Byteball

Byteball, later rebranded as Obyte, is a cryptocurrency platform that uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) rather than a traditional blockchain to record transactions and support decentralized applications. The native asset is the byte, or bytes, used to pay for transaction fees and to participate in contracts.

Technology and design: In Byteball/Obyte, new transactions reference previous transactions, building a DAG of receipts and payments. There are no miners or a single blockchain, which the project argues reduces fees and increases scalability. The platform supports programmable payments via smart contracts, including conditional payments that can be triggered by external data or events and multi-party arrangements.

Features and use cases: The system supports private payments, data contracts, and multi-party contracts; it can be used to implement escrow, loyalty programs, and cross-chain interactions with supported gateways and oracles. It emphasizes user-controlled privacy and offline transaction capabilities.

History and status: Byteball was launched in the mid-2010s by an anonymous developer team and later rebranded to Obyte in 2019 to reflect broader decentralization. The project remains community-driven with ongoing development and ecosystem-building, though it has not achieved the same level of mainstream adoption as larger blockchains.

Governance and economics: The Byteball/Obyte protocol is designed to operate without a central issuer; network security relies on the DAG structure and consensus among participants. The supply of bytes is managed by protocol rules, with fees used to process transactions.