The Ravencoin whitepaper was published by Bruce Fenton, Tron Black and Joel Weight.

They stand out over the majority of the crypto crowd in that they were all seasoned businessmen and developers before they started this project.

Fenton is well known in crypto for being a board member and an executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation from 2015 to 2018. Before crypto, he had a solid career in investment banking as the vice president of Morgan Stanley in the 90s and a managing director of Atlantis Consulting for 13 years. Currently, he works as a managing director of Chainstone Labs, a stealth fintech startup.

Tron Black is a principal software developer with more than 30 years of experience, including leading several software companies as a CEO. He has been working in crypto since 2013 on several ventures including Verified Wallet, CoinCPA and t0. He is currently employed with Medici Ventures, a subsidiary of Overstock.com focused on blockchain technology applications.

Weight is a chief technology officer at Overstock.com, a well known online retailer. Previously, he has also been involved with Medici Ventures in roles of COO and CTO. He is a veteran software developer who started his career after graduating from the University of Utah in 1998 right in the middle of the dotcom bubble.

As a fork of the Bitcoin code, Ravencoin features four key changes: modified issuance schedule (with block reward of 5,000 RVN), block time reduced to one minute, coin supply capped at 21 billion (a thousand times more than BTC) and a mining algorithm (KAWPOW, formerly X16R and X16RV2 respectively) intended to mitigate the centralization of mining caused by ASIC hardware.

Ravencoin aimsto solve the problem of assets transfer and trading over blockchain. Previously, if someone created an asset on the Bitcoin blockchain, it could be accidentally destroyed when someone traded the coins it was created with.

RVN coins are designed as internal currency within the network and must be burnt in order to issue token assets on the Ravenchain. The assets can represent anything: real world custodial objects like gold or physical euros, virtual goods and objects, a share of a project like stocks and securities, airline miles or an hour of someone’s wage, etc.

The planned future versions of Ravencoin protocol will support integrated messaging and voting systems.

Ravencoin insists on being as fair and open as it is possible for a new cryptocurrency. There was no pre-mine, no ICO and no coins were held for developer or founders rewards.

In three years since its inception (as of March 2021), 39% of coins are already mined. The total supply is capped at 21 billion coins.

Ravencoin is a fork of Bitcoin, so it is protected by the power of decentralization and mathematics. It uses a proof-of-work mining algorithm called KAWPOW, which replaced X16R and X16RV2 on May 6, 2020. Not only does this ensure security it is designed to be ASIC resistant.

The X16r algorithm group employed initially uses 16 different hashing algorithms for each mining block, but the order in which they are used is different for every block and is derived from the last 8 bytes of the hash of the previous block. It was thought that the necessity to adapt each cycle did not give ASICs any advantage over CPUs and GPUs. Eventually, however, ASICs for it were created, andRavencoin had to switch to an entirely different algorithm, KAWPOW, which was a slightly modified version of ProgPow, which itself was the evolution of Ethash and is optimised for mining on GPUs.

This, combined with the commitment of fair distribution with no pre-mine is meant to ensure that no single individual or organization will have or be able to have enough hash power to try to attempt a 51% attack or create any sort of artificial market price shocks.

Unfortunately, there was a successful known hack of the Ravencoin blockchain, of which the public was informed about on June 3, 2020. During the attack, hackers managed to instantly mint i315 million RVN coins, which constitutes about 1.5% of Ravencoin’s supply cap of 21 billion. At the moment of the announcement, the price of the stolen RVN was estimated at USD $5.7M. None of the existing coin holders were directly affected by the attack.

RVN is a freely traded coin with pairs against stablecoins, such as Tether (USDT), other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and fiat money.

The top exchanges for trading in Ravencoin are currently Binance, Huobi Global, OKEx, ZG.com, and VCC Exchange. You can find others listed on our crypto exchanges page.

New to crypto and want to know how to buy Bitcoin (BTC) or any other token? Find out the details here.

Learn more about Counterparty, one of the first crypto protocols for assets trading.

Maybe it’s time for a deep dive into Polkadot, a booming multichain protocol that facilitates the cross-chain transfer of any data or assets.

What is ASIC mining?

Want to know how it started? Read our explainer on Bitcoin.

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