Bringing crypto to the world: Snax and Reddcoin analysis

Multiple projects in the blockchain community are trying to achieve widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies through the integration of the social networks together with the blockchain networks. They aim to create “social coin” which would be widely used by the general population. This article is the first part of the series which will look at the different approaches to increasing adoption of the blockchain technology.

Here are some of the problems that people who are unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies face when using blockchain for the first time:

1. The simplicity of use. Crypto today is not easy to use. The UX is not intuitive and there are many steps that people have to take to get and use crypto. For example, creating an Ethereum wallet is far from trivial, then the wallet addresses are impossible to remember, and on top of that, creating transactions and then choosing the gas price for it can confuse people.
2. Cost of transactions, speed, and scalability. To be widely adopted by the general population, the crypto has to offer cheap and fast transaction. It has to be able to handle millions of transactions each day as its audience can reach hundreds of millions of people.
3. Getting tokens. Most people, by now, have heard about cryptocurrency, however, a majority of them has no idea how to get it. If the aim of a token is to be used by a certain community, then people in that community should be able to earn said tokens without having to buy them from an exchange.
4. Narrow use case. Currently, most cryptocurrencies only work as securities. You can trade them, but you have a limited ability to purchase goods and services with them. People should have the ability to perform a wide range of tasks using cryptocurrencies.

In this article, we will look at how to do Reddcoin and Snax attempt to solve these problems.

Here is the technical information about Reddcoin and Snax:

Technical comparison of Snax and Reddcoin

Both of Reddcoin and Snax aim to make digital currencies to be more accessible to the general public. Both try to achieve it by seamlessly integrating blockchain into multiple existing social networks while making transactions fast and cheap. You can read more about Snax token distribution here.

Simplicity of use

Reddcoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies on the market and, from the start, it has branded itself as a social cryptocurrency bringing an idea of creating more recognizable account names to replace standard crypto wallet addresses.

These account names (also known as ReddID) were created to make cryptocurrencies more accessible to the population and the idea has developed further. Right now Reddcoin is working on a way to tie multiple social network account names to their ReddID.

There is one major flaw with this naming system, as it is rather complicated to use (based on the beta as full release version is not yet available). If you are new to crypto here is what you would have to do to get a working ReddID:

1. Create a wallet with Reddcoin.
2. Register on a crypto exchange.
3. Exchange fiat to crypto and get RDD.
4. Download browser extension which creates a separate wallet for you.
5. Pay some RDD to register your ReddID
6. Wait for the network confirmation, or try again if it fails.
7. Bind your social accounts to ReddID.

It does, though, help to make RDD more accessible, as after completing this process you would no longer need to remember lengthy wallet address and you can simply use social account names to send and receive transactions.

With Snax you can begin using a network with a few simple steps:

1. Download browser extension (or mobile app in the future).
2. Get your seed phrase and set a password.
3. Create your Snax account and verify your account by posting a given hash (string of numbers and letters) with your social account.
4. Receive 50 SNAX airdrop for registering

Once you have posted a tweet, everything else is not only automatic but is also free! You will now have an account with Snax blockchain network and a social media account bound to it — you can send and receive transactions using nothing but your friend’s social account name. You can even send a transaction to your friend’s social account if they are not yet on the Snax network! They will receive their funds as soon as they join Snax.

Cost of transactions, speed, and scalability

Reddcoin began as an open source blockchain derived from Litecoin. The first block was released on the 2nd of February 2014 with PoW (Proof of Work) consensus, changing to PoSV consensus on the 2nd of August same year. Reddcoin average transaction fees are currently about 0.04 cents, which is almost nil. However, the transaction price has fluctuated, reaching 60 cents at the beginning of November 2018, even though the prices for RDD were dropping for almost a year by that point. You should expect an average transaction to be processed within 4–12 minutes, which is rather fast, compared to Bitcoin, but is still far from the speed of credit cards.

We have chosen to build our blockchain based on EOS engine to protect our community from having to pay any fees for their transaction, and because of that Snax social transactions are free, and take seconds to confirm.

When it comes to the speed of transactions, Reddcoin can process about 70 transactions per second or 6 million transactions per day. That can be increased in the future by increasing the block size, however, that would burden the network as the overall size of the network would increase as well.

Snax is using one of the most advanced blockchain engines allowing it to have at least 1500 transactions per second which add ups to over 120 million transactions per day. This can also be improved in the future with sharding of different platforms integrations to different sidechains.

Getting tokens

Social cryptocurrency has to have a fair distribution of tokens — everyone should be able to earn it without the need to buy it from someone else or investing in expensive hardware.

Proof of Stake Velocity allows everyone with RDD tokens to earn dividends by staking their tokens. It is not particularly hard to stake tokens, but you have to have some tokens on their core wallet and understand its functionality to be able to do it. You can earn about 5% interest per year on the minimal concurrent balance in your wallet.

Snax uses Delegated Proof of Stake consensus, which allows anyone with 64GB of RAM and 512GB SSD on their computer to become an elected representative for the network and earn a substantial amount of tokens. You would have to convince people to vote for you (amount of voting weight depends on the number of tokens you hold) and the reward is rather large, so you will have a lot of competition, however, that is not the only way to earn tokens with Snax.

In addition, Snax has created a new system to distribute tokens called Publisher Reward, where social influencers are rewarded for their content using a complex evaluating algorithm which you can find here. Anyone with a social influence can earn Publisher Rewards — you do not need to own any Snax beforehand. Since it is absolutely free and very simple to receive Publisher Rewards, it will help to attract social influencers, as they will have a direct financial incentive to join the network, further increasing the rate of adoption of the Snax blockchain.

Narrow use case

Cryptocurrencies have made a lot of headlines last year as a lot of people began trading on Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptos as if they were securities. Although crypto tokens can be used as securities, to have general population use crypto it should have more use cases.

Reddcoin has focused on building its token as tips and donations mechanism for social networks. By having a cheap and fast mechanism for making donations to people, using their social accounts as addresses, Reddcoin should achieve solution to this problem. There is one issue that they need to solve — you can only currently send tips to the people who are already registered with the network, and that limits Reddcoin ability for widespread adoption of this feature.

Snax has solved this problem, as you can send SNAX tokens to everyone using their social account names, even if they are not on the Snax network — people will receive their SNAX as soon as they verify their account. This makes Snax a great tool for donations.

Snax provides developers with smart contracts to develop decentralized applications inside the chain. You can think about Snax like a programmable, trustless financial layer over the public social media. Developers working with the social network can save a lot of resources by using Snax financial structure to build games and platforms that monetize social accounts.

For example, if a developer wants to build a game that uses social media accounts and has some in game transactions that allow users to send each other collectables, they can save a lot of time and resources by using SNAX tokens. Snax provides the code basis for the developer to realize their ideas, and bring new use cases to life.

Conclusion

Both Snax and Reddcoin are trying to bring cryptocurrency closer to the general public, however, they have a different method of solving the problems that arise from that. Reddcoin is an older technology, but it has been tested by time and has a large community behind it. However, we believe that Snax has more modern mechanics that would help it to become the first crypto which will bring decentralized currencies to the wider audience.

Our team believes in the future of social cryptocurrencies, and we would welcome people from Reddcoin community to join us and help us to bring wonders of the blockchain technology to the general population.

You can read more about Snax at our website https://snax.one/, you can engage with our community in our Discord here: https://discord.gg/qygxJAZ and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for instant updates: https://twitter.com/SnaxTeam.

Bringing crypto to the world: Snax and Reddcoin analysis was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.