Viacoin was introduced in July 2014. Viacoin integrates counterparty assets on top of a Bitcoin based blockchain with a system called the ClearingHouse protocol to allow the building of decentralized exchanges. Viacoin was created to avoid issues of Bitcoin blockchain bloat and make decentralized exchange and asset issuance practical with 24 second block times drastically improving performance. Bitcoin reduced OP_RETURN data storage from 80 bytes to 40 bytes forcing counterparty to switch encoding to multisig. By extending the OP_RETURN in the Viacoin blockchain to 80 bytes, bloat and tx sizes are reduced by avoiding a multi-signature workaround. Peter Todd has been hired by Viacoin as Chief Scientist to continue his research of Tree Chains. Viacoin has plans to implement Tree Chains to solve the centralized mining and scalability issues of Bitcoin mining and also to tackle decentralized identity and reputation.
- Block generation: 24 seconds
- Total Currency: 92 million coins by 2026
- Consensus algorithm: scrypt Proof-of-Work
- Market capitalization: $2,000,000 USD in August 2014