Nano

The first RaiBlocks paper appeared in December 2014 with a narrow ambition: move value quickly without bidding for block space.

When the network opened, acquisition was unusual. People solved manual CAPTCHAs and received XRB; there was no mining contest or public sale.

The faucet stopped in October 2017 after roughly 39% of genesis had been distributed. The rest went to a burn address, leaving about 133.248 million nano and no path above the genesis ceiling.

Instead of one chain shared by everyone, every account writes its own signed history. A sender can change only the sender’s chain.

Payment is therefore split. The confirmed send cannot be revoked, but the destination must publish a receive block before spending the amount. Offline receipt becomes possible at the cost of wallet software tracking receivables.

When conflicting blocks appear, representatives vote with weight delegated by balances. Delegation does not move or lock the money, and representatives receive no inflation reward.

This separates payment control from voting service: a representative cannot spend for a user, while a user can move voting weight elsewhere.

The same design concentrates consequences when large representatives fail or voting weight clusters. Network safety depends on holders actually choosing diverse, available operators.

On January 30, 2018, the team replaced the difficult-to-pronounce RaiBlocks name with Nano. Nine days later BitGrail halted XRB trading.

BitGrail reported a 17 million NANO hole. The Nano team said its preliminary ledger check found no double spend and pointed toward exchange software, but that was one party’s statement.

For users, the sharper distinction was custody. Fast irreversible sends could not recover keys and balances controlled by an exchange; Florence proceedings later converted pooled balances into euro claims rather than restoring coins one for one.

Nano always required a small work value on each block, but it used that computation as a spam filter rather than mining. With no monetary fee, valid-looking traffic could still consume node memory, bandwidth and election slots.

The 2021 denial-of-service episode delayed V22 and slowed confirmations. The response kept transfers free while ranking work by account balance and time since use.

Later releases layered hinted elections, continuous backlog scanning and fair queues onto that first scheduler. “Feeless” survived, but service became an explicit allocation problem.

V28 Electrum capped the gap between checked and cemented blocks at roughly 100,000 and added traffic shaping. Under overload, nodes can now discard or defer lower-priority unfinished work instead of accepting an unlimited queue.

Foundation tests reported legitimate confirmations under 1.5 seconds during a 200,000-block burst. That is useful engineering evidence, not a promise that every mainnet node or future attack will match the test.

V28.2 remained the latest tagged release in this review. A May 2026 post described V29 changes to scheduling, bootstrap and integrity as ongoing work.

XNO still represents a spendable ledger balance and a choice of representative, not a yield-bearing stake. The Foundation supports software and adoption but does not redeem XNO or pay node operators through the protocol.

Nano’s continuity lies in refusing a transaction fee. Its evolution lies in admitting that free money transfer still needs rules for scarce attention—and repeatedly rewriting those rules after reality tests them.