BANANO: a Feeless, Instant, Rich in Potassium Cryptocurrency Powered by DAG Technology Disrupting the Meme Economy

Banoshi Nakanano
www.banano.cc

Abstract
Don't let your memes be dreams.

Smug Illustration

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1. Introduction

In the year 2009, we saw the introduction of the first ever decentralized payment network, the mother of all coins, Bitcoin [1]. In the years that followed, global interest grew and Bitcoin inspired the genesis of numerous cryptography based projects that also worked towards trustless secure payment systems and storage of value.

Bitcoin uses blockchain technology where a distributed ledger records transactions chronologically and publicly. Subsequent advancement in the space gave rise to second generation projects like Ethereum, Litecoin, EOS, Stellar, Monero and many others, which built on this concept by adding new features, and sometimes by acting as platforms for dApps - the execution of decentralised applications. Then finally in 2015, Sergio Lerner published a paper describing the applicability of so-called Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) to the field of cryptography [2]. This concept was adopted by multiple third generation cryptocurrencies. One such project originally developed by Colin LeMahieu emerged by specifically targeting the scalability issues plaguing generations one and two: Raiblocks. Raiblocks rebranded to NANO in January 2018 [3].

BANANO is a feeless, instant, rich in potassium cryptocurrency powered by DAG technology disrupting the meme economy. It is the first fork peel of NANO, the genesis block redefining the memeconomy on 1 April 2018. Oh, did you know that Colin Lemahieu, the founder of Nano, likes us? Yea, that’s right (Figure 1)!

Figure 1: “I think memecoins are hilarious, we have one, we have BANANO, I like those guys!” Colin LeMahieu, Nano Founder

Similar to NANO, BANANO has quite more properties and advantages over classical cryptocurrencies than simply being high in potassium, obviously (Table 1).

Table 1: Feature comparison: BANANO vs. Bitcoin

Feature comparison: Banano vs. Bitcoin

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2. What is BANANO?

BANANO started as a joke between a devoted group of NANO contributors and resulted in a coin being the product of a considerable amount of effort (without taking itself too seriously). While it's true that BANANO kept big portions of the original node code to keep cross-chain compatibility between existing code libraries, many parameters have been fine-tuned, such as work requirements and units. As it progresses, the node code will likely diverge further. NANO has the mantra of ‘do one thing and do it well’. BANANO, however, is more open to feature additions, e.g. on-chain messaging or privacy. BANANO doesn’t aim for drastic modifications of the reference implementation of the node at this early stage: it’s more about improving the ecosystem and ensuring we have the best developers to do so!

It’s hard to overlook the exceptional tools and utilities that our hard working developers monkeys have contributed thus far. Take a peek at BANANO’s mobile wallet, Kalium (Figure 2). It’s a modern mobile wallet designed to be efficient and effective when transferring BANANO between you and your banfam - that is to say, your BANANO Family. With it, you can send instant transactions to anyone, anywhere, for free! On top of this and in line with the overall philosophy behind BANANO, Kalium is easy-to-use to ensure anyone will be able to get started with BANANO in minutes, without requiring any crypto-related knowledge whatsoever.

Figure 2: Kalium - BANANO’s mobile wallet (Download).

Kalium Wallet

We also haven’t forgotten the roots of our BANANO tree. We made the tech from Kalium Wallet available for NANO users with Natrium, a mobile wallet for NANO based on Kalium tech! Adding features and helping other developers to create feasible concepts are just some of the few things we do while hanging in our BANANO hammocks. Most importantly, we work on the BANANO ecosystem and second layer solutions such as CAMO BANANO, our super-secret privacy layer, which is currently in development (Phase 1 announcement).

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BANANO prides itself in its active development and pro-active community. BANANO community members have created fascinating projects, such as an implementation of BANANO into Minecraft, guild rewards in mobile games and apps, and even faucet bots on popular streaming platforms and highly used tipbots on major social media platforms such as Telegram, Twitter, Discord and Reddit.

One of the most impactful differences between NANO and BANANO is that we started with billions of newly minted coins (Figure 3), 3.4 billion to be exact, that we use to continually run faucets that propagate DAG technology, fuel the tipping economy, and fund community projects. In that way, our objectives are similar to those of the NanoCenter—a community of NANO fans, investors, and contributors who operate parallel to NANO core.

BANANO follows a gamification approach and strives to also get into the hands of people who have never interacted with crypto before. Given its (apparently) silly and potassium-rich nature, BANANO is friendly and somewhat forgiving to new users. Let’s be real, losing “some memecoins earned from sh*tposting” is not half as bad as “suffering a stolen” on a large investment. After all, making the start with cryptocurrency as easy as possible through a fun attitude, gamification, and education is a main aim of the project, finally enabling everyone to finally handle crypto assets in general in a responsible way.

ALSO, it’s important to note: behind all the memes and sh*tposting, the BANANO operation has a highly skilled team dedicated community, and it is very, very, legit.

Nano to Banano Factory Animation

Figure 3: BANANO is the first peel of the NANO cryptocurrency and adheres to the open-source spirit. In the figure above, NANO in its raw form is remodelled through a combination of proof-of-work optimisation and potassium doping, resulting in unprecedented performance..

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3. BANANO Specifications

3.1. 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_" (Figure 4).

Kalium Share Card

Figure 4: A BANANO public address, starting with “ban_”. The QR code shown contains the exact same information and can be read by applications such as Kalium.

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've got several options (Figure 5):

Kalium Wallet
Banano Vault
Ledger Hardware Wallet

Figure 5: Overview of main BANANO wallets.

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3.2. Rise of the Block Lettuce

How is BANANO developed to offer feeless, almost instant transactions? Enter the Block Lettuce.

Block Lettuce

Figure 6: Block Lettuce.

BANANO uses a Block Lettuce (Figure 6) architecture to achieve lightening-quick transfer speeds. Each account has its own blockchain. Transferring funds from one account to another requires two transactions: a send which deducts value from the sender's balance and a receive adds the same amount to the receiver's balance. An account encodes its accumulated total balance when it makes a transaction, therefore nodes only need to keep track of the latest block rather than expend larger resources to track an account's full transaction history. Correctness is maintained, however there is a vast reduction in time and work versus a single-blockchain architecture used by other cryptocurrencies.

3.3.BANANOdes

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 (Figure 7).

Kalium Send Process
Nano vs Banano Speed

Figure 7: A real-time Kalium transaction and BANANO & NANO speed comparison.

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3.4. 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.

3.5. MonKey

Cryptocurrency wallet addresses are typically long strings of characters that can be nearly indistinguishable from each other. MonKeys solve this long-standing problem through the creation of unique, monkey-shaped avatars from a hash value based on a user's public key. These visual representations of wallet addresses serve to identify users while protecting the privacy of the account holders (Figure 8).

MonKey Change

Figure 8: Your MonKey is unique! No two wallet addresses share the same MonKey!

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Each MonKey has a unique combination of fur and eye colour, and can have additional accessories in varying styles, such as hats, glasses, shirts, pants, mouth types, tail decorations, and more! The value of the accessories is classified into 3 categories: basic, rare, and premium. The rarity ranges from 1/2 to 1/32 and 1/1024 MonKeys, respectively. There are hundreds of billions of possible MonKey combinations. Consider that RGB color ranges from (0,0,0) to (255,255,255). Therefore, there are 256³ = 16,777,216 color options. By only examining fur color and eye color generation we get 16,777,216² = 281,474,976,710,656 MonKey options. This is without even considering the 7 classes of accessories and their corresponding coloring! For testing purposes, we’ve implemented a MonKey generator right below (Figure 9). This generator allows you to experiment with MonKeys even without having a real wallet address (even though creating one is recommended and only takes seconds). You are welcome to try it for yourself, maybe you will be lucky and draw a premium accessory!

Figure 9: MonKey Generator

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Shady MonKey

4. CAMO BANANO - Private Coins on BANANO using ECDH

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 (Figure 10) at its current stage is a way for two people to share a seed. To share it securely they put it in the blockchain, that's essentially it!

Of note, CAMO BANANO Phase 1 as described here and currently being available allows for confidential transactions, but not for real privacy yet. Ongoing development will include the requirement of adding a new block type to the BANANO protocol and subsequently allow for sum-of-squares private transactions.

CAMO Banano

Figure 10: CAMO BANANO graphic.

The current CAMO solution currently consists of three layers of technology:

  1. Blockchain steganography.
  2. Storing ECDH public key in the blockchain.
  3. Private reversible transactions using shared seeds.
    Private irreversible transactions using shared public keys.

4.1. Blockchain Stenography and ECDH

Each BANANO wallet houses multiple addresses and is accessed using a seed. It is assumed that both party A (Alice) and B (Bob) in the transaction have an existing seed for an existing wallet. The main purpose of this system is to send funds from Alice's wallet to one of the wallets owned by Bob, knowing only Bobs seed and its first enclosed wallet. By splitting transactions of funds between multiple wallets under a single seed each party is in control of the funds but do not show up on a rich list.

4.2. A Private Reversible Transaction

1- Assume Part A (Alice) and B (Bob) have an existing seed and wallet.

2- Alice and Bob achieve a shared secret using Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) [4].

3- Alice and Bob must agree on a third neutral location to use to mix the funds and obfuscate records of their transactions to any eavesdropper (Eve).

4- Alice sends three transactions to herself to store the seed of a third party on the blockchain. To do this, she leverages the fact the BANANO balance field has a precision of 29 places after the decimal point, i.e. you can store 11 bytes of data in the balance field 2. Alice splits the 32 byte public key into three chunks of 11, 11, and 10 bytes and sends three transactions to herself encoding these bytes in the balance field.

5- Bob looks through Alice's transactions history and finds three where the representative is the hash of the shared secret. Bob combines theses to obtain the seed Alice hid in the blockchain. This seed is now neutral to both participating parties, and only both parties have access to it. At this point, if Alice sends funds to this neutral location the transaction can be considered reversible.

6- Alice sends funds to the first N addresses contained in the neutral seed, starting at the zeroth address. She uses multiple transactions where the total number N is determined by the total amount of funds to be sent. In the Camo Phase 1 release this is orders of 10 BANANO: 10, 100, 1000 .... In production it is intended to be split according to how transactions in the blockchain look at that point in time.

7- Bob moves funds from each used address in the neutral seed to N separate addresses under a seed in his control. To Eve, it appears Alice simply sent out many random low payments, which then each went onto a second address. However, if Bob consolidated into his wallet at only its zeroth address, Eve could then collapse the graph and see all the transactions went from Alice to Bob.

4.3. A Private Irreversible Transaction

Using the same method as reversible transactions, a new wallet is created instead of a new seed. The new wallet is controlled by only one party, so transactions are not reversible. The new wallet is stored on the blockchain in almost the same way as the reversible seed. The only difference is that the representative is set to the hash of the hashed shared secret and the public key, to distinguish it from the reversible transaction.

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Airdrop Animation
Airdrop Animation

5. Distribution

BANANO is freely distributed through faucets, games, contests, giveaways, and airdrops. To date, both NANO and Doge holders have been rejuvenated with yellow goodness via airdrops (more coming in the future). Apart from that, BANANO had a very unique distinction from basically all other cryptocurrency projects from the very beginning: Free coin distribution through innovative faucet games. You heard it right, we don’t have just some boring faucets, we have faucet games! The legendary BANANO Runner game (Figure 11) with its first round in April 2018 was a huge success and an unprecedented form of airdropping a new cryptocurrency to its community.

Figure 11: A video from BANANO Runner - we’ll never forget this legendary BANANO faucet game!

One of the highest aims of the ongoing free distribution of BANANO always was (and still is) to keep the distribution fair. Unfortunately, there have been attempts to bot and exploit BANANO faucet games from the very beginning. That’s one of the reasons why BANANO Runner sadly had to be discontinued after 5 highly successful rounds with thousands of participants.

In addition to rains and tips at our Discord server and lots of tips also through tipbots at our subreddit, Twitter account and Telegram groups (Figure 12), lots of often innovative events have been running in order to continue the free and fair ongoing distribution, including various contests & giveaways focusing on fun and creativity. Of note, both official and unofficial contests and games are an integral part of the BANANO ecosystem.

Discord Tipbot
Reddit Tipbot
Twitter Tipbot

Figure 12: BANANO Tipbot wallet overview.

Finally, several new faucets and faucet games have been developed, tested, and are meanwhile running permanently or intermittently! Here’s a brief, incomplete insight about some current faucets at the time of writing. Please make sure to visit our website at banano.cc for an updated overview.

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5.1. Black Monkey

With the name being a reference to the term of the “black sheep”, the Black Monkey faucet game revolves around finding the odd MonKey out of 6 MonKeys. Each MonKey will have some combination of hat, glasses, smile, skin color, clothing, shoes, and accessories. The goal is to identify the one MonKey being different, while the other 5 MonKeys have absolutely identical items of that type (Figure 13). Visit blackmonkey.banano.cc to play.

Black Monkey

Figure 13: One of the most popular BANANO faucets: Black Monkey

5.2. Meme Faucet

The BANANO Meme Faucet consists of writing and verifying descriptions of various memes or other images. When you submit a description, it will be evaluated and compared to the relative picture by another user, who will act as both faucet-user and “inspector” (Figure 14). Meme Faucet is available on memefaucet.banano.cc while it's active but it's not active currently.

Meme Faucet

Figure 14: A screenshot from BANANO Meme Faucet.

5.3. Crane Faucet

The crane faucet is run 24/7 and consists of solving captchas and various other “minigames” such as ‘Monkey Match’ or ‘Catch the Monkey’ (Figure 15). Crane Faucet is available on faucet.banano.coranos.io while it's active but it's not active currently.

Crane Faucet

Figure 15: A screenshot from BANANO Crane Faucet.

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5.4. BANANO Mining

It’s rarely mentioned that some fresh cryptocurrencies like BANANO (and it’s father NANO) do not require mining and therefore are highly innovative examples for ecologically “green” cryptocurrencies. However, in this case we purposefully branded our new Folding@Home faucet as “BANANO Miner” (Figure 16). This naming choice was made as a way of stating that cryptocurrency mining is not without alternatives!

Banano Miner

Figure 16: BANANO Miner - Contribute to Medical Research while earning BANANO!

There are 2 separate faucet projects in this category, BANANO Powerplant and the BANANO Miner Faucet.

BANANO Powerplant is a CPU mining pool faucet that mines a range of different altcoins and pays out with BANANO. The payments are subsidized by BANANO, so the rates are better than mining the altcoins directly. Powerplant was available on powerplant.banano.cc while it was active but it has been discontinued.

BANANO Miner is not really a miner. Instead of running arbitrary calculations to “mine” a cryptocurrency, your computer runs protein folding simulations through Folding@Home, which helps researchers fight Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Cancer, Alzheimer’s and many more genetic diseases, and infectious diseases. Then, we send BANANO to your wallet based on the size of your computational contribution (Figure 17). Visit bananominer.com to try it out.

Banano Miner Animation

Figure 17: Fight diseases with computational power while earning BANANO!

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Shady MonKey

5.5. MonkeyTalks

MonkeyTalks is a proof-of-concept application showing how versatile BANANO can be, and how easy it can be used in new contexts. MonkeyTalks is a combination of a self-sustaining BANANO faucet and an on-chain messaging platform (Figure 18). First it’s a faucet because for sending a message you’ll need to pay a small fee in BANANO. Second, it’s self-sustaining since your payment in turn refills the faucet. And finally, it's on-chain because any message sent through MonkeyTalks it’s engraved into the transaction’s RAW: this means that all of the messages are publicly visible and basically immutable because they were written into the BANANO blockchain. MonkeyTalks is basically a proof-of-concept website that combines a faucet giving out free BANANO with an actual application BANANO can be used for. There’s a clear incentive to visit the site to claim the faucet, which in turn incentivizes users to pay BANANO for a message many people will see. To make this more interesting, you can also choose to pay a little more to highlight your message in a different color.
Visit MonkeyTalks.cc to try it out.

MonkeyTalks

Figure 18: MonkeyTalks - A self-sustaining BANANO faucet including on-chain messaging!

5.6. Inflation versus Deflation

While its ongoing free and fair distribution program surely resembles one of the biggest strengths of BANANO and has led to a rapidly growing community, it also logically leads to inflation. That’s why the BANANO team in July 2019 announced a monthly ‘Buy-Back and Burn’ scheme (article). In brief, the BANANO team uses earnings from faucet monetization (mainly mined coins and income from advertisements) to buy back BANANO from exchanges and subsequently sends all bought BANANO to a burn address, making respective coins ultimately inaccessible. The overall aim of this approach is to stabilize markets especially during the ongoing free distribution phase (Figure 19). Coin burns unrelated to this program have occurred, and may happen again in the future.

Buy-Back and Burn

Figure 19: BANANO has a ‘Buy-Back and Burn’ program.

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Banburner

6. Summary

• BANANO (BAN) is a fourth-generation cryptocurrency that offers feeless, instant and ecologically green transactions. It utilizes a novel DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) based block-lettuce™ architecture, where each user possesses his own blockchain.

• BANANO was forked in April 2018 from NANO. BANANO did no ICO whatsoever, instead all coins were and are distributed through an ongoing free and fair distribution program, through Airdrops, Faucet Games and other events. Meanwhile, BANANO is also experimenting with feature additions such as a privacy layer (Camo BANANO), on-chain messaging (MonkeyTalks) and more.

• In the context of distribution, one major aim of BANANO is using their infrastructure with easy-to-use mobile wallets (Kalium) and Tipbots on several major social media platforms to onboard normies and crypto-noobs who have no idea yet what a cryptocurrency is. Of note, the key here is to make the start with crypto as easy as possible, and use a fun attitude and a gamification approach to get new users started without all the usual hassle, and then educate them to handle cryptocurrencies in a responsible way.

• At the time of writing, BANANO is already heavily used in tens of thousands of daily on-chain transactions for tipping and payment within our community and on several third-party platforms.

• The main hub where the BANANO community resides and collaborates is our Discord server. Here you'll find BANANO constantly flying around between the community members. We recommend an expedition to the Jungle channel where it frequently rains BANANO on all active MonKeys. Please join us there, everyone is welcome! We are genuinely a very open project, so if you have a great faucet idea or want to contribute otherwise, chat to us! We’re looking forward to your visit!

• If you can't wait to get your paws on some juicy, yellow BANANO, we are listed on several exchanges already (overview at Coingecko).

7. Acknowledgements

The authors of this yellowpaper would like to warmly thank all members of the BANANO community for their valuable contributions to the BANANO ecosphere.

8. References

  1. S. Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 2008.
  2. S. D. Lerner, DagCoin Draft. SEPTEMBER 2015.
  3. C. LeMahieu, Nano: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network.
  4. https://nano.org/en/whitepaper. Accessed: 2018-10-21.
  5. D. Whiteld, New Directions in Cryptography. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. IT-22, NO 6, NOVEMBER 1976.

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