Banano: Everything You Need to Know | Faucets | Mining | Games | DeFi | NFTs

What is Banano?

Banano is a meme coin that was started as a joke by a few devoted Nano contributors. It is a fourth-generation cryptocurrency that offers instant, feeless and eco-friendly transactions. Banano utilizes a novel Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology called Block Lattice, where each user has their own blockchain.

Banano was forked from Nano in April 2018. But unlike Nano, whose developers were focused on the payment aspect of the cryptocurrency, Banano was more open to feature additions like on-chain messaging, privacy layers and NFTs.

Banano did not have an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), instead, all coins were and are distributed through ongoing free and fair distribution program like airdrops, faucet games and other events. Banano has always used a fun attitude and a gamification approach to get new users started without all the usual hazzles of handling cryptocurrencies.  

Apart from being a meme coin, Banano is also meant to be an educational cryptocurrency. The idea is, if you lose some Banano, it is not a big deal but you learn your lesson. For this, Banano is distributed for free through games and faucets. This gave a lot of people a chance to own their first cryptocurrency and also provided newbies with the opportunity to familiarize themselves with essential concepts like wallet, seed, exchange etc.

What is Special About Banano?

Banano has several key advantages over other competing cryptocurrencies as it uses new data structures, consensus mechanisms and other innovative features:

• Feeless: One of the biggest advantages of Banano is its feeless transactions. By focusing on transferring value as efficiently as possible, Banano has ensured that the network stays feeless. It has helped Banano to be simple and easy to use. It also provides the perfect environment for crypto newbies to learn and experiment with cryptocurrencies.
• Instant: Banano transactions can be completed in under a second. Regardless of whether the transaction is related to the purchase of goods at a store, cross-border money transfer or online payment, the transaction is completed instantly. All the payments are fully settled on the network without any delay.
• Eco-friendly: A lot of cryptocurrencies consume a lot of energy to secure their networks. But Banano avoids the use of such resource-intense mining processes by using better consensus mechanisms and design choices. At a time when the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies is being questioned, Banano seems like a promising alternative.

How Does Banano Work?

Similar to Nano, Banano uses a new variation of the DAG technology called Block Lattice. In Block Lattice, each account has its own blockchain (called an account-chain) and only the owner of the account can update it. Every ‘block’ in Banano is just a transaction, and instead of storing a full record of the entire blockchain transactions, the blocks in the blockchain (account-chain) contains only the current balance in the account and their associated transaction amounts. This approach ensures that the blocks are added quickly without conflicts and send to the network for confirmation. This allows for near instantaneous transactions.

This is in sharp contrast to other cryptos like Bitcoin, in which all transactions are recorded and batched together into a block before being added to the blockchain. And since the size of the blocks is small, transactions have to bid to be included in the block. The fees generated from this bidding process are distributed to the nodes that create these new blocks and this whole bidding process is known as mining. The elimination of this resource-intense bidding process is how Banano has managed to keep its network feeless.

Banano developers have opted to keep significant portions of the original code from Nano in order to keep cross-chain compatibility between existing code libraries. But they have fine-tuned parameters like the Proof of Work (POW) requirements and currency units. But as more features are added to Banano, the code is likely to diverge more from the original version. Most of these changes are made in order to improve the ecosystem.

Banano also has a deflationary program called the ‘Banano Buy-Back and Burn’ program which uses the earnings from the faucets to buy back Banano on exchanges. The bought-back Banano is burned monthly. This approach helps in stabilizing the price of Banano during the distribution phase by reducing the supply.

How to Get Free Banano?

Banano is freely distributed through faucets, games, contests, giveaways and airdrops. As Banano did not have an ICO, it used innovative faucet games to distribute the coins. In addition to that, active users on the Banano discord server receive rains and tips. Tipbots are used at the Banano subreddit, Twitter account and telegram groups to give away lots of tips and keep the community engaged.

Faucets

Banano has a number of faucets and faucet games that are running permanently or intermittently.

• Monkey Talks
• Banano Faucet
• Prussia’s Banano Faucet
• TNV Banano Faucet
• Black Monkey
• Banano Fans
• Banano Faucet Imalfect

Banano Mining

Cryptocurrencies like Banano do not require mining and therefore are examples of ecologically green cryptocurrencies. But Banano has purposefully branded some of its faucets as miners. This naming choice was made as a way of stating that crypto mining is not without alternatives.

• Banano Powerplant: Banano Powerplant is a mining pool faucet that uses CPU to mine a range of different altcoins and pays out in Banano. And since the rates are subsidized by Banano, the rates are better than mining them directly.
• Banano Miner Faucet: Banano Miner is not really a miner. Instead of running arbitrary calculations to ‘mine’ a cryptocurrency, the resources of the computer are used to help researchers by running folding simulations through Folding@Home. Then, based on the computational contribution Banano is send to the wallets of the ‘miners’.

Games

The Banano ecosystem also feature a number of games which payout in Banano.

• Banano Bust
• MonKey Slots
• Banano Lotto
• Banano Crop
• Mokeee Run

DeFi | NFTs

• ApeSwap: Wrapped Banano (wBAN) is available on the Binance Smart Chain and can be traded on ApeSwap.
• CryptomonKeys: Freely distributed Banano themed NFTs

Exchanges

A crypto exchange is an online platform that acts like an intermediary between buyers and sellers.

• Coinex.com
• Mercatox.com
• Txbit.io
• Vitex.net

Wallet

While a crypto exchange makes it possible to trade cryptos, a crypto wallet is used to store those coins.

• Kalium: Official mobile wallet for Android and iOS
• BananoVault: Official web wallet