DarkCoin is a coin shrouded in technology and mystery. One of the first coins ever developed in the histry of crypto, the coin has amassed huge popularity among followers. Not to mention the great market activity surrounding the coin which has lead to stability and steady growth benefiting many of its users. On an short interview with the DarkCoin lead dev, Evan Duffield i gained a in depth insight into the dedicated development team behind the coin and what the future holds in store for it.

1) What were the beginnings of DarkCoin like ? what were some of the main aims and have they been achieved to the level you want ?

Evan Duffield : Darkcoin started out with the mission of creating a type of eCash for the internet. During this year we’ve worked on a strategy to accomplish this by adding two innovations. The first is masternodes, a infrastructure innovation which allows us to build functional services into the core protocol. Utilizing the first, we’re able to add functional innovations such as privacy and instant transactions.

By introducing Masternodes, we solve many of the issues that Bitcoin faces, such as the bleeding of full nodes and lack of network infrastructure. For example, Darkcoin with a mere market cap of 9 million (as of this morning) has 1700 masternodes running currently. Bitcoin with a market cap of 4 billion, only has 6600 due to a lack of incentive for full node operators. With more full nodes comes much greater ability for these operators to serve users creating a great user experience during for propagating of messages, syncing and the ability for the network to withstand denial of service attacks.

During the 2014 year we’ve managed to create the core technology backing the masternode network and also implement Darksend, our flagship anonymization technology. Users who want to anonymize coins can do so at any time, using any number of the masternodes to anonymize their coins in a completely trustless way.

2) Will there be any initiatives for DarkCoin adoption as currently there are services which use the coin but will this be able to expand ?

Evan Duffield : Now that the Darkcoin core technology is stable and working, we’ll be unveiling our 2015 marketing plan soon. This will involve a highly organized group of people reaching out to Bitcoin businesses and users all over the world to tell them about how Darkcoin can benefit them. We’re gearing up to position ourselves as a business friendly private cryptocurrency. Beyond that we also have some exciting partnerships in the works and we’ll be receiving more information about soon.

3) Privacy and security are two of the main aims of the coin. Relating to this will you borrow any features from other stealth coins such as Stealthcoin/shadowcash or will all features be inhouse ?

Evan Duffield : Our team is growing all of the time, so we’re able to move really fast and implement many new features on top of the Bitcoin core technology. Currently we have six developers, which is more than enough to build all of the required technology in-house. This will allow us to continue to lead the crypto-currency privacy revolution and provide other crypto-currencies with our technology to improve the whole ecosystem.

4) What are your plans for the future of DarkCoin and as developers are there any features in the works at the moment ?

Evan Duffield : For early 2015 we have some exciting features in the works such as forking from the Bitcoin 0.9.3 codebase to gain years of code improvements, the Darksend precision matching engine for much faster mixing, instantX which provides instant irreversible transactions*, encrypted masternode communications to ensure no one is snooping on connections, the multipath routing system for hiding masternode IPs and 2-factor authentication at a core protocol level to protect user funds. Darkcoin is moving faster than ever so we look forward to the progress in 2015!

*Bitcoin transactions can be reversed by mining a conflicting transaction after an unconfirmed transaction has been broadcast. Utilizing this attack, an attacker would mine a conflicting transaction in a block, once they have a block they would purchase goods. After the transaction has been broadcast to the whole network and been instantly confirmed “safe” and goods have been delivered, they would broadcast the conflicting block and then receive the funds back. InstantX solves this by using a concensus and locking strategy described here: https://www.darkcoin.io/downloads/InstantTX.pdf

So there it was an exclusive interview with the DarkCoin team. If you liked this article follow us on twitter @themerklenews and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter.