Komodo was undoubtedly one of the most underrated cryptocurrencies of 2018, even though fundamentally it was one of the soundest projects. The security, privacy advantages and impressive 10k tx/s offered by the KMD platform went largely unnoticed by the market. However, Komodo wasn’t entirely ignored. Within the community and discussions present on the KMD platform were a handful of capable individuals that eventually conceptualized a new and better cryptocurrency, ARRR.
Fundamental
ARRR, or also known as Pirate, is an independent blockchain built as an asset chain to the KMD platform. Designed as a combination of ZEC and XMR, Pirate looks to improve the privacy and security features of XMR whilst fixing the fungibility problem of ZEC through the enforcement of forced shield-transactions.
The issue is that transactions from shielded balances to transparent balances are often the cause of decreased fungibility, as it is possible to identify coin mixing patterns. Concerns are also had about coins being “tainted” by affiliations to past transactions. The solution is to completely prevent this from happening.
This means that Pirate is a forced shield-transactions (z-transactions) only blockchain, making transparent transactions impossible on the Pirate blockchain. The ultimate objective of the project is to be the next-gen privacy cryptocurrency with completely anonymous transactions, except for mining rewards and notary node logs.
As an asset chain of the KMD ecosystem, Pirate also inherits much of Komodo’s features such as Zero Knowledge Privacy and delayed Proof-of-Work (dPoW). Also included, is the ability to backup asset chain records into the Komodo main chain and record them on as a hash on Bitcoin. This effectively enables the asset chain’s records to be then included in the backup that is pushed into the protective hash rate of the main Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain, Bitcoin.
This is made possible due to KMD being a fork of ZEC, which was a fork of BTC. In this way, the asset chain records can be protected by the largest hash-rate available on one blockchain. To compromise an asset chain that is employing Komodo’s dPoW protocol, the attacker would have to destroy all existing copies of the asset chain, all copies of the KMD main chain, and the accompanying PoW network (Bitcoin) into which the dPoW backups are inserted.
A visualized schematic of dPoW protocol.
Komodo’s security service is performed by notary nodes, chosen through a stake-weighted vote. These notary nodes have the option to switch notarization to another PoW network besides BTC if needed. For an example, in the event where worldwide miners’ hashing power changes to that of another PoW network, or the cost of notarization becomes unsustainable.
In addition, since KMD derive from ZEC and BTC, all features included in the Bitcoin protocol and Zcash parameters are also available on ARRR. This includes Zk-SNARKS, the top-tier standard for blockchain privacy at this time.
Even for individuals with the utmost priority for privacy will require the need for receipts to verify transactions, therefore Pirate will utilize view keys for this purpose. With view keys, one can prove they paid a certain amount of coins to a certain address. A node processing an incoming viewing key for a z-address can view all past transactions received by that address, as well as all future transactions sent to it. The viewing party cannot spend any funds from the address.
Cryptocurrency
According to information included in the Pirate whitepaper, current block-time is 60 seconds, using the Equihash Proof-of-Work mining algorithm. The maximum supply is approximately 200 million ARRR, with a speed of 6-26 TPS and a transaction fee of 0.0001 ARRR.
The emission schedule for ARRR coin.
Included is also an emission schedule of the Pirate cryptocurrency, halving in block rewards every 388885 blocks, equating to an estimated 270 days per reward period.
Development
Though early in its infancy, the Pirate team has been able to facilitate the use of z-address deposits and withdrawals with the exchange DigitalPrice and successfully launched coin trading at the end of October 2018. And because it is an KMD integration, Sapling is planned for mid-December 2018, enabling future development of Point-of-Sale (PoS) integration, hardware wallet, Web Shop Plugins, and mobile wallets through Simple Payment Verification (zSPV). The development of a Pirate Foundation is also planned for Q1 2019, with hardware wallet integrations being estimated for Q3 2019.
The Pirate team has already set themselves apart from the existing competitors due to it’s open-sourced, community approach and the progress they’ve achieved thus far. For a market with a waning trust in the current cryptocurrency teams, Pirate may be the fresh breath of air private-centric consumers are looking for. The pioneers of ARRR are enthusiastic and looking to continue to contribute and/or improve the project at a pace not seen by very many other altcoin projects.
