; giving a representative the power to proxy vote reduces that requirement. A user has the ability to easily reassign their representative to any account at any time through a change transaction. The weight of the account is subtracted from the old representative and added to the new representative. No funds are moved in this transaction, and the representative does not have spending power of the account's funds.

PoW in BANANO is solely used as an anti-spam tool and computation is almost instant. Once a transaction is sent, the PoW for the next block can be pre-computed, as the previous block field is already known. Therefore, as long as the time between transactions is greater than the time required to compute the PoW, transactions appear instantaneous to users (Figure 7).

Figure 7: A real-time Kalium transaction and BANANO & NANO speed comparison.

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3.4. Proof-of-Work

NANO's Proof-of-Work mechanism intends to serve as an anti-spam mechanism at the cost of unnecessarily delaying block generation on low-end machines. This makes community projects and field studies harder to maintain and grow. NANO's ability to pre-cache one work upfront doesn't help much, and concurrent work caching often isn't feasible either. That's why for BANANO, we chose a quicker proof-of-work generation time, but kept the original algorithm (hashing a nonce that is concatenated with the block hash, until the result exceeds a certain threshold). As a result, the BANANO protocol runs on low power hardware, enabling it to be a lightweight, practical and decentralized cryptocurrency for everyday use. On average, generation times are 8x faster for BANANO than for NANO while consuming 8x less electricity. There's a mathematical formula to calculate this: (2⁶4 - 0xfffffe0000000000) / (2⁶4 - 0xffffffc000000000), this work generation is even mobile friendly! Existing work generator software is backwards compatible, but it should be adjusted to the new threshold to not waste energy unnecessarily.

3.5. MonKey

Cryptocurrency wallet addresses are typically long strings of characters that can be nearly indistinguishable from each other. MonKeys solve this long-standing problem through the creation of unique, monkey-shaped avatars from a hash value based on a user's public key. These visual representations of wallet addresses serve to identify users while protecting the privacy of the account holders (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Your MonKey is unique! No two wallet addresses share the same MonKey!

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Each MonKey has a unique combination of fur and eye colour, and can have additional accessories in varying styles, such as hats, glasses, shirts, pants, mouth types, tail decorations, and more! The value of the accessories is classified into 3 categories: basic, rare, and premium. The rarity ranges from 1/2 to 1/32 and 1/1024 MonKeys, respectively. There are hundreds of billions of possible MonKey combinations. Consider that RGB color ranges from (0,0,0) to (255,255,255). Therefore, there are 256³ = 16,777,216 color options. By only examining fur color and eye color generation we get 16,777,216² = 281,474,976,710,656 MonKey options. This is without even considering the 7 classes of accessories and their corresponding coloring! For testing purposes, we’ve implemented a MonKey generator right below (Figure 9). This generator allows you to experiment with MonKeys even without having a real wallet address (even though creating one is recommended and only takes seconds). You are welcome to try it for yourself, maybe you will be lucky and draw a premium accessory!

Figure 9: MonKey Generator

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5.1. Black Monkey

With the name being a reference to the term of the “black sheep”, the Black Monkey faucet game revolves around finding the odd MonKey out of 6 MonKeys. Each MonKey will have some combination of hat, glasses, smile, skin color, clothing, shoes, and accessories. The goal is to identify the one MonKey being different, while the other 5 MonKeys have absolutely identical items of that type (Figure 13). Visit blackmonkey.banano.cc to play.

Figure 13: One of the most popular BANANO faucets: Black Monkey

5.2. Meme Faucet

The BANANO Meme Faucet consists of writing and verifying descriptions of various memes or other images. When you submit a description, it will be evaluated and compared to the relative picture by another user, who will act as both faucet-user and “inspector” (Figure 14). Meme Faucet is available on memefaucet.banano.cc while it's active but it's not active currently.

Figure 14: A screenshot from BANANO Meme Faucet.

5.3. Crane Faucet

The crane faucet is run 24/7 and consists of solving captchas and various other “minigames” such as ‘Monkey Match’ or ‘Catch the Monkey’ (Figure 15). Crane Faucet is available on faucet.banano.coranos.io while it's active but it's not active currently.

Figure 15: A screenshot from BANANO Crane Faucet.

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5.4. BANANO Mining

It’s rarely mentioned that some fresh cryptocurrencies like BANANO (and it’s father NANO) do not require mining and therefore are highly innovative examples for ecologically “green” cryptocurrencies. However, in this case we purposefully branded our new Folding@Home faucet as “BANANO Miner” (Figure 16). This naming choice was made as a way of stating that cryptocurrency mining is not without alternatives!

Figure 16: BANANO Miner - Contribute to Medical Research while earning BANANO!

There are 2 separate faucet projects in this category, BANANO Powerplant and the BANANO Miner Faucet.

BANANO Powerplant is a CPU mining pool faucet that mines a range of different altcoins and pays out with BANANO. The payments are subsidized by BANANO, so the rates are better than mining the altcoins directly. Powerplant was available on powerplant.banano.cc while it was active but it has been discontinued.

BANANO Miner is not really a miner. Instead of running arbitrary calculations to “mine” a cryptocurrency, your computer runs protein folding simulations through Folding@Home, which helps researchers fight Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Cancer, Alzheimer’s and many more genetic diseases, and infectious diseases. Then, we send BANANO to your wallet based on the size of your computational contribution (Figure 17). Visit bananominer.com to try it out.

Figure 17: Fight diseases with computational power while earning BANANO!

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