COTI

What is COTI (COTI)?

COTI is an enterprise-grade, blockchain-based fintech platform that empowers organizations to build their own payment solutions and digitize any currency to save time and money.

The platform bills itself as “the ultimate power grid of payments,” arguing that cash payments are cheaper than digital solutions and blockchain falls short thanks to instability, complexity, and a lack of scalability.

COTI attempts to provide payment solutions that are as seamless and scalable as traditional payments while being as cost-effective and secure as blockchain.

Who are the Founders of COTI?

COTI was conceived in 2016 by Samuel Falkon, who envisioned the need for a secure, scalable, and instant payment system that could support both fiat and crypto payments. Falkon founded COTI alongside partner David Assaraf, a financial specialist, and former HSBC internal auditor.

One of the early group partners the pair recruited to fulfill their vision was Shahaf Bar-Geffen, the current CEO of COTI. The project’s CTO is Dr. Nir Haloani, owner of 14 patents and former researcher at IBM.

How Does COTI Work?

At the core of COTI’s product portfolio is the COTI Trustchain, a proprietary consensus algorithm based on machine learning. This network dramatically decreases transaction costs and increases processing speed by assigning trust scores to transactions and clustering them in chains.

The COTI Trustchain lies on a multi-DAG (directed acyclic graph) data structure, functioning in tandem to drive up scalability to a theoretical 100,000 transactions per second (TPS).

This DAG-based protocol creates a holistic payment solution that is modular and fully customizable by combining infrastructure, services, and application layers. The latter can include wallets, point-of-sale support, and externally developed stablecoins and apps, while the infrastructure layer describes history nodes, full nodes, and DSP nodes,

The COTI multi-DAG can be compared to Ethereum in that it is a common decentralized infrastructure that can be used as the basis for many other tokens and smart contracts, while one native coin is needed for the payment of fees.

What makes COTI Unique?

COTI is a platform that provides complete solutions, and COTI Pay is one of the best in the business. The service can process all payment types, from online to offline, including cryptocurrencies, credit cards, and even merchants’ native coins.

Instant settlements are a requirement for true mass global adoption, and COTI Pay does this safely and securely while also providing both consumers and merchants with additional advantages.

The platform has developed an Arbitration Service that offers dispute resolution through a decentralized collective of highly trusted network participants. Meanwhile, privacy is also a standout, with transactions unable to be traced back to a specific user. This is because a multi-address is being implemented for each transaction via a one-way hash function.

How is the COTI Network Secured?

COTI’s DAG-based decentralized ledger uses a consensus mechanism referred to as proof-of-trust (PoT). This allows scalability through parallel source selection and assigning users with Trust Scores. Users with a higher Trust Score enjoy faster confirmations.

Since Trust Scores are key to scalability and faster transaction validation at the core of the Trustchain Algorithm, they are managed Trust Score Nodes. These are decentralized nodes, and are fed information on user behavior by COTI’s Trust Score Update Algorithm (TSUA).

Transactions initiated by a user in the form of a COTI wallet need this Trust Score. The wallet sends a Trust Score request to a Trust Score Node and is furnished with their relevant Trust Score value.

This Trust Score is then added to the transaction and sent by the user to a full node. These nodes verify transactions and select a source to validate them before performing PoT.

The transaction is then validated and added to the DAG network before being sent to two DSP (Double-Spend Prevention) nodes. This step is designed to prevent double-spend attacks and fraud.

Once green-lighted by the two DSP nodes, the transaction is broadcast to the DSP network, Trust Score network, and Zero Spend server. The full network can then verify the transaction, and after a certain threshold of confirmations is received, the network reaches “Trustchain Consensus.”

What is the Use of COTI?

COTI is the native coin of the COTI platform and is used to pay network fees by users who transact. It is also used in the COTI Treasury, where holders can deposit COTI and claim a share of the yield it generates.

This COTI Treasury system lets users deposit their COTI coins as collateral and create a position called a “trove.” This is represented by tCOTI tokens that are minted upon depositing, and tCOTI can be redeemed for COTI at any time.

The Treasury grows over time as the ecosystem pays fees, and users are encouraged to lock up their COTI in the Treasury to share some of the fees generated by the platform as a whole.

How Much COTI is In Circulation?

COTI has a maximum supply of 2 billion coins, with just over 1.1 billion currently in circulation. The cryptocurrency can be considered a multichain asset because even though it is the native coin of the COTI Trustchain, it can be bridged to Ethereum as an ERC-20 token.

If you have ERC-20 COTI and want to convert it to Trustchain native COTI or vice versa, you can use the COTI Bridge.

How Do You Buy COTI?

You can buy COTI on some of the top cryptocurrency exchanges and use fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies like BTC and BNB to transact. It’s also possible to buy COTI using stablecoins such as USDT and BUSD.

If you prefer decentralized exchanges, you can pick up ERC-20 COTI on Ethereum via Uniswap and then bridge across to the Trustchain.

How Do You Store COTI?

The best way to store COTI safely is by using the COTI Pay wallet. That’s for Trustchain native COTI coins, of course, so if you are more interested in ERC-20 COTI, then you can use any Ethereum-compatible wallet.

Is COTI a Good Investment?

COTI is a well-known project in the blockchain space. One of its premier accomplishments to date was its selection by Cardano to be the official issuer of the Djed stablecoin on the Cardano blockchain.

Djed operates by maintaining a reserve while letting users mint and burn stablecoins and reserve coins. In fact, it has a reserve ratio range of between 400% and 800%, making it a heavily overcollateralized protocol.

COTI’s selection for Djed issuance was an example of the project’s quality as an enterprise-grade solutions provider. However, the relationship between Cardano and COTI goes even further since AdaPay, Cardano's payment gateway solution, is also the product of a collaboration with COTI.

Given this track record of innovation and adoption, there’s every chance that COTI’s success could snowball in the future.