Ravencoin(RVN)

Ravencoin is an open-source decentralized peer-to-peer network specifically developed for asset creation and transfers. Ravencoin aims to help increase liquidity for assets and make them available for permissionless trading over the blockchain, as well as to provide immutable records of property ownership. 

RVN, the internal currency of the network, is the central component of the Ravencoin network. RVN coins facilitate the issuance of assets and trading of tokenized assets, and must be burned in order to create new assets on the network.

Ravencoin aims to simplify the issuance and management of any kind of real-world assets and digital assets over blockchain alongside non-asset tokens, which can be used for communication or voting. Assets can be anything, including land titles, documents, virtual products and objects, securities, real-world custodial items like gold or actual euros, airline miles, and more.

The project was launched on Jan. 3, 2018, on the 9th anniversary of Bitcoin. Ravencoin is a fork of the Bitcoin codebase, so the launch date was a tribute to the “parent” cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, the project's name references a popular series “Game of Thrones'', with Ravencoin’s whitepaper elaborating on the name  as follows: “In the fictional world of Westeros, ravens are used as messengers who carry statements of truth.”

Ravencoin released its tokens to the community at the project’s launch without ICO, pre-mine or master nodes, to distribute RVN fairly and prevent network centralization. However, the company received support from a blockchain-focused VC fund Medici Ventures. The project is currently governed by Ravencoin foundation independent from Medici and exists in the form of a Wyoming non-profit.

The founders of Ravencoin were Bruce Fenton, who was a board member and an executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation from 2015 to 2018, and the network’s lead developer Tron Black, who is a serial entrepreneur with 30+ years of experience as a software developer. 

Independent teams can use the Ravencoin network to build applications on top of it. Using Ravencoin, developers can build and support security tokens, digital collectibles, utility tokens, gift cards, fiat currencies or other user-defined assets. 

Over 40 projects are created and run on the Ravencoin blockchain, according to Ravenwiki. In the Ravencoin ecosystem, security token offerings (STOs) and non-fungible tokens are the two main use cases for protocols (NFTs). 

RVN price

According to the RVN live price chart, Ravencoin had a moderate price dynamic between its launch and July 2022 as there were four major peaks, each followed by a slow rollback to the initial price of $0.01-$0.02.

RVN had a stellar year in 2019 despite the crypto winter that sent the prices of the major cryptos down. It was listed on Binance in February of that year, an event that provided bullish momentum to RVN price. The price of RVN in USD terms reached an all-time high of just under $0.08 in June 2019. 

However, the cryptocurrency followed the broader crypto market through the rest of the year, with RVN closing December 2019 at $0.023. After plunging even lower to $0.014 in March 2020 alongside the broader crypto market, Ravencoin was locked in the range between $0.012 and $0.22 for most of the time during the next 6 months. 

In July 2020, attackers exploited a vulnerability in Ravencoin’s mining algorithm to mint extra RVN. About 315 million RVN were minted, worth about $5.7 million at prices as of Jul. 3, 2020. The exploit resulted in the creation of an extra 5% of Ravencoin’s current supply at the time, or 1.5% of the coin’s maximum supply.  

Ravencoin swung back to growth in February 2021. Analysts pointed out that an 800% meteoric rise of RVN to $0.229 between Feb. 1 and Feb. 20 can be attributed to a major crypto bull run. The GameStop stocks craze, which was also unfolding at the time and led to brokerage firms briefly suspending access to multiple stocks, probably highlighted Ravencoin's use case for permissionless trading of tokenized assets. 

In the following months, RVN set a new all time high of $0.2336 on Apr. 14, 2021, just weeks before entering a correction phase that lasted for more than a year and pushed the price as low as $0.0487 on Jun. 22, 2022.

How RVN works

The goal of Ravencoin is to streamline asset creation and management with a blockchain tailored for these purposes, so it builds on the failings of Bitcoin and Ethereum features in this niche. 

Being a fork of Bitcoin version 0.15.99, Ravencoin is built on an established code base. Like Bitcoin, Ravencoin is a Proof-of-Work (PoW) network, but some key differences have been built into its protocol. First, Ravencoin boasts a shorter block time of 1 minute as opposed to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes, which means an increased transaction throughput for Ravencoin. 

Another primary difference between Bitcoin and Ravencoin is their mining algorithms. Ravencoin started off with a unique ASIC-resistant mining algorithm called X16R, which was introduced by Ravencoin developers to avoid industrialized mining of RVN. 

In September 2019, the mining algorithm had to be adapted to X16Rv2 after the team discovered the presence of ASICs in the network. The adaptation involved adding an extra hashing algorithm to three of the 16 existing ones, which significantly reduced the times an ASIC can be used. 

Ravencoin developers had to perform another algorithm change to protect the network against ASICs in May 2020. Preceded by X16R and X16Rv2, KawPoW became the third Ravencoin algorithm implemented on May. 6, 2020 with a hard fork, and it is still active as of July. 2022. 

Ravencoin’s RVN has a maximum total supply of 21 billion coins, a thousand times larger than Bitcoin’s 21 million. There are over 11.5 billion RVN coins in circulation at the time of writing, which means that 54% of the supply has already been mined. 

Users employ the Raven Core client and burn RVN coins to issue tokens on the network. After the asset is created, users can decide on the purpose of the asset, the rules that govern them and its basic tokenomics such as total supply and fungibility. Ravencoin also makes it possible to build in rewards or token returns denominated in RVN, which can be applicable for dividend-paying assets or assets with cash flow. 

RVN news, updates and highlights

Ravencoin went through its first halving on Jan. 11, 2022, which occurred at block 2,100,000. As a result, the total number of RVN mined by miners per block reduced from 5,000 to 2,500. With that, the amount of new Ravencoin is being cut by 3.6 million per day or about 1.3 billion a year – a huge reduction, which decreased the selling pressure coming from miners. 

Despite miner rewards being slashed, RVN may still ride the wave of popularity with its PoW consensus mechanism in the near future. Some community members believe Ravencoin could benefit from Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in the same manner as Ethereum Classic. The Merge will replace miners with stakers, therefore existing Ethereum miners are expected to switch to PoW chains.

At the same time, the Ravencoin development team continues their work on the project, as can be seen from the developer meeting transcripts shared with the community. While developers keep building, it becomes evident that the pitfall for Ravencoin growth might lie in relatively low adoption rates and lack of brand awareness for most projects in its ecosystem, and not in its possible technical imperfections. 

Another factor in the equation is the demand for Revencoin, which is tied to adoption of tokenized assets. Despite the advantages offered by this technology, there is still probably a long way to go before security token use becomes widespread. There are several established different players in this niche building platforms for security tokenization and exchanges for this type of assets, but they all struggle to see the same parabolic growth as DeFi and NFT verticals did. 

Frequently asked questions about RVN

• Can you mine or stake RVN?

You can mine RVN coins, but only GPU mining is an available option. You can use the community guide to mining RVN to find out the requirements for miners. You can also check the mining pools here. 

It is worth noting that Ravencoin fights against ASIC mining it as it prevents more users buying and trading Ravencoin and leads to centralization. 

• What are some of the best RVN wallets?

Official wallets are always recommended. Ravencoin has you covered with their own Ravencoin Core QT official wallet, which has Windows, Linux, or Mac OS versions and can be downloaded from Ravencoin Github. 

Popular multi-coin wallets that support RVN tokens are Trust Wallet, Exodus and Atomic wallet, among others. You can find the complete list of wallets that support RVN on Ravencoin’s website.

• What can you do with RVN?

RVN is used in the Ravencoin network to issue digital securities or to pay out the holders of the specific types of tokenized assets. 

• How to buy RVN? 

Ravencoin’s RVN token is listed on some of the largest exchanges globally, including Binance, OKX, Huobi, gate.io and Ascendex. You can choose between RVN/USDT and RVN/BTC trading pairs, but there are more exotic ones available on some exchanges.