PotCoin

PotCoin (code: POT) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency which exists with the aim of becoming the standard form of payment for the legalized cannabis industry. PotCoin is an open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license and was technically identical to Litecoin until August 23, 2015, when Potcoin changed to Proof-of-Stake-Velocity (PoSV). PotCoin is not managed by any central authority and provides a decentralised solution for the transfer of value.

PotCoin is based on a public ledger known as a blockchain. PotCoin was originally a fork of Litecoin-QT but with key differences including a shorter block generation time, a quicker halving schedule and an increased maximum number of coins. Before PotCoin was publicly released, 55 blocks were mined for checkpoints. The initial block reward (the number of coins rewarded for solving a block whilst mining) was set at 420 PotCoins but on June 1, 2014, the block reward was halved.

PotCoin was released on January 21, 2014, via GitHub by three entrepreneurs from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, who hoped to create a cryptocurrency that would be adopted by the legal cannabis industry across the world. The nicknames of PotCoin developers are Hasoshi, Mr. Jones and Smokemon 514. A week after launch, PotCoin had enough interest to merit multiple mining pools and on January 30 was added to a newly launched cryptocurrency exchange, called Cryptorush, allowing trading between Bitcoin and PotCoin.

During February and March 2014, PotCoin gained mainstream media attention due to the large community and expanding development team. On February 17, Chronic Star Medical, a supplier of cannabis foods, was the first merchant to announce they would be accepting PotCoin as a form of payment. By the end of March, PotCoin was added to three cryptocurrency exchanges that account for the largest trade volume to this date and the development team had announced that they had secured their first seed-round investment.

On April 9, 2014, the PotCoin development team revealed their identities for the first time when co-founders and developers Joel Yaffe and Nick Iversen delivered a talk about PotCoin at the New York Cryptocurrency Convention. The team also announced that they would be present in Denver on April 20 for the 420 counterculture holiday. On April 19, 2014, PotCoin witnessed a dramatic rise in price, taking its market capitalization over 1 million USD for the first time, fuelled by excitement around the April 20th counterculture holiday. On April 20, PotCoin experienced its first major crash and depreciating to half its value in one day due to speculation by investors.

Early 2015 showed difficult times for Potcoin. The original development team broke apart and left for various reasons. At this point the community tried to rally Potcoin away from death as a community-driven coin. PotLabs, a group of people who had helped to develop many things for Potcoin in the early years, took charge of the push to keep Potcoin alive and moving forward.

On August 23, 2015, Potlabs released an update for Potcoin, one that was very anticipated. With this Potcoin began its move to the POSV algorithm. Over the next few weeks, there were some issues with the network getting up to speed. Many cryptocurrency exchanges also froze their Potcoin wallets waiting to see what would happen. Within a few weeks, the network began to get up to speed and when exchanges were notified they began to unfreeze their wallets allowing normal transactions to resume.

On June 13, 2017, PotCoin sponsored Ex-NBA Star Dennis Rodman's fifth trip to North Korea. They also sponsored his June 2018 visit to Singapore so he could be there for the 2018 North Korea–United States summit.