Artbyte (ABY) is a well-established digital currency dedicated to art, artists, and all kinds of creative pursuits. In fact, the cryptographic construct of “Artbyte” predates non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by nearly a decade! The legacy Artbyte chain, based on Scrypt block validation, was a pioneer of fast, secure transactions. However, because it was designed with fast transaction (and block generation) times, the original Artbyte was inherently vulnerable to both 51% attacks and unintentional forks. This, in turn, affected its reliability and adoption.
In response, EWMCI-led group of developers implemented a critical code upgrade in early 2022. This important upgrade significantly reduced the probability of a 51% attack by introducing hybrid PoW (Proof-of-Work, Scrypt-based) and PoS (Proof-of-Stake) block validation methodology. Following successful rollout of the upgraded code, the new Artbyte is able to provide all of the features of the legacy Artbyte (e.g., fast transaction / block times) while ensuring enhanced blockchain security. At the same time, the emission model was reformed to reflect contemporary supply-demand considerations inherent to a fully mature blockchain. Thus, annual emission of new Artbyte was reduced from >2 million to fewer than 50,000 coins / year.
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) refers to the use of currency itself (e.g., your ownership of Artbyte) to achieve certain pre-defined goals. In Artbyte network, PoS is used to provide minting and transaction processing alongside the PoW capability to do the same. This results in added redundancy and increases overall blockchain security. The latter is strengthened because transactions can now be processed regardless of any PoW activity. At the same time, even massive amount of PoW “hashing power” will not be sufficient to “take over” the network without also owning more than 50% of all the coins being staked.
Because at the “network-level” there will are multiple active participants who “stake” their coins, a significant number of coins (e.g., collateral) will be present on deposit (and thus not free to move or be spent). This, in turn, stabilizes the network and protects it from malignant, third-party actors by making attacks costly, impractical, and in effect self-destructive.
The enhanced energy efficiency of Artbyte refers primarily to the long-term benefits of PoS. This is because Artbyte is not dependent on the use of energy-hungry PoW coin-generating application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), thus reducing the overall network energy consumption and reducing its environmental footprint and impact.
At the same time, PoW is the most practical way of supporting the early phase of minting of a cryptocurrency like Artbyte, as well as introducing an added layer of network security. Because of this, our developer team decided to keep PoW as part of Artbyte’s hybrid design. To further optimize energy efficiency, we decided to continue to utilize the currently utilized and more environmentally friendly Scrypt algorithm.
There are three main ways of acquiring Artbyte (ABY): [1] Purchase with fiat currency using a specialized vendor, such as BexCrypto; [2] Exchanging other cryptocurrencies for ZET on platforms such as FreiExchange, FreiXLite, XeggeX, or Komodo Wallet; and [3] Selling goods or services for ABY, using platforms such as the EWMCI Shop.
Important note: There are unreliable and/or outright fraudulent exchanges out there. Unless specifically verified and pre-vetted by our team (e.g., LISTED ONLY HERE ON THIS WEBSITE) please DO NOT engage in any trading outside of the EWMCI-certified list of exchanges (AtomicDEX, FreiExchange, and FreiXLite). Trading outside of these four exchanges will likely result in LOSSES and is outside of the scope of our team’s influence due to regulatory and legal jurisdictional limitations.
There are several ways of securely storing Artbyte (ABY): [1] Our desktop Qt wallet ; [2] The state-of-the-art Komodo Wallet; and [3] The Gemmer Wallet by Primecoin. and [4] Wally.ID multi-wallet. In addition, we are working on our own, native EWMCI wallet platform called CoinMunityWallet. Additional resources and links can be found on the EWMCI Resources Page.
Important note: The two-year migration period from legacy to new Artbyte chain was completed on September 1, 2022. After this date, all legacy coins (addresses starting with “A…”) are considered retired and only new coins (addresses starting with “C…”) will be supported.