Ravencoin is an open-source blockchain platform that focuses on the creation and transfer of assets on a peer-to-peer basis. With its help, users can create and trade digital assets such as gaming items or software licenses as well as real-world commodities such as gold bars and land deeds. Launched as a fork of Bitcoin version 0.15.99 on January 3rd, 2018, it is powered by a native token RVN and uses an X16R hashing algorithm that makes it ASIC-resistant and prevents the network from getting centralized.

RVN tokens can be used for creating fungible and non-fungible digital assets and even non-asset-based tokens such as VOTE. The latest one powers Ravencoin’s consensus mechanism. RVN tokens have a total supply of 21 billion coins and new blocks are produced once in a minute with the block reward of 5,000 RVN. The coins can be obtained via mining within such pools as Minepool, MiningPanda, Suprnova, Virtopia, Protopool, Hash4Life, Omegapool, and others. They can also be purchased on top exchanges including Binance, CoinEx and Bittrex and stored on Ravencoin’s native wallet or hardware wallet Trezor for enhanced security.

At first glance, the project may seem to reinvent Ethereum’s ERC-721 and ERC-223 standards that serve for creating unique non-fungible tokens to represent any asset in a digitized form. However, the Ravencoin team argues that these standards lack specialization which may lead to problems in assets’ transfer. One of the key problems with Ethereum-based tokens is the complexity of the procedure as additional fees are required to accomplish a transaction. When the network gets congested and transaction fees get higher, the process may get unnecessarily costly. Ravencoin offers an optimization solution for this issue.

The project was launched without ICO, pre-mine, and master nodes. It was announced on Twitter on January 4th, 2018, by Bruce Fenton, Atlantic Financial’s CEO and Founder. In his tweet, Fenton briefly described the summary of the project’s ideas and growth up to date. Fenton acts as an advisor with his 20+ years of experience in the financial sector, however, it is unknown who else stands behind the project in reality as its founders preferred to stay incognito. One of Ravencoin’s key developers has the nickname of Tron Black on GitHub with a proven record of more than 5 years of experience in blockchain development. Since the project is open-source, anyone can contribute to its development.

Ravencoin’s roadmap for the code development was published on its Github account on April 3rd in 3 months after the launch. On the same date, the white paper was released on the project’s official website. At the time of launch, the project’s development was funded by Medici Ventures owned by Overstock.com. Ravencoin is not the only project in the blockchain industry that focuses on asset transfer. The closest sibling that it has is named Bytom. This platform has a similar mission to tokenize assets from the real world. However, unlike Ravencoin, Bytom is compatible with ASICs.