Banano

The logo of Banano cryptocurrency

Banano is a feeless, instant, rich in potassium cryptocurrency powered by DAG technology, disrupting the meme economy. It is a fork of Nano, but with more memes and a lower PoW requirement. Banano was born on April 1, 2018 . Since then, it has been distributed for free through a variety of means, including faucets, games and giveaway events.

## Technology

### Accounts

In order to keep your precious Banano safe, you'll need a wallet. A wallet can be accessed using a public key, also known as a wallet address; and a private key, also known as a seed. Together, the public key and the private key form a key-pair. The wallet address is its public key, it’s basically like your bank account number. You can share your wallet address with anyone in the world and your Banano will remain secure. Every Banano wallet address begins with the prefix, "`ban_`". The first character after the prefix is either "`1`" or "`3`".

A wallet seed is known as its private key because it absolutely must be kept private. It’s the equivalent to your bank account login information. Never share your Banano seed! Anyone that has your seed can access your delicious pile of Banano, which can lead to a potassium deficiency.

To join the other jungle MonKeys and get a Banano wallet of your own, you have several options:

* Desktop wallet: Banano Vault Web Wallet.
* Mobile wallet: Kalium (Android & iOS).
* Hardware wallet: Ledger Nano S model is supported with the Banano Vault.

### Nodes

*Main article: Bananode*
The Banano ledger is secured through Open Representative Voting (previously called ‘delegated Proof of Stake’), a powerful decentralization mechanism that has no strong analog in Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithms. In conventional PoS systems, the account owner's node must be running to participate in voting. By contrast, Banano account holders choose a representative node to vote on their behalf in the event of conflicting transactions. Continuously running a node is impractical for many everyday users; giving a representative the power to proxy vote reduces that requirement. A user has the ability to easily reassign their representative to any account at any time through a change transaction. The weight of the account is subtracted from the old representative and added to the new representative. No funds are moved in this transaction, and the representative does not have spending power of the account's funds.

PoW in Banano is solely used as an anti-spam tool and computation is almost instant. Once a transaction is sent, the PoW for the next block can be pre-computed, as the previous block field is already known. Therefore, as long as the time between transactions is greater than the time required to compute the PoW, transactions appear instantaneous to users.

### Proof of Work

Nano's Proof of Work mechanism intends to serve as an anti-spam mechanism at the cost of unnecessarily delaying block generation on low-end machines. This makes community projects and field studies harder to maintain and grow. Nano's ability to pre-cache one work upfront doesn't help much, and concurrent work caching often isn't feasible either. That's why for Banano, we chose a quicker proof-of-work generation time, but kept the original algorithm (hashing a nonce that is concatenated with the block hash, until the result exceeds a certain threshold). As a result, the Banano protocol runs on low power hardware, enabling it to be a lightweight, practical and decentralized cryptocurrency for everyday use. On average, generation times are 8x faster for Banano than for Nano while consuming 8x less electricity. There's a mathematical formula to calculate this: `(264 - 0xfffffe0000000000)/(264 - 0xffffffc000000000)`, this work generation is even mobile friendly! Existing work generator software is backwards compatible, but it should be adjusted to the new threshold to not waste energy unnecessarily.

### MonKey

*Main article: MonKey*
MonKeys are identicons for Banano representing each address in a unique way. MonKeys are a centralized service offered by the Banano development team but has no impact on the performance or decentralization of the Banano network. MonKeys are strictly a unique visual representation of a Banano address to help users identify an adress more easily.

## Tokenomics

The initial supply of Banano was 3,102,823,669.20. More than 1 billion Banano was burned, resulting in a new supply limit of 1,919,420,069. As of August 2021, the circulating supply of Banano is around 1.3 billion.

## Camo Banano

*Main article: Camo Banano*
A well known cryptographic challenge is that of privacy: prevention of unauthorized extraction of information from communications over an insecure channel. Neither companies nor individuals want all of their information being publicly visible on a blockchain, in a way it can be read without any restrictions by governments, family members, friends, or business competitors. Serving as Banano's privacy layer, Camo Banano at its current stage is a way for two people to share a seed.

## Wrapped Banano

*Main article: Wrapped Banano*
Wrapped Banano (wBan) are wrapped tokens on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Polygon. A wrapped token is a cryptocurrency token pegged to the value of another, original, cryptocurrency. The original cryptocurrency is put in a "wrapper", which is a kind of digital vault that allows the wrapped token to be created on another blockchain. This allows Banano (in the form of wBan) to be bought and sold on the BSC and Polygon, two big blockchains in the DeFi ecosystem.

## References

1. ↑ V22dev2.
2. ↑ V23develop.
3. ↑ Master branch.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Banoshi Nakanano. BANANO: a Feeless, Instant, Rich in Potassium Cryptocurrency Powered by DAG Technology Disrupting the Meme Economy (English).
5. ↑ CoinGecko. Banano (English). Retrieved on August 17, 2021.
6. ↑ wrap-that-potassium (2021-06-08). wBAn FAQ (English). The Daily Peel. Archived from the original on September 12, 2021. Retrieved on September 11, 2021.
7. ↑ Binance Academy (2021-01-20). What are wrapped tokens? (English). Archived from the original on September 12, 2021. Retrieved on September 12, 2021.