All major cryptocurrencies have seen their code being forked over the past few years. It is a trend affecting Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and so forth. Monero has seen its fair share of forks too, although the Masari project has been overlooked by a lot of people. Nearly a year after being first announced, now is a good time to look into what this project is about.
The Masari Fork
One could argue forking Monero will only result in projects which are of lesser quality. There is a very different type of quality associated with Monero development compared to other currencies which provide privacy or anonymity. Even so, it is a good codebase to start from, and the Masari team decided to fork Monero in September of 2017.
How Is it Different?
Any fork of an existing cryptocurrency has to make an impact in one way or another. For Masari, the big change affected the project’s mining difficulty algorithm in order to avoid flash mining issues. Although this fork will receive upstream updates from Monero itself, it will also contribute back to the main branch through suggestions and potential implementations of different features.
Masari utilizes the CryptoNight-Fast algorithm, which should still be ASIC-resistant at this time. All of the initial funding associated with this project came from its developers, as there was no ICO or anything similar to speak of. There was a premine comprising under 1% of all coins, although those funds have been deposited into a donation wallet for future development.
The big question is whether or not Masari will find any use cases in the cryptocurrency world. For now, there do not appear to be any real use cases for this currency, although things are always subject to change in the cryptocurrency world. It can be found on a few smaller exchanges, although no major trading platform has decided to pick up this forked coin.
The Road Ahead
For the Masari team, there is still plenty of work to be done in the coming months and years. The mobile wallet will come to market in two weeks, and its code can be found on GitHub. This is a pretty big development for the project in its current stage, although it is only a small step toward making a big impact in the world of cryptocurrencies.