The Byteball project has garnered a lot of positive attention over the past year or so. Most people know it as a currency which is distributed to Bitcoin holders on a regular basis. Even so, there is a lot more to this project than meets the eye. The project is all about making smart payments more simple, which is a very noble cause, all things considered. Moreover, it is about “enabling trust where trust couldn’t exist before”. Now is a good time to look at what this project has to offer other than the free airdrops.
Why is ByteBall a Thing?
The main reason to use Byteball over other currencies is its risk-free conditional smart payments. No other traditional currency in the world can perform such actions as of right now. Being able to place a specific condition on a payment and ensure it is automatically executed when that condition has been met is certainly interesting. If said condition is not met, the money will simply be returned to the sender. It is a completely trustless setup which seems to work quite well.
What’s the tech behind Byteball?
The concept of conditional payments is not difficult to explain. Simply send money to a recipient on the Byteball network, add the condition, and let things unfold on their own. There is also a strong focus on peer-to-peer insurance as a way to hedge against negative events. More specifically, it is possible to buy insurance from peers and get paid if a negative event occurs. All of this is based on smart contract technology, which is one of the driving factors behind ByteBall as a project.
This latter option can easily be applied to many real-life events. Airplane flights and package deliveries, for instance, can both benefit from peer-to-peer insurance. All of the data related to the insurance parameters will be added to the database by a decentralized oracle, which will allow users to unlock the associated contracts and claim their rewards accordingly. It is always better to insure against unfortunate events and never need it rather than to have no insurance in place.
Byteball can also be used for other purposes. Prediction markets using smart contracts are another interesting option worth exploring. There’s also a way to bet against other Byteball users in a peer-to-peer fashion. With the Winter Olympics coming up soon, there will be plenty of options waiting to be explored. Last but not least, Byteball users can send cryptocurrency via email or chat. Perhaps the most interesting non-payment feature is the option to store one’s digital identity inside a Byteball wallet with the help of Jumio.
What Comes Next for Byteball?
There is a lot more to Byteball than the things outlined above. The project has its own untraceable currency, known as Blackbytes. The project also supports atomic exchanges, regulated assets, on-chain oracles, and settlement finality. All of this shows there is still a lot of work to be done in the future, but once all of these features come to market, people will start taking this project more seriously. With some marketing efforts taking place already, things are looking pretty interesting for Byteball.
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