TouchCoin

An easily spendable cryptocurrency with lightning-fast block times.

Comment

Inspiration

Currently, the cryptocurrency market is flooded with "HODL"ers who buy and hoard cryptocurrency, causing a severe lack of liquidity in the market, and newcomers to crypto find it hard to buy, trade, and use cryptocurrency. Additionally, due to the inherent nature of large blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, block times are usually upward of 30 seconds, meaning that transactions and and smart contracts are nowhere near as fast as they need to be for point of sale exchanges.

What it does

TouchCoin is a new cryptocurrency with an 5 second average blocktime. This makes transactions over 6 times as fast as Ethereum, 30 times faster than Litecoin, and over 120 times as fast as Bitcoin. It enables new use cases such as small, point of sale transactions at local retailers and restaurants, where waiting half a minute per transaction is absurd.

How we built it

To create the new blockchain and set up the seed nodes, we used CryptoNote and modified it to support quick mining and a very short block time. The 2 seed nodes are hosted on DigitalOcean droplets with 2GB of RAM each. We used simplewallet to make the CLI wallet and connected it to CryptoNote's open-source wallet GUI.

Challenges we ran into

We tried using Forknote at first without much success and decided to switch to CryptoNote. Acquiring the correct version of Boost and cmake was also a challenge since the versions that were required were deprecated and not available in traditional package managers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to and building a fully functioning blockchain as well as being able to set up nodes to mine and verify transactions in the time allotted.

What we learned

How to use cryptonote to create a blockchain, how to set up seed nodes, and much more!

What's next for touchCoin

Linking the wallet app to the blockchain and having it mine when the phone is charging and not in use. This way, every new user adds to the strength and hashpower of the blockchain while simultaneously earning coins for themselves to use. We would also like the user to be able to pay at traditional PoS kiosks using NFC, and even allow for phone-to-phone transactions through NFC as well.

Share this project:

Updates