Robert has reported for a variety of international publications including the Associated Press, The Guardian, Vice, and Decrypt. Current areas of interest include the political economy of technology, cryptocurrencies, and privacy. Robert has a Bachelor of Science from UCL, and a Master's degree from the University of Oxford's Internet Institute.
What is COTI?
COTI is the native token of Coti, a high-speed, low-cost blockchain protocol designed for payments. The name stands for Currency of the Internet, and it markets itself as a direct competitor to Ethereum.
Launched in 2019, the Coti blockchain runs on a technology called directed acyclic graph (DAG). A DAG is a database of transactions, similar to a blockchain. But while a blockchain groups transactions into blocks and then links them together into a chain, a DAG records transactions as vertices, where each sits atop the last. Transactions are added to DAGs like branches are added to a tree: they can sprout in any direction, making the network less rigid than a blockchain.
Coti is different from typical DAGs because it supports independent clusters of DAGs. This means that clusters can zoom ahead to validate transactions by themselves rather than waiting for the rest of the network to catch up. COTI aims to eventually process more than 100,000 transactions per second. By contrast, Ethereum, the most popular blockchain for applications, currently processes about 14 transactions per second.
The network is small. At the end of May 2022, the COTI coin had a market capitalization of $1457 million.
What can you do with COTI?
Within the Coti blockchain network, COTI is the currency used to settle transactions — or pay the blockchain’s validators to move funds from one wallet to another.
COTI also allows you to stake its token — locking it up within a smart contract to validate transactions — on the network to earn rewards from its treasury.
Since COTI is also issued as an ERC-20 token (Ethereum), BEP-20 token (BNB Smart Chain), and BEP2 token (BNB Beacon Chain), you can stake it in DeFi protocols native to those blockchains. These protocols let you earn additional rewards, but they are experimental and yields are highly variable.
As with most crypto, you can also use it for speculation.
How can you buy COTI?
You can buy COTI through a crypto brokerage, a centralized crypto exchange, or a decentralized exchange.
Wealthsimple Crypto is an example of a brokerage. When you buy COTI from Wealthsimple Crypto, Wealthsimple acts as an intermediary, facilitating the buying and selling for you. All you have to do is sign up for an account (Canadian residents only), then connect a payment method.
The second method is to use a cryptocurrency exchange company. Crypto exchanges let you trade COTI with other users via a “matching engine” — a piece of software that matches buyers with sellers on a centralized order book (not through a blockchain).
The third method is a decentralized exchanges (DEX). DEXes are a little like cryptocurrency exchanges, but they execute trades using computer code called smart contracts that run on blockchain. Instead of an order book matching buyers and sellers, most decentralized exchanges let traders swap in and out of vast reserves of tokens called liquidity pools.
COTI is issued as an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token, meaning you can swap it on Ethereum’s most popular decentralized exchange, Uniswap. It’s also issued as a BEP-20 token, allowing you to swap the token on BNB Smart Chain DEXes like PancakeSwap.
To trade on a decentralized exchange, you have to connect an anonymous Web3 wallet, such as MetaMask, to the exchange. You don’t need to provide any formal identification to use them, but you will need to pay a transaction fee in the blockchain’s native currency: ETH for Ethereum and BNB for Binance Smart Chain.
Last Updated June 30, 2022
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