Let’s face it: there’s a sea of altcoins debuting practically every month. Now that cryptocurrency has made its mark for more than five years, the technology is getting more sophisticated and easier to produce. That being said, it doesn’t always mean new altcoins make a significant impact.
With new altcoins premiering all the time, it’s hard to break the mold and catch some eyes. But NeuCoin seems to be doing alright with that, as they’re launching their crypto-currency on the heels of $2.25 million in funding from major tech industry giants.
Before launching, NeuCoin reached out to “strategic angels,” inviting them to invest in their vision of mainstream adoption. The return on those invitations is a bit of a staggering list. Not only are Jackson Palmer, creator of Dogecoin, and Brock Pierce of the Bitcoin Foundation advisors to the NeuCoin team, but they also have a list of people involved that put their money on the line.
- Patrik Stymne – co-founder of King (Candy Crush Saga)
- Rob Goldman – head of growth at Facebook
- Emil Michael – senior vice president of business at Uber
- Henrik Kjellberg – president of Hotwire
- Alex Norstrom – vice president of growth at Spotify (strategic advisor to NeuCoin)
In addition to those strategic angels, NeuCoin has also partnered with MondoMedia, YouTube’s most-viewed animation channel — touting more than two billion views — Jango, an online music service, and RadioAirplay, a music artist promotion company with 250,000 musicians.
All that work prior to a launch is unheard of for most altcoins. Normally, there are a lot of promises that never come to fruition, but rarely are their serious partnerships spread across multiple industries right out of the gate.
The NeuCoin Specs
With a big opening, speculators can only hope that NeuCoin has a big vision and plan. According to the team, they plan on focusing their efforts on micropayments, which makes sense when looking at their angels.
NeuCoin utilizes proof-of-stake technology, and plan on distributing their currency to all participants who help increase its utility, growth and value..
Their plan is to give coins away for free to get consumers started, along with rewarding those that recruit more people. Then, some coins will be given to companies that accept micropayments in Neucoin, along with exchanges and payment processors. Finally, an undisclosed amount, at this time, seem to have been sold to investors, with the proceeds from their investment going toward user acquisition and utility development.
“Strategic currency distribution is a huge advantage over Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work coins,” said Dan Kaufman, one of NeuCoin’s co-founders. “Instead of handing all the currency to miners, where its value is essentially spent on computing and electricity costs, NeuCoin channels the value of the currency into user growth and projects that make the currency useful for regular consumers.”
According to NeuCoin, the utility and growth will be funded by three separate non-profit foundations, based in the Isle of Man, which we all know is incredibly digital currency-friendly. But as we have seen with bitcoin, having foundations making decisions on behalf of the user base makes it hard for crypto-currencies to feel truly decentralized. It’s a debate that wages on to this day.
NeuCoin is also premined, another debate that’s currently being discussed at length by various members of the digital currency world. While some feel premining is necessary to reward developers, others think it’s downright dirty after seeing countless scams launch with premines.
Still, some people are perfectly fine with a premine — as mentioned above, it’s a debate that’s currently being discussed.
According to NeuCoin, the premining and rate of production are as follows:
“Three billion NeuCoins will be pre-mined and allocated to the foundations (83.3 percent), the founding team (6.7 percent), and the initial investors (10 percent).
Over 10 years, the supply of NeuCoins will grow to approximately 100 billion, primarily from PoS awards that steadily decline from 100 percent to 6 percent per year. After 10 years, the supply of coins will grow by 2 percent to 4 percent per year, based on the number of coins staked by miners. These high PoS rates reward early NeuCoin adopters and address a critical security issue of previous PoS coins by incentivizing PoS miners to stake many coins and operate many nodes.“
What do you think of NeuCoin? Does it have the power to back up the developers’ promises? Let us know in the comments below!
Pictures from Pixabay and Wired Archives