Cryptocurrencies have a long and storied history, even if DeFi, DEXs, and NFTs take up all the headlines these days. Some currencies, even those outside the major ones, go back many years, and their development has evolved to keep up with new technological ideas.
Electra Coin is one of those projects. With nearly five years in the market, the asset has undergone quite a few significant changes as it contends with a new crypto environment.
What Is Electra Coin?
Put simply, Electra Coin is a project that focuses on building a global payments system, with the ECA coin at the heart of its operations. The original idea was to create a system where customers, merchants, and everyday users could use the Electra Coin payments system for almost any day-to-day transaction.
The project was founded in 2017 and has undergone several reworkings to get where it is today. The current list of objectives, as stated in the latest whitepaper release, prioritizes three tasks:
- Designing and building a cryptocurrency that remains at the cutting edge of technological developments
- Creating a financial ecosystem that its stakeholders can rely on
- Ensuring decentralization so that the community can have their say in the project's future development.
The Electra Coin project does not focus on particular niche use cases. Rather, it wants to build the best possible network for everyday payments on the network. Granted, it is up against some tough competitors with respect to its use case.
However, before dismissing Electra Coin, we should at least understand how it works and the features that distinguish it from other projects within the sector.
What Technical Choices Did Electra Coin Make?
The main features that set Electra Coin apart have to do with its technical design. It was through this design that it hoped to make its ECA coin suitable for everyday payments. Electra Coin initially started as a Proof of Work-based network. However, in 2017, it shifted to Proof of Stake.
Electra Coin makes use of a blockchain algorithm called NIST 5, which was developed following a 5-year study by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The blockchain has a confirmation/block time of 64 seconds with a block size of 10 MB. It also supports atomic swaps and the Lightning Network.
It can approximately execute 1,600 transactions per second with SegWit. Transactions are claimed to cost 0.000001 ECA, which is near negligible.
All of these technical designs are aimed to facilitate an asset that can support a global merchants and payments ecosystem. To that end, Electra Coin does have a few interesting features.
What Sets Electra Coin Apart?
To support its goal of becoming a global payments system, the team has focused on a few key priorities. However, all of that wouldn't be feasible without fundamental network changes. In 2019, it underwent a fork to upgrade this to Proof-of-Stake v3.0e, which made security and general improvements. One of the ways it did this was by introducing considerations for transaction depth in the stalking model.
The staking rewards of the PoSv3e mechanism encourages users to stay connected to the network. If a transaction has remained unspent for 12 hours, it is eligible to be selected to earn a staking reward and a block. The user's reward is then calculated based on a formula. If they aren't connected, they can't receive this extra reward.
Of course, the network is also more environmentally friendly because it is PoS-based. The team explicitly wanted to move away from cryptocurrency mining for this purpose. Furthermore, the latter, combined with the Lightning Network and SegWit, greatly increased the throughput of the network.
Without this additional throughput, Electra Coin wouldn't be able to create a family of products that it intends to offer as an all-encompassing ecosystem. This includes an Electra Coin wallet on all devices, merchant applications like plugins for eCommerce products, merchant mobile applications, point-of-sale terminals, and centralized online payment gateways.
But still, Electra Coin is currently undergoing massive changes. The new team that has formed is deliberating how to proceed with the project, which is what the next section covers.
Electra Coin Is Undergoing Massive Changes
It's worth talking about how Electra Coin has changed over the years. The project has come a long way, so it's important to note how it plans to change things up in the future.
Between 2017 and late 2020, Electra Coin was focused on its old agenda. It started out as a PoW network that eventually switched to PoS, undergoing a few forks and upgrades before the new project was announced in November 2020.
After that, since January 2021, Electra continued — but didn't really have a team. A few months later, in April 2021, a new team was announced, making themselves responsible for the growth of the project moving. However, this new team hasn't laid out its development plans yet.
As for its potential as a means of everyday payment, the future of Electra Coin remains to be seen. There are several newer projects out there that already give the market mainstays like Bitcoin and Litecoin more of a competition. The Electra Coin price and success will depend on its ability to bolster its technical infrastructure to support everyday payments.
How To Buy Electra Coin
The question of how to buy Electra Coin is simple enough — you can buy it as you would any other asset. However, the question of where to buy Electra Coin is a little more challenging, as the asset is only available on only a few exchanges.
You can buy the ECA coin on Crex24, Coinfalcon, STEX, and C-Patex. Liquidity on this asset doesn't seem to be too high, so keep that in mind. ECA is also available on Komodo Wallet — a non-custodial wallet and cross-chain/cross-protocol decentralized exchange rolled into one application. This makes Komodo Wallet an ideal Electra Coin exchange and Electra Coin wallet.
A Long Road Ahead for Electra Coin
Electra Coin is quite an old asset that is attempting to compete with newer assets. Its use case of becoming a coin for everyday payments will require some stellar features in order for it to become more widely used as a viable option. As it stands, an Electra Coin review would boil down to it being a middling competitor to more established assets.
However, the new team is reviewing how the asset and network could be improved upon. There is hope in that, and by integrating more recent technical developments, the asset could perhaps make a big splash with a new identity. That remains to be seen, but it is very well possible.
ECA Available on Komodo Wallet
Komodo Wallet is a non-custodial wallet, crypto bridge, and peer-to-peer (P2P) decentralized exchange that provides native support for the Electra blockchain and the ECA coin.
Users can HODL and trade ECA on Komodo Wallet along with other popular cryptocurrencies such as BTC, ETH, DOGE, MATIC, and much more.