Emercoin (Symbol: EMC) is a cryptocurrency that is in some ways similar to Namecoin and Peercoin. It was launched in December 2013 and announced three days before launch in order to notify miners in advance.
Emercoin employs both proof-of-work (POW) mining and proof-of-stake (POS) minting and uses SHA-256 hashes.
EMC is considered to be a leading digital currency and Blockchain platform which focuses on creating innovative and scalable services for both business and personal use.
Developers propose Emercoin as a foundation for multiple possible services, rather simply a currency:
Oleg Khovayko, Emercoin Lead Developer, said, "Key difference in Emercoin from other cryptocurrencies is that we are using blockchain not just for transfer credit values. We consider Emercoin as a technological platform for distributed, censorship–proof and scalable services. So we developed a suite of services running on top of the Emercoin blockchain that will be very useful for a lot of companies and even private persons."
As of 2016 year the following services are implemented:
EMCDNS — Decentralized, uncensored domain name system, peering with OpenNIC (currently supporting the .bazar, .coin, .emc and .lib TLDs)
Infrastructure for SSL certificates (EMCSSL) — The blockchain is used as a decentralized trust store of hash sums for client SSL-certificates
Public Key Infrastructure (EMCSSH) — bridge between OpenSSH and the EMC blockchain, allowing for secure, decentralized management of PKI
InfoCard — Storage for electronic business cards for use with EMCSSL
EMCTTS — Trusted storage for digital timestamps on the blockchain
EMCSTREAM — Micropayment library for streaming media
Magnet — Distributed BitTorrent tracker for internet file sharing
EmerBoard — Distributed trusted BBS
EMCDPO — A decentralized solution for Proof of Ownership
Advertising Link Exchanger on Emercoin (EMCLNX) — a peer-to-peer text-advertisement network based on a per-click payment model. Uses NVS as distributed storage for advertising contracts and EmerCoin credits (EMc) as the payment unit
EMCDNS is supported on several Tor exit nodes.
OpenNIC DNS servers resolve Emercoin domains.
EMCSSL is implemented in the Drupal content management system.
EMCSSH is deploied in the Hashcoins company
The farmer Mikhail Shlyapnikov uses Emercoin blockchain in the own business.
January 20, 2017: The plugin "Frigate" for the browsers now support EMCDNS zones.
December 11, 2013: first public release
February 11, 2014: Folding@Home sponsorship project is started
November 4, 2014: Name-Value Storage (NVS) is added; EMSDNS is built on top of NVS
December 10, 2014: subdomains in the EMCDNS are now allowed
November 30, 2015: Emercoin is attaсked, creating a fork of the blockchain
December 1, 2015: the vulnerability of PPCoin protocol is fixed
January 1, 2016: potential vulnerability is fixed
January 4, 2016: Emercoin partners with Microsoft for BaaS (Microsoft Azure "Blockchain as a Service")
June 29, 2016: Emercoin and Microsoft Azure released the Emercoin Blockchain Engine in the Azure Marketplace.
August 15, 2016: Emercoin wallet 0.5.0 is released. This is first blockchain wallet with PoS, based on the bitcoin core 0.10.2.
October 6, 2016: Emercoin wallet 0.5.1 (bugfix) is released.
December 22, 2016: Emercoin wallet 0.5.2 is released. Based on the bitcoin core 0.10.4, the interface displays UTF-8 in the NVS fields, ENUM support.
December 29, 2016: Emercoin wallet 0.5.2.1 (bugfix) is released.
January 23, 2017 Emercoin placed on 9 position in the rating 2016 year of the cryptocurrencies in the Benchmark.pl, top of the Bitcoin (10 position).
February 13, 2017: Emercoin wallet 0.6.0 is released. Merged mining with the Bitcoin is implemented.
