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Nano (ticker: XNO) is a digital payment protocol focused on fast, feeless, lightweight transfers. The Nano Foundation's documentation describes it as a secure, green and decentralized network designed for everyday payments, while nano.org positions it as digital currency without fees.

Rather than using one global chain, Nano uses a block-lattice ledger: every account controls its own blockchain (account-chain). A Nano block represents one transaction and records the account state, including balance and representative. This structure lets account chains be updated independently and asynchronously instead of waiting for a global block producer.

Nano launched under the name RaiBlocks; the original whitepaper dates to November 2017, but the documentation warns that portions are no longer accurate and points readers to the actively maintained Living Whitepaper. The current node implementation is open source and written in C++.

Nano's monetary design has a fixed upper bound: the genesis account contained the maximum quantity and no new supply can be created. The official glossary lists post-burn circulating supply as 133,248,297.920938463463374607431768211455 Nano, while noting that lost keys and additional burn addresses make actual spendable circulation lower.

Nano targets payment shortcomings associated with conventional cryptocurrencies: transaction fees that make small payments impractical, confirmation delays, scaling bottlenecks created by global blocks, and high energy use from mining-based consensus. Its stated use cases include remittances, microtransactions, online and in-store payments, foreign exchange and trading, and banking infrastructure.

The protocol is designed to transfer the full value directly to the recipient without a network fee. It avoids traditional mining and global block production; a small amount of user-generated work is retained as an anti-spam quality-of-service mechanism rather than as the security or consensus engine. Trade-offs include dependence on representative voting, the need for recipients to publish receive blocks before spending incoming funds, and the operational complexity of running reliable nodes.

A transfer is split into two account-chain actions. The sender publishes a send/state block that debits its own account and links the funds to the recipient. The recipient can be offline; later it publishes a receive block that credits its own account. The send becomes an irreversible receivable once confirmed, but the funds cannot be spent by the recipient until its receive block is confirmed.

Consensus uses Open Representative Voting (ORV). Each account may delegate its balance as voting weight to a representative, change that delegation at any time, and continue spending its funds; delegation is not staking. Representatives vote on block validity, and principal representatives (accounts with at least 0.1% of online voting weight, per the glossary) rebroadcast votes. Nodes tally votes until quorum, defined in the glossary as a delta greater than 67% of online voting weight, is reached.

Blocks are lightweight stateful records containing account, previous block, representative, balance, link, signature and work fields. Nano's work is a small Proof-of-Work value calculated by the user or a work peer; documentation says it generally takes a few seconds on a modern desktop CPU and is intended to raise the cost of spam. Because each account chain can progress independently and blocks are small, the official overview says confirmation is often under a couple of seconds, subject to network conditions.