September is in full swing and is starting to heat up, with the end of the summer season activity in the markets.
Will this be the season that altcoins rise to prominence? Keep an eye on the volume and chatter and you never know – this week’s gamble could be next month’s killer use case for digital currency.
Pinkcoin and Sync team up
Two prominent altcoins have recently established a partnership, setting the stage for long-term cooperation on both services and broader project support.
The teams behind Sync and pinkcoin have entered into a new agreement in which some of the investor benefits given to Sync users will also be extended to those who stake certain amounts of PINK. This includes enrollment in the membership program offered by the Sync Foundation, the trade organization built around the Sync project, and discounts on the group’s upcoming cryptocurrency gathering in Las Vegas scheduled for later this year.
Cooperation between coins is not new, though past examples like UNOCS have demonstrated that there are limits to broad organizations formed by ostensibly competing coins.
But according to pinkcoin developer CryptoCayce, pinkcoin and Sync have much to gain from working together. Calling the partnership a “win-win situation”, he told CoinDesk:
“Pink and Sync are not in competition in the same space within the altcoin world since Pink is so abundant with about 364 million coins and Sync is so scarce with about 1,100 coins we view Pink as having day-to-day usage whereas Sync is effectively the gold reserve.”
The pinkcoin team is currently working on the beta version of its online poker platform, and the partnership adds a level of support to the project. Among the services offered to eligible pinkcoin holders is a webinar with poker professional Danny Johnson.
Dogecoin web app Backslash enters beta Monday
Some have called dogecoin an easy way to get into digital currency, owing to its ease of use, robust community and family friendly image. One of the goals of the project is to introduce people to cryptocurrency who aren’t necessarily familiar with the technology.
Backslash, which began development earlier this summer, is looking to make it even simpler to send DOGE from one person to another. The platform is an HTML 5 web app that hosts a series of wallets for users who want to quickly send DOGE to others, and will be entering public beta this Monday.
Users can send dogecoins via email or social media accounts, enabling recipients to create their own wallet via Backslash’s service. The team behind the project said that they took a similar approach to Coinbase in terms of coin management, which keeps their transactions off the block chain and, as a result, free.
CoinDesk spoke with Paul Benigeri and Roneil Rumburg, the co-creators of the web platform, who said that the goal is to make it easy to tip or donate dogecoin, which are arguably two of the key use cases for the coin.
While the infrastructure appears simple, the team goes to great lengths to make sure that private keys are kept away from potential fraudulent access. Rumberg explained that transactions are signed on a computer that is partitioned from the Internet, using a separate device to actually broadcast the transactions.
Rumburg told CoinDesk:
“What we’re trying to do there is air-gap the keys from the Internet.”
Though still in its early stages, the community reactions to Backslash’s alpha were mostly positive. According to Benigeri, the public beta will draw from past participants as well as those in the DOGE community that have been waiting for broader access.
Darkcoin undergoes anonymity review
The darkcoin development team has been working on a new version of DarkSend, its transaction anonymizing mechanism that helped spark a boom in production of anon-style altcoins.
DarkSend+ was submitted for review to cryptocurrency expert Kristov Atlas, who later drafted a full summary of his findings.
The move is not a new one. Other coins built on the basis of anonymity have been subjected to public coin reviews, and most of these undertakings are intended to prove the veracity of the anonymizing mechanisms.
In the case of Atlas’ examination, he found that while there are vulnerabilities to certain types of attacks, darkcoin’s approach to hiding transactions works.
Darkcoin developer Evan Duffield noted in a response to Atlas’ report that some of the identified weaknesses have already been addressed. He acknowledged that some approaches, including those that target masternodes, are capable of succeeding.
However, he reiterated that DarkSend achieves its stated goals, explaining:
“Darkcoin solves the anonymity problem by making the block chain a fog. There are very few practical ways to attack our system, and at it’s core, most of the attacks listed were based solely on the fact that the merged transactions were using only two participants while in the test environment. This has always been a known issue and never was intended to be used beyond testing.”
Strange alt of the week
The plethora of altcoins in existence has given rise to certain projects, both serious and light-hearted, to somehow reduce the considerable supply through redemptive or outright destructive means.
While not the first to suggest using a proof-of-burn mechanism to produce coins in a network, ÇoinProLite is perhaps the most outlandishly presented as demonstrated by its Bitcoin Talk forum post.
Using a commonly attributed (if not decidedly scatalogical) term to denote coins that are of a poor quality, the ÇoinProLite developer says that the altcoin community at-large can help lessen or eliminate coins that are no longer in use, and that many a so-called bagholder can escape their “dire positions” with ÇoinProLite.
For a sales pitch that can only truly be experienced rather than described, ÇoinProLite has won this week’s Strange Alt of the Week award.
ÇoinProLite is expected to have a max supply of roughly 2.6 billion coins, though the final amount could change depending on the number of coins burned in the process. The coin’s “innards and guts”, in the words of its developer, provide multiple proofing systems, including a staking mechanism that generates a small interest rate.
Despite the loquacious style of the developer’s posts, the person behind the project seems to want to create a more inclusive environment for whatever community may emerge.
The developer says:
“Bear in mind for you guys sitting on the sidelines, there’s plenty of room for maneuverability if there’s some aspects you’ll like to see incorporated that I’ve failed to mention or thought of yet, but suffice to say this’ll be built with your best interest in mind, along with as much transparency as possible, allowing you to even dictate the terms. Simply voice your opinion, whereupon a dialog will ensue to further the cause.”
Images via Shutterstock, Bitcoin Talk
Have a tip about a notable happening in the altcoin world? Email CoinDesk at stan@coindesk.com.
Disclaimer: This article should not be viewed as an endorsement. Please do your own extensive research before you consider investing in the altcoin space.