In this article, we are going to take a look at Coti, the world’s first blockchain protocol optimized for creating decentralized payment networks and stablecoins. It is designed for use by governments, merchants, stablecoin issuers, and payment dApps. We will cover some of its features and what sets it apart.
Current Challenges & Coti’s Solution
To understand Coti’s contribution and unique features, we must first take a look at the challenges traditional payments and digital currencies pose. One of the downsides of traditional payment systems lies in the high fees that can reach even 15% for merchants, which consequently leads to higher product costs for consumers.
Then there’s the long settlement time, which decreases merchant cash flow. Declined transactions also negatively affect merchant profits. Plus, over two billion people remain unbanked.
Additionally, today’s blockchain platforms are optimized for dApps and not for payments, and they don’t provide the tools and infrastructure needed for everyday transactional use.
Digital payments are still facing numerous challenges, including volatile prices, scalability issues, the absence of regulation, a lack of buyer-seller protection, and a complicated user experience. All this deters the adoption of cryptocurrencies for mainstream use and everyday transactional needs.
Here is where Coti comes into play as it aims to bridge the best of traditional payments and the best of digital currencies. It cuts out the middlemen but does so without the downfalls of cryptocurrencies.
It was designed in such a way as to provide a payment network that would be widely used by both consumers and traders as the basic method for payment. Coti is described as “the digital currency alternative to traditional payment systems like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal.” The project promises to help organizations save time and money by empowering them to build their own payment solutions and digitize any currency.
Architecture
To meet the challenges traditional finance and blockchain platforms currently face, Coti uses a DAG-based protocol as well as a fast, private, scalable, and inclusive infrastructure.
It utilizes a proof-of-trust consensus algorithm, features a MultiDAG system, a Global Trust System, a universal payment solution, and a payment gateway. The four participants in the COTI ecosystem include node operators, merchants, end-users, and mediators.
Its architecture is divided into three layers:
- The infrastructure layer – which is based on an underlying DAG (directed acyclic graph) protocol.
- The services layer – which includes cross-chain, KYC, and buyer-seller transaction protection services.
- The application layer – which includes a wallet and digital card services.
Trustchain and Trust Scores
One of Coti’s most important innovations is the Trustchain, a decentralized ledger that can process over 100,000 transactions per second, thus powering offline and online payments, loyalty payments, and more.
The Trustchain is composed of clusters that are computed based on a DAG algorithm. It considerably reduces transaction costs and increases processing speed by assigning trust scores to transactions.
To be a part of COTI’s ledger, token transactions have to be attached to two prior transactions. The Cluster thus makes it possible to attach transactions at a very fast pace. To achieve this, Coti has implemented another layer of data on every user, namely, the trust score.
So all participants, including nodes, accounts, and transactions have their own trust scores which are derived from a user’s historical performance data and objective information. When a user joins the network for the first time, the initial trust score is mainly based on the result of KYC validation.
In Coti, high trust scores mean low fees, while low trust scores are associated with high fees. The participants’ scores basically are determined through their accumulated contributions to the system.
This mechanism is used to analyze historical fraud and thus profile transactions, which are classified into risky and non-risky categories with the help of several machine learning techniques. A reputation score is thus calculated for every user. For more on the mechanisms used to determine these scores, the project’s technical whitepaper is worth reading.
To a certain extent, the trust score mechanism makes up for discrepancies that can be found when aggregating a user’s off-chain information from other underlying digital tokens and public blockchains, which guarantees the credibility of its payment network. Furthermore, it provides the mechanism for a DAG algorithm to process transactions, increasing the overall network efficiency and security.
To put it simply, the transaction confirmation time is directly related to the participants’ Trust Scores. The Trustchain algorithm uses these trust scores to determine the amount of PoW needed to confirm a transaction. The higher a user’s Trust Score, the faster the confirmation time. So this is the foundation of COTI’s Proof of Trust (PoT) consensus.
Coti Pay Ecosystem
Coti has developed the Coti Pay ecosystem which is based on the Trustchain protocol. This is an extensive and distributed payment network that includes application modules, exchanges, arbitration systems, and stablecoins.
Thanks to the wallets and debit cards provided by the Coti Pay system to C-end users, Coti’s payment network can be used for daily purposes, having the following functions:
- Peer-to-peer payments;
- Wallet to wallet trading;
- Exchanging digital and fiat currencies securely through COTI-X exchange;
- Digital token cards and legal currency transactions/storage.
Then there’s Coti Dime, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar that provides the core functionality of the Coti Pay ecosystem. To solve any disputes that may arise between merchants and users, Coti Pay also includes an arbitration system.
Coti’s Advantages
All we’ve just mentioned ensures various advantages and comes with key innovations, such as:
- One-click payments that can be embedded into merchant websites for easy checkout.
- Easy access for node operators – given Coti’s Node Manager, anyone can join the network as a node operator and run all types of nodes.
- Privacy – since privacy remains one of the most sought-after features, a multi-address is implemented for each transaction by a one-way hash function, so transactions cannot be tracked back to a specific user.
- Proof of Trust (PoT) consensus – which adds to the scalability achieved by Coti’s DAG-based decentralized ledger and increases transaction confirmation time thanks to the trust scores as we’ve seen earlier.
- Equitable fee model – fees are balanced and distributed between network participants through a transparent and equitable fee model.
- Smart contracts – Coti is the one to premiere decentralized on-chain smart contracts for the DAG. Smart contracts are recorded in the COTI MultiDAG Cluster, and Full Nodes perform several verifications before confirmation.
- Stablecoin framework – Coti’s MultiDAG ecosystem and components make it possible to create high-performance stable coins.
$COTI Token
The network’s native currency is COTI which powers the network and the interactions between merchants, consumers, node operators, and mediators. The maximum supply is 2 billion COTI tokens, with a circulating supply of 868 million tokens. At the time of our research, the COTI price was $0.31, with a market cap of $269 million. It hit its ATH of $0.48 on August 25th, 2021.
For the token sale, the team allocated 30% of the COTI tokens, with 45% of the total supply going to incentives and liquidity reserves, 15% to the project’s team, and 10% to advisors.
The token serves various functions. It is used as a medium of exchange, so for making and receiving payments within the network, for staking, as incentives for node operators, and for fees (all the network’s fees can only be paid with COTI coins).
COTI is listed on popular exchanges, including Binance, KuCoin, and Huobi Global, to name a few. It was also listed on Coinbase in August and on the DEX Aggregator Protocol 1inch in September.
Team & Community
The Coti protocol was founded in 2017. Samuel Falkon is Coti’s co-founder. He has held various product development and sales management positions, having broad experience in the fintech industry and digital currency. He is currently the VP of business development at the COTI group.
David Assaraf is also Coti’s co-founder. He holds a BSc degree in biotech and economics from Tel Aviv University and is the former CEO of WEB3. The team behind COTI also includes engineers, economists, researchers, and professionals from the banking and fintech industries.
According to the information available on the project’s website, the investor list includes names such as Black Crafters, Wave Financials, Blackedge Capital, and Hard Yaka (owned by Greg Kidd). The project also benefits from strong support, having a community of almost 138k followers on Twitter and of 25k on Facebook. It also has an active page on Medium.
Plans
The team members behind Coti are busy working on the project’s growth, as recently mentioned on their Medium page. What’s also worth mentioning is that their page includes their latest development, an NFT game where you can collect unique NFTs and win COTI prizes worth over 2,000,000 $COTI.
Conclusion
Coti’s solution to the issues of traditional finance as well as to those of other blockchains comes with a few key innovations that are worth keeping an eye on. It is thought out and developed to help companies save time and money by providing them with the tools needed to create fintech products easily.
The online payment system is the project’s targeted market. Given that this is a growing market that still needs solutions like the one provided by Coti, we think it is worth following the project’s development.