Oh Ardor, how I burn with yearning to see you pump, but alas thou has fallen victim to the crypto bear. His teeth firmly penetrated thy thin veiled and soft skin. Ardor’s predecenssor, NXT, was my first altcoin buy. I was a staunch bitcoin maximalist (I still sort of am) but then I decided to try some of these newfangled altcoins and see what the fuss is all about. At the time NXT was the first pure proof-of-stake blockchain and it had an impressive array of functions built-in but sadly with time it seems that NXT never took off and didn’t grab enough market share to reach criticality. After many years the team behind NXT – Jelurida – released their new baby – Ardor. Ardor is meant to be “an evolution of the NXT blockchain that launched in 2018 to address issues of blockchain bloat, scalability and versatility. Ardor is designed as a complete ecosystem where multiple players can interact with each other without needing to go outside the platform, as described in the Ardor Whitepaper” That’s a pretty damn good description of what Ardor is. Every NXT holder got an equivalent 1:1 ratio of the new Ardor tokens. You could also buy Ardor during their ICO launch phase, but for me since I held NXT I just took the free coins and smiled. Was ardor a good investment? Well, that’s a different story and we’ll get into that further down.
First I must disclose (in the interest of transparancy) that I am an Ardor bag holder. I no longer hold any NXT sadly cause I got tired of it going nowhere. The Jelurida team says that NXT still has life left in it, but it seems more like a walking corpse at this point. I am by no means intending to pump my bags cause I doubt my article will have any influence. Ardor for me represents a crypto “hail mary” and if it goes to zero so be it, but I will be honest and say that it deserves far more attention than the crypto market has given it. With a billion and one shitcoins being launched every day Ardor fell victim to the noise of the crowd. It’s tough to stand out! Jelurida doesn’t have a ridiculously large marketing budget so they can’t throw money around like some other altcoins. Better or more marketing could help perhaps. Now that I got that disclosure out of the way let’s move on and learn a bit of what Ardor has to offer and get into some technical details.
“The fundamental concept of the Ardor design is a clean separation between “forging token” and “transactional token”. In Nxt, it is the NXT coin that serves this dual purpose, being used both to determine forging stake, i.e. the right of an account to generate blocks, and to execute all kinds of value-transfer transactions, i.e. represent unit of value. In Ardor, a separation of these two functions is used to achieve both much greater scalability, by reducing blockchain bloat, and flexibility, by allowing multiple other transactional tokens to be used, in effect allowing custom “child chains” to exist and run on the same network of nodes”
So as you can see Ardor is a sidechain platform. If you are not familar with the sidechain concept it basically means that one master chain is able to host and run a near unlimited number of child-chain that each can serve a specific role or function. You can launch your own side-chain on the Ardor mother-chain if you wanted! In fact I encourage you to do so. The transactional token chain on the Ardor platform is called Ignis.
Ignis is meant for day to day transactions and has the same feature set that NXT has. There is:
1) build in asset exchange
2) secure messaging
3) voting system
4) data cloud
5) shuffling feature
6) alias (so you can link a particular humanly memorable word to your Ignis address)
7) monetary system (allows you to create your own token
8) marketplace ( buy/sell items all from within the Ignis wallet interface)
Another feature that Ignis/Ardor allow is what they call “Lightweight Smart Contracts”. Unlike Ethereum’s touring complete smart contract language which gives you enough rope to hang yourself, with Lightweight Contracts your smart contracts are simpler and thus safer. They give you what you need and nothing more.
These all sound like neat features, and at this point you may be asking yourself why hasn’t this amazing coin/platform taken off? Well, I have no clue and I have tried to answer that question and have come up with several answers but nothing that can be universally agreed upon. I think part of the problem is like I said earlier the sheer noise in the altcoin market. There are far too many new “shouty” coins that jump out at clueless “investors” and promise them the moon and these fools no doubt FOMO in and buy bad projects. I get it, it’s tough to sort out the gems from the garbage and most cryptocurrency investors lack the skills to do so. This is a sad state of affairs the concurrency industry find itself but let’s be fair here and realize that this is not exclusive to cryptocurrencies and that in general people are bad at investing.
So what does the future hold for Ardor. At the moment the bear market took a solid bite of this Ardor the token’s value as of today Feb 7 2019 sits at around $0.05 per coin. Is it time to buy? I’m going to let you be the judge of that. If you’re going to buy any coin a bear market is the RIGHT TIME to do it. Please make sure to do thorough research on any coin/project before you buy into it!
What will I do? Will I increase my Ardor bags. My bags are not that heavy but at the moment I don’t have any more spare cash to dump into altcoins. I may pickup a few coins here and there as long as this bear market drags on. At the moment I am mainly earning a tiny bit of Ardor by forging coins (the equivalent of mining in a proof of stake system). In my next article about Ardor I will tell you how you too can stake your ardor coins by joining an Ardor “forging” pool.
For all the technical details and minutia that I could not possibly cover here in a blog posting I encourage you to visit the Ardor homepage.
Cheers, and happy investing!