HYCON: Cryptocurrency at Its Best

Today for the first time ever I'm going to review a project whose ICO has been over for a couple of months now. Yet, it is still an exciting one, and I've been following it since March. I'm speaking about HYCON, a cryptocurrency developed by the Infinity Project team. Infinity Project is a blockchain infrastructure project that works on various solutions including exchange services, music platform, smart wallet, etc. under the aegis of Glosfer, a major Korean blockchain company.

The Idea

The idea of HYCON is to create a flexible and market-friendly cryptocurrency outperforming existing competitors in terms of the hashrate, latency, scalability and safety. HYCON stands for "hyper-connected coin" and functions within Infinity's own blockchain. The Infinity Project wants to develop a platform using which consumers will be able to use cryptocurrencies in real world more easily, with the ultimate goal of increasing the adoption of crypto. Moreover, the Infinity Project intends to build a truly decentralized and user-friendly exchange. By using HYCON consumers will be able to trade cryptocurrencies quickly and cheaply.

The Technology

HYCON relies on Cryptonight V7 mining algorithm and SPECTRE protocol that generalizes a blockchain into a directed acyclic graph (DAG). DAG structure has no fixed blocks, and each transaction in it carries its own proof of work, thus reducing the latency. SPECTRE allows for creation of parallel blocks by separating the mining and consensus portions of the protocol. Skipping the technicalities, one can say that SPECTRE ensures that transactions are included into the blocks with relative ease and speed ensuring high speed and reliability of these transactions. In HYCON, SPECTRE is modified to increase performance.

HYCON is currently using proof of work as a consensus algorithm with the initial target of 1 block per second, although SPECTRE can theoretically scale up to 10 blocks per second. Moreover, since proof of work consumes a lot of electricity, HYCON's creators consider other possibilities for consensus, including proof of space. It is expected that the entire supply of HYCON will be mined in 50 years. Users can use HYCON wallets for storing and performing transactions with the cryptocurrency.

The Token Metrics

Since the HYCON ICO has been over for a couple of months already, there is not much to tell about. HYCONs will be distributed in the following way:

As you can see, 70 per cent of HYCON will be available for mining, with the remaining 30 per cent minted with the Genesis block for various purposes. The team managed to raise $45m during pre-sale and private sale and well as another $22.9m during the crowdsale for 10 per cent of the tokens, which shows unbelievable level of trust in the project from the investors. Despite the huge hard cap, the sale was sold out ahead of time.

The Team and Advisors

CEO and CTO Taewon Kim as well as many other team members represent Glosfer (which I mentioned in the introduction). CPO Dongju Ryu served as the Technical Advisor for the Ministry of National Defence Cyber Command and the Advisor of Cyber Security & Technology for the National Police Agency in Korea. Vice President Jason French spend many years with Samsung, just like Blockchain Developer Francis Lim.

Advisors include Dr. Philipp Sandner who heads the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and Monique Morrow who held senior managerial positions at Cisco and Swisscom.

The Product

HYCON’s mainnet along with its code on GitHub was launched on 1 June in line with the roadmap. The mining started shortly after this, with the global hash power surpassing 10 million hashes per second. The team is actively involved in various blockchain events and crypto conferences. Moreover, the team is working on making HYCON available on Nano Ledger. In addition to this, a lite wallet is expected to be launched as a Chrome extension soon so users won't have to run a node and be fully synced to the network to make transactions.

Conclusion

HYCON has been criticized by many ICO reviewers for token metrics but nevertheless the project has tremendous support from its investors and community. It managed to raise all the funds and has completed all the milestones from its roadmap so far. The team and advisors has been working in the blockchain space for many years and has many years of experience combined in other major companies. The Infinity Project has a lot of real-world use cases and if implemented according to the plan, it will be able to make cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies more available for the general public. HYCON is expected to hit exchanges in early July, so keep your eyes peeled!

More info about HYCON:
HYCON website: https://hycon.io
HYCON Telegram: https://t.me/teamhycon
HYCON Whitepaper: https://hycon.io/doc/whitepaper_en.pdf

This article is not a buy/sell recommendation. I am not a financial adviser and you should do your own research before investing in any project.

Thanks for reading, stay tuned for other reviews and feel free to upvote, resteem and follow me!