An international team of developers has announced that they are expecting to launch a new digital currency on June 7 after the last presale stage, which has been designed to provide anonymous and untraceable transactions for users.
INTCoin claims to be a next generation decentralized Blockchain-based digital currency that takes advantage of the Blockchain technology's capabilities to provide complete anonymity and security for users, with 50 transactions per second being made.
Alessio Evers, the main INTCoin developer, who spoke to Cointelegraph, explained why INTCoin was created.
"We think privacy is one of the most significant qualities of digital currencies, but a lot of projects provide the solutions to non-existent problems and neglect this aspect," Evers said. "From our side, we think that user's private payment information has to remain private in all meanings."
Before the launch of the INTCoin currency, the team is undertaking three presale stages. Phase one has ended while phase two is due to end on May 13, which will see the start of phase three, finishing on June 5. At the time of writing, the total number of coins purchased amounts to 1,701,874.45 on the current exchange rate of 2,799 INT for 1 BTC.
During all presale periods, the team expects to sell about five mln coins with the presale money going toward the development of the technology to the point of release and team growth.
Complete anonymity
One of the key advantages highlighted by INTCoin creators is its protocol AniNote, which, according to Evers, is an improvement on the CryptoNote protocol, which allows the creation of completely anonymous egalitarian cryptocurrencies.
Monero, which has seen a rapid expansion in growth since its development, is one digital currency that uses CryptoNote - Dash is another. Monero is thought to be so popular within the digital currency space because it offers unique privacy features that make it completely anonymous and almost untraceable. However, by upgrading the ring signature within the CryptoNote protocol, AniNote eliminates the possibility of identifying a specific user.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Mikhael Klirond, from INTCoin, said that the currency differs from others such as Monero because it utilizes a multichannel signature.
"[The] multichannelling option allows [the] involvement of several nodes for coin mixing in a process of signing a single user transaction," Klirond said. "It allows the highest level of coin mixing with a large number of the system's nodes involved."
Value among miners and simple users of currency
While there are numerous altcoins on the market already, the team working on the launch of INTCoin believe that the product they have will provide the ease and accessibility to users and miners that they are searching for.
With a team established by several developers with experience in providing financial technology solutions to the private banking sphere in the East-Asia region, some of the ways they aim to increase value is through a hybrid, proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm that delivers good rewards to miners with each block being created every 45-55 seconds.
The team has also simplified the process of becoming a PoS holder by reducing the compulsory portion of holding coins. Furthermore, it's believed and hoped that the currency's anonymity will attract users who are keen to remain private when using digital currencies, thus helping to increase the value of it.
As the INTCoin is limited, over a 70-year period there will be about 91 mln coins issued. Klirond explained that the PoW miner's reward will account for 47 percent or 42.7 mln coins while the PoS holder's reward will amount to 40 percent or 36.4 mln coins. The initial budget will be 4.5 percent of the amount of coins and the developing budget will account for the remaining 8.5 percent.
According to Klirond, the coins issued will decrease by three percent every 180 days and about 5.9 percent each year.
"Stable reward decreasing is [an] attractive scheme both for miners and holders," he said. "This [makes it easy] to predict possible rewards to one single miner and not to have imbalance and centralization in mining power after halving or abrupt reward decreasing each period."
No scalability issues
Unlike Bitcoin, which is currently going through scalability problems that is splitting the community in two, INTCoin sees no threat of this with its coin for years to come. It is only through the understanding of Bitcoin's scalability problems that they undertook steps to increase the number of transactions per second in the network to between 42 and 50, states Klirond.
"[During] the next several years of INTCoin development, we don't have any need to scale the network by providing sidechains, increasing Blockchain size, using payment channels or other solutions," he added.