Bytom is a public blockchain platform that wants to bridge the digital and physical world. To accomplish this, it has created a decentralized network where digital and physical assets can be registered and exchanged with one another.
According to their official website, the goal of the Bytom project is to connect atomic assets such as bonds, dividends, securities, warrants, forecasting information, intelligence information, etc. from the physical world with assets that exist on the Bytom blockchain (digital assets and currencies).
Bytom Value, Market Cap and Volume
Bytom has a maximum available supply of 2.1 billion BTM tokens. Of that amount, 33% is reserved for mining rewards, 30% was distributed during the ICO phase, 20% is reserved by the Bytom Foundation, 10% was set aside for development, and 7% went to private equity investors.
The funds collected during the ICO phase will be used to fund various startup operations on the Bytom blockchain, including cryptographic audits, third-party audits, marketing, legal and financial affairs, and the initial computing power needed to deploy the blockchain.
Bytom’s mining rewards will be halved every four years until no new mining block reward is produced. Approximately 86.6 million tokens will be mined every year for the first four years. That figure will be halved to 43.3 million tokens a year for the next four years, and so on. 1% of all mining yields will be donated to non-profits researching AI. Comprehensive details on how the Bytom Foundation plans to use its funding can be found in the economic white paper.
The available supply of BTM is now set at 1.4 billion and almost a billion tokens are already in the circulating supply. BTM’s market cap reached $400 million USD with a 24-hour volume of almost $20 million USD in December 2017.
Types of Assets on Bytom
Income Assets – Includes fixed assets invested by a local government, non-performing assets, etc.
Equity Assets – Includes shares of non-public digital investments, equity of non-listed companies, equity of private funds, etc. The transfer of equity assets requires investor verification.
Securitized Assets – Includes debts, automobile loans, and other asset-backed securities that can generate predictable cash flow and whose credit can be enhanced through structured design.
Bytom wants to promote the interaction and circulation of assets between the physical and digital world so that they can be exchanged, registered, gambled, and engaged in contract-based inter-operations within the Bytom protocol. Bytom has its own native coin (abbreviated BTM) for governing transactions within the network. BTM is meant to encourage miners to get involved in the Bytom ecosystem and provide transaction fees for asset trading, dividends of income assets, and deposits for asset issuance.
How Bytom Works
Bytom’s architecture is made up of three layers, which are compatible with the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) design of Bitcoin:
Application Layer – The application layer is mobile friendly and enables developers to create asset management applications.
Contract Layer – The contract layer uses genesis and control contracts for asset issuance and management.
Data Transmission Layer – The transmission layer implements distributed ledger technology to achieve asset issuance, spending, transfer and other operations.
According to Bytom’s technical whitepaper, the platform uses several features to help it achieve its goals of bridging the gap between physical and digital assets.
Compatible with Bitcoin’s UTXO Model
It uses the transaction data structure of Bitcoin to achieve high-speed concurrence and controllable anonymity. Bytom also has its own basic transaction unit called BUTXO (Bytome Unspent Transaction Output), which is scalable and supports multiple asset types. Once a transaction uses a particular output, the same output can’t be used by other transactions.
General Address Format
The design of the Bytom wallet uses BIP32, BIP33, and BIP441 formats to provide support for multiple currencies, accounts, and keys.
Compatible with the Chinese National Encryption Standard
In addition to using SHA256 hashing and ESCDA encryption from Bitcoin’s design to create private keys, public keys and an address system, Bytom also supports cryptographic algorithms that are compliant with the Chinese National Standard.
Enhanced Trading Flexibility
Unlike the Ethereum model, Bytom’s UTXO design adopts a mechanism similar to nonce to ensure each unspent outputs can only be associated with one transaction.
Cross-Chain Asset Transactions and Dividend Distribution
Developers can perform API calls using smart contracts to verify network activities on side chains, and thus achieve cross-chain asset transaction, dividend distribution, and communication in the contract.
AI ASIC-Chip Friendly PoW Algorithm
Bytom’s hashing process is friendlier to AI ASIC chips than CPU and GPU chips. Outdated miners can be used to accelerate AI hardware and save mining costs.
Virtual Machine (BVM)
Bytom features a stack-type state virtual machine. BVM’s instruction set is Turing complete and all instructions are executed on the stack. Pricing depends on the operation consumption, and is very similar to the gas mechanism of Ethereum’s virtual machine.
Asset Naming with ODIN
Assets on Bytom will be named using ODIN (Open Data Index Name) standards to ensure the uniqueness of assets across the entire network. ODIN is based on the Bitcoin blockchain and supports the introduction of other blockchains through multi-level marking.
Quasi “Segregated Witness” Design
Bytom uses distributed ledger technology (DLT) to allow interaction between various assets. The platform separates a signature’s data and witness to achieve isolation between synchronized distributed ledgers and asset management.
Bytom vs. Other Cryptocurrencies
Bytom doesn’t want to be just digital currency like Bitcoin or Litecoin. Instead, it was designed to facilitate the exchange of diversified digital assets and mainly focuses on asset registration and circulation. It’s core objectives are:
– To establish diversified byte assets and standards. It wants to become a global open platform for the registration of byte assets and to facilitate the definition and creation of byte assets in a user-friendly manner.
– To create an interactive tool for building diversified byte assets. In addition to being a tool for asset exchange, the platform will also support more complicated forms of interaction with forecasting and triggering tools.
Bytom believes trading atomic assets on blockchains is the next logical step now that digital currencies are gaining traction
Buying and Storing Bytom
Several exchanges allow Bytom trading in BTC, ETH, and USDT pairs. The most popular exchanges where BTM is available include HitBTC, EtherDelta, Cex.com, Gate.io and Cryptopia. BTM is an ERC20-compliant token, which means you can store it in a TREZOR Hardware Wallet ot MyEtherWallet (MEW) as a custom token. For mobile storage the Bytom developers recommend imToken, a smart digital wallet that supports multiple coins and works on iOS and Android systems.
Liquidity of Bytom
Despite getting de-listed from Binance after the People’s Bank of China banned ICOs for “illegal fundraising” in September 2017, Bytom has managed to remain fairly liquid. With Binance out of the picture for the time being, Gate.io now has the highest volume of BTM trading.
