What is Electroneum (ETN)? | An All-Encompassing Guide

What Is Electroneum?

Electroneum is a mobile-first cryptocurrency aimed at mass adoption. The Electroneum team makes acquiring cryptocurrency as simple as downloading an app. By breaking down the barriers around acquiring it, the Electroneum team believes they can spread their coin far and wide.

There are countless people that want to buy various coins but aren’t willing to send awkward selfies with their passport to a website they know nothing about. There are also the issues of linking bank accounts and paying shockingly high fees. Electroneum feels they have the solution and in this guide, we’ll go over how they aim to bring cryptocurrency to the masses.

In this guide we’ll be covering the following:

• How Does Electroneum Work? 
• About Electroneum
• Trading History
• Where Can You Buy Electroneum?
• Where Can You Store Electroneum?
• Conclusion
• Additional Resources

How Does Electroneum Work?

Electroneum, also referred to as ETN, is built off the Monero codebase to allow for transactions on a decentralized blockchain. Like Monero, Electroneum has some built-in privacy features. One of the main criticisms of Bitcoin is that the balance of every wallet address is public and easily searchable.  This problem is solved with Electroneum’s stealth address, a one-time public key that “prevents recipient’s funds from being linked with their wallet. That address can be audited by a 3rd party to prove the transaction occurred (with the sender sharing their public view key).

The recipient gets their funds through their wallet’s private view key which scans the blockchain. Once detected and retrieved by the wallet, a single-use private key is created (corresponding with senders public key).

The recipient can now spend those funds using their private spend key. This occurs without the sender, recipient, nor the amount transacted publicly linked. If you’d like to read more about the privacy technology behind Monero and Electroneum, we suggest our Monero guide here.

Transactions are relatively fast with dynamic fees based on the level of traffic on the network. You can check out the recent blocks here. The vast majority of transactions have less than 0.2 ETN in total fees and new blocks are added every minute or so.

The Electroneum codebase tries to avoid powerful ASICs having a huge advantage over CPU miners. The mining utilizes a memory bound algorithm to try and encourage CPU mining, giving average users easy access to ETN. The ability to give everyone access to this coin will be a recurring theme throughout this guide.

Mobile App

Electroneum’s greatest differentiator is using a mobile app to bring in new users. It’s already available both for Android and iOS.

Mobile app login

The app provides access to a digital wallet and the ability to send and receive ETN. For extra security, you also have the option to create offline paper wallets. It’s recommended you spread your coins out across several paper wallets in case you lose one.

Manage your ETN funds

The app incentivizes you to share your knowledge of Electroneum with the world. Anyone who invites five friends to join the app is entered into a contest to win 5000 ETN. The new users you invite are also eligible to win.

Referral benefits

Mobile Mining

The most interesting feature is the ability to perform mobile mining. The app will allow your phone’s CPU to engage in simulated mining. This doesn’t cause your phone to heat up or lose significant battery life. The mining also uses a negligible amount of your internet data. Though your mobile mining won’t actually help confirm new blocks on the blockchain, you’ll still receive rewards.

The app requires the use of your CPU to teach you about the connection between the power of your computer and the ability to mine. Eventually, they hope to convert some of the mobile miners to full miners on a computer. Using the phone’s CPU also prevents people from simulating thousands of iterations of the app on a computer to receive free coins.

The mobile miner

But why pay people to do virtual mining? “The mobile miners bring the utility of viral marketing to Electroneum. It’s important to remember they aren’t bringing blockchain utility, they’re bringing a different utility – they’re bringing on users at a ridiculously low CPA and allowing Electroneum to have viral growth.” 

The app now has 1.5 million registered users on Android and iOS and continue to grow.

Coin Supply and Sustainability

The team reserved 4.4 billion ETN for investors in the ICO. Those who shared the ICO and translated relevant information received a combined 20 million ETN. The core 12 person team also reserved 20 million ETN for funding purposes. There’s a circulating supply almost 8.5 billion ETN that will eventually reach a maximum supply of 21 billion ETN through rewards to the miners.

21 billion coins were chosen over Bitcoin’s 21 million for psychological reasons. They felt users would be more satisfied earning full coins as rewards and would prefer making purchases in integer values. After all of the coins are mined, miners will still be able to profit by collecting the transaction fees.

About Electroneum

History of Electroneum

The Electroneum ICO reached their hard cap of 40 million dollars during fundraising. Their Github release was November 1st. However, before the launch of the mobile app, they were hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The team had to shut down their servers and work over 26 hours straight to deal with the attack.

Eventually, after some delay, ICO investors were distributed their coins and Electroneum continued working towards their goal of spreading ETN to the masses. Over 690 million ETN were transferring during the first 24 hours, requiring only 430 ETN in fees.

Sunday 18.41 Coding as fast as we can. Working to get this live all weekend. Thanks for patience, Hope for good news this evening! pic.twitter.com/wuZQZGoHUJ

— electroneum (@electroneum) November 5, 2017

Electroneum Team and Progress

Electroneum calls itself the first British based cryptocurrency. The team of 18, based in Kent, is led by Richard Ells, the co-founder of SiteWizard and Retortal.com. James Atkinson is the head of the Electroneum Development Team with over 10 years of experience. He’s leading the charge on the Electroneum App.

Dean Cole, on the other hand, is known as the “member of the team with the least sleep… consuming giant quantities of caffeine.” He maintains and develops the servers required for mining and transacting in Electroneum.

Part of the Electroneum Team

Partnerships

The Electroneum team actively seeks out partnerships to further spread ETN. They’ve partnered with XIUS, a telecommunication payment giant. Electroneum wishes to use this partnership to promote the use of their mobile mining app as a way to offset the costs of owning a smartphone.

BMedia, a Japanese based social media and e-commerce company, has also partnered up with Electroneum. BMedia’s 500,000 Facebook followers and monthly reach of 10 million users should play a key role in ETN’s marketing plan.

The company Fanfare gives out prizes and rewards to users that upload their own videos about the products they love. Electroneum has partnered with them to hopefully one day reward their users with ETN.

Online Gaming

The Electroneum team hopes to replace in-game currencies, such as World of Warcraft gold, with ETN. Imagine all of the completed quests and sold items paying out in a currency that can easily be converted to other cryptocurrencies or fiat. This would not only encourage players to play more, but the gaming company could charge fees on depositing and withdrawing ETN from their ecosystem.

Creating a game that advertises ETN as an in-game currency could also prove to be an effective marketing tool. One mobile game involves trying to fly a rocketship to the moon while collecting ETN. When the player dies, they have to watch a video advertisement to help fund the ETN rewarded to the users.  

Gambling

There are several gambling websites already accepting Bitcoin, but the problem is that it’s hard for most people to obtain it. The majority of online gambling takes place outside of America, where it’s especially hard to acquire Bitcoin. Most countries do not have access to Coinbase or Gemini and their local exchanges often have 7% fees or higher. Electroneum once again hopes to reduce friction and encouraging gambling sites to accept the currency.

Electroneum Mining

As mentioned previously, due to the ASIC resistant nature of the Electroneum mining algorithm, it’s still feasible to mine coins with just your CPU. You can complete a quick download and join a mining pool right away here. The average block reward is about 9,500 ETN.

Roadmap

The Electroneum timeline is quite extensive. Some interesting developments for the rest of 2018 include a community application, gig economy website, and instant payment solution. There isn’t, however, detailed guidelines beyond this or for time horizons in 2019. 

Latest roadmap goals for the Electroneum team

Trading History

ETN’s ICO price was one cent. Those who managed to sell at last years highs, could have made returns in excess of 15 times their initial investment. Unfortunately, even the good news of the mobile miner and iOS version release have done nothing to stop the steep decline of ETN’s price in 2018.

The team has recently announced an exciting development which will allow Electroneum to be KYC compliant and provide better payment integration with existing businesses. Most company news, however, will most likely not move the price since ETN is still a small cap coin. When the market recovers on the back of Bitcoin we may see life again for ETN.

Where Can You Buy Electroneum?

ETN was initially only available on Cryptopia. Fortunately, KuCoin has since picked it up for listing which is a good sign for improving the liquidity in the coin. In addition, there are some smaller exchanges where it can be traded, though with only a few buyers and sellers, you may have a hard time getting your trade filled.

Where Can You Store Electroneum?

You can find the Electroneum Wallet Manager here.

Wallet Manager

Through the wallet manager, you can set up online or offline wallets. The online wallet you register is accessible through the app using your same login details. You can follow this detailed guide from the team on how to create, store and secure your offline wallet.

Conclusion

If you are new to crypto and don’t like the hassle of registering with exchanges, then downloading the Electroneum app and trying to win free coins may be your best entry into this world. Furthermore, if loud, expensive ASICs intimidate you, then check out the Electroneum CPU mining solution. Even though Electroneum is named after the electron, it’s hard to be negative about its future.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated by Ryan Smith on 11.23.2018 to reflect the recent changes of the project.

Additional Resources

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