DigiByte Stands Ground. What’s the Flip Side to Its Success in 2020?

DigiByte was created in 2013-2014 like many other digital coins which have by now left the crypto market. However, Digibyte not only continues to exist, but also sees rapid growth. From the end of March to May 2020, the DGB rate grew by as much as 930%, leading the cryptocurrency to the 37th place by capitalization in the CoinMarketCap ranking. What is the secret to explosive growth, and why did it suddenly force DigiByte creator Jared Tate to retire?

At the very beginning

DigiByte was positioned as the optimal platform to solve many tasks, including financial and other. This was facilitated by the high speed of transactions, the low cost of one coin that is convenient for settlements, low fees and reliable encryption. Well, this set of qualities is not unique. Marketing of almost all developing cryptocurrencies in one way or another is seeking assurances of incomparable efficiency and incredible decentralization. But in the case of DigiByte, the words meet the actions. For several years, developers have consistently introduced innovations, for example, it was Digibyte that became one of the first large crypto projects that used SegWit technology. An important step was the distribution of PoW mining to five algorithms at once, which attracted new users and made the blockchain less vulnerable to centralized attack attempts.

The right development strategy laid the ground for the “to the moon” event, but successful business decisions also are the reasons. So, the Dutch arm of the DigiByte Software Foundation has developed an application for tracking the contacts of patients with COVID-19. It was presented to the Dutch government, which attracted the attention of mainstream media. The AMA session held on the Burency platform also contributed a lot — the DigiByte representatives got more than 3000 questions. As a result, Digibyte was the 6th most tweeted-about crypto this May.

The growing interest in this cryptocurrency has attracted new users, and in its turn, has attracted further attention. A "self-sustaining reaction" began. Rudy BOUWMAN, vice president and co-founder of DigiByte Foundation, commented on it for Bitnewstoday:

«New people looking into DigiByte would most probably get the same ‘wow-experience’ like we all had when we first found out about DigiByte: a grassroots movement, no ICO, no company behind it, no premined coins for market making, honesty, integrity, and all just volunteers with a passion»

Bouwman added that he associates the success of DGB with the fact that the project was initially oriented not only to the crypto market, but also to integration with third-party projects like the V-ID and Antum platforms.

Is there a flip side to this success?

However, the sudden retirement of Jared Tate spoiled an absolutely positive experience. On May 15, the creator of DGB tweeted a lengthy message in which he announced that he was no longer a representative of his project. Instead, Tate was about to build third-party applications on DigiByte. He called the greed of the crypto market participants to be the main reason behind his decision. He called people striving for simple and quick enrichment, not thinking about the real equality that decentralization can bring.

It's hard to believe that having been engaged in cryptocurrencies for 8 years, Tate did not understand the motivation of a significant part of the community. It is suggested that the possible reason might be some kind of internal conflict that has occurred amid rapid success, but at the moment there is no evidence for this. Tate soon denied rumors that he had sold his tokens — according to him, 99% of his cryptocurrency is still in DGB and he will always keep it that way.

The decline in the DGB rate following this announcement was expected and it was sharp (from $0.026 on May 8 to $0.013 on May 22), but it lasted only a few days, followed by a correction. At the moment, the DGB has almost recovered its losses. On May 27, a partnership was announced between DigiByte and the Threefold p2p ecosystem. The purpose of the collaboration was declared "decentralization of the global architecture of the Internet." It seems that DigiByte is able not only to succeed, but also to stand ground — which is especially important for the crypto market with its highest volatility.