Nano (cryptocurrency)

• 1. Introduction

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  Nano is a cryptocurrency that processes payments without charging a fee and confirms them in under one second. Colin LeMahieu launched it in October 2015 specifically to address what Bitcoin had failed to solve at scale: mounting costs and sluggish confirmation times. The design he chose was unlike anything else in digital finance at the time. Within a few years, Nano would draw global attention, though not only for its technical merits. A major theft would become one of the currency's most visible crises. Before that, Nano had to come into existence, and its creator's first move was to give the currency away for free.

• 2. Free Money, Fixed Supply

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  Colin LeMahieu began developing RaiBlocks, as Nano was first known, in 2014. A year into that work, he opened a captcha-secured internet faucet. Anyone who solved the captcha could receive RaiBlocks at no charge. The faucet ran until exactly 126,248,289 units had been claimed, then closed in 2017. Adding a developer fund of 7,000,000 units brought the total fixed supply to 133,248,297. That number has never changed. In 2018, the project took the name Nano. Every unit distributed through that faucet would eventually be tracked by a ledger design unlike any other in the industry.

• 3. The Block-Lattice

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  Of all the cryptocurrencies that preceded Nano, none used a directed acyclic graph as its underlying data structure. In most payment networks, every transaction joins a single shared chain of blocks. Nano fragments that model. Every account holds its own independent blockchain. A single block records exactly one transaction. It also carries the account's running balance at that moment. This design is called a block-lattice. Two accounts settling a payment between themselves never compete for space on a common ledger. Their chains update independently, unaffected by activity on any other account in the network. That separation also changes how Nano reaches agreement across a decentralized network without any central coordinator.

• 4. Consensus by Weight

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  Nano's approach to confirming transactions resembles proof of stake in its structure. Each account carries a voting weight equal to the amount of Nano it holds. Accounts do not cast votes themselves. Each one delegates its weight to a representative node of its choice. Those nodes vote on transactions on behalf of their delegators. The first transaction to gather 67% of the total voting weight is confirmed as valid, and any competing transaction is rejected. That threshold matters most in a double-spend attempt. When someone broadcasts two contradictory payments from the same account at once, nodes vote on both. The first to reach 67% wins. That precision in dispute resolution would be tested when 17 million Nano went missing from an Italian exchange in 2018.

• 5. The BitGrail Reckoning

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  On the 9th of February 2018, BitGrail, an Italian cryptocurrency exchange, announced it had been hacked and would shut down. Users who had stored funds on the platform found themselves unable to access them. Victims banded together and filed a class-action lawsuit against BitGrail's owner, Francesco Firano, seeking to recover their losses in the Florence Courthouse. In January 2019, the court found BitGrail guilty. The exchange had failed to implement adequate safeguards and had not reported its losses as they occurred. Italy's Network Operations Command investigated the case separately. That police unit alleged that Firano had personally committed fraud. Nano's price had been trading around ten dollars before the theft. Afterward, it dropped to one dollar. The faucet that had distributed Nano's entire supply had closed in 2017, before any of that legal reckoning had begun.