What is PIVX?

PIVX is an abbreviation for Private Instant Verified Transaction. It is used to describe a cryptocurrency that focuses on providing fast and private transactions. Besides incredibly fast transactions, this open source cryptocurrency allows anonymity and security. After it was forked from DASH (another open-source cryptocurrency), PIVX was originally called Darknet. However, it was re-branded in 2017 and given the name PIVX. After this change, the PIVX community grew a lot bigger and the team got a lot stronger. Interested in buying or selling PIVX? Get started right now!

What is the cryptocurrency PIVX

Table of Contents

  1. The History of PIVX
  2. The Technical Specifications of PIVX
  3. The Price of PIVX
  4. Unique Aspects of PIVX
  5. Why Use PIVX?
  6. Resources of PIVX

The History of PIVX

PIVX was first created as a hard fork of Dash in January 2015 and it was originally released as DarkNet (DNET). As a fork of the coin DASH, which also has its roots in privacy oriented coins, DarkNet didn’t attract the attention of cryptocurrency enthusiasts right away. In 2017, the coin DarkNet was re-branded to PIVX, which stands for Private, Instant, Verified, Transaction.

history of pivx

Initial Struggles

The creators of PIVX believe that privacy is one of users’ most important rights. When DNET was first created, the coin was not very popular. It was only after the re-branding that people became interested in PIVX and started investing time and money into the project. Due to the re-branding, the community of PIVX had grown exponentially and it currently counts now over 9000 users. It is interesting to mention that the users of PIVX are now called PIVians.

The Development Team

The PIVX development team completely consist of people from the community. If you take a look at the website of PIVX, you will find the top contributors to the project, but none of these people own the project itself. The financial aspect of the project is handled through DAO’s. A DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization which is controlled by shareholders of the project, not by any central government. The monthly budgets are decided through the masternodes voting system.

The Reason

The coin was first created to tackle the privacy issues that some coins have. In most cases, users are actually able to locate cryptocurrency transaction in the blockchain. To change this, PIVX implemented the Zerocoin protocol that could solve this problem. Read more about this protocol in the sections below.

Specifications of PIVX

Ticker Symbol PIVX
Founder(s) n/a
Date of Release 25 November 2015
Consensus mechanism Proof of Stake
Hashing Algorithm Quark
Maximum supply Infinite
Average Block Time 1 Minute
Mining / Staking reward Max 5 PIVX / block
Average blocksize 2 mb
Next Block Halving n/a
Smart Contracts No

The Price of PIVX

Unique Aspects of PIVX

The PIVX community wanted to create an open-source and decentralized cryptocurrency that could be sent almost for free. The cryptocurrency is also completely private and it doesn’t leave any traces of its users’ activities.

unique aspects of pivx

Decentralization Solution

The team has decentralized the coin by letting the community vote on their projects and by implementing a proof of stake algorithm. The PoS algorithm allows participants to achieve distributed consensus where each new block creator is chosen based on random selection and factors such as their age and wealth. As for the voting on projects, only owners of a Masternode are able to vote on budget and development proposals.

The Benefits of the Proof of Stake Algorithm

The proof of stake consensus algorithm ensures that miners will not compete for hashing power. This makes the coin much more secure. Because of the combination ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) encryption algorithm and a proof of stake consensus algorithm, PIVX has become the first coin to implement private transactions into a proof of stake consensus algorithm. The Zero-Knowledge proof is a type of protocol that allows one party to let the other party know that they’re familiar with the value of X without revealing any other information.

Zerocoin Protocol

Another unique aspect of PIVX is the Zerocoin protocol, which converts your normal PIV into zPIV. This obfuscates all the history of that coin and makes it impossible to tell which address that particular coin came from. On the receivers end, this will just show up as a normal incoming transaction without any history or background.

What Is SwiftTX?

The team also added the SwiftTX function as a way to get a transaction confirmed in a matter of seconds. Thanks to this function, users do not have to wait for additional confirmations. This is a good jump start for PIVX to offer their network as a payment provider for online shops, as they remove the waiting times completely. All of this is possible thanks to the masternodes and PoS 3.0 consensus.

Why Use PIVX?

PIVX is encouraging people to in a way become their own bank. With a PIVX wallet, users are able to send coins almost instantly to any part of the world without any fees. The PIVX wallet also features a “normal account” function. This type of account holds your funds that you can use for regular public transactions. You can also opt for a “private savings account,” which can be used to send your transactions privately.

use of pivx

The Speed and Budget

Besides complete privacy and anonymity, the speed of the network plays a crucial role in PIVX’s mission. The speed of transactions provided by this network opens up a lot of new business opportunities. Because of the SwiftTX function that enables instant transaction confirmations, online webshops can offer PIVX as a fast and reliable payment solution that could work for both parties. Implementing PIVX in online stores would not only improve the user experience and allow much faster transactions but it will also save budget for both sides, as there are no additional fees.

Not Only a Cryptocurrency

PIVX is not only a cryptocurrency but also a masternode coin. What this means is that people can use this currency to set up a masternode (a computer wallet) with 10 000 PIVX coins and thus earn PIVX every day. However, for this to be possible you need to use a dedicated PIVX wallet as it will not work if you use an exchange wallet.

Resources of PIVX