Skycoin is a cryptocurrency, Skywire is the network its users run, and CXO moves signed data between them. Today they ship together. One program, skywire, holds the Skywire visor and the services its network runs on, a CXO node, and the Skycoin node, wallet and tools, and the same program runs as a visor in a browser tab.
Skywire
Skywire is an encrypted peer-to-peer overlay network. Every visor is addressed by its public key, every link and every route is encrypted, and every handshake includes a post-quantum key exchange.
Its core is routing. Visors route over one hop or several, find routes from what they and their neighbours already know, and carry one connection over several paths at once, so a cut path does not end it and no single path carries all of it.
Every visor comes with a VPN, a SOCKS5 proxy, chat with voice calls, mail, a remote shell and websites published on its key. More than a thousand visors run on the public network, and eligible visors share a daily reward in Skycoin.
learn more about skywire
learn more about cxo
Skyminer
Node
Skycoin
Skycoin is a cryptocurrency written from scratch to be what Bitcoin would look like without its rough edges. It has no transaction or signature malleability and no scripting language, its wallets are simple and deterministic, CoinJoin transactions look like any other, and a transaction settles in about ten seconds.
Skycoin is not mined. Its supply is fixed at 100 million SKY, and new coins reach people through the Skywire reward system. Holding SKY earns coin hours, and a transaction pays its fee by burning some of them, so sending SKY costs no SKY.
Anyone can launch a blockchain of their own on the same code, a fiber coin, with skywire skycoin newcoin. The web wallet holds Skycoin, fiber coins and Bitcoin, and it runs inside a Skywire visor, where it reaches nodes over the mesh.
get a wallet
learn more about cx
Coin Hours
Coin Join
Fiber
CX
CXO
CXO is Skycoin’s object replication system. A publisher signs a tree of objects with the key of its feed, and subscribers fetch it, check the signature and keep a copy.
Skywire runs on it. The services behind a Skywire network publish routing data, addresses, services and keys as signed feeds, visors publish their own transport lists and registrations, and Skychat keeps its history and groups in it. A signed feed can be checked however it arrived, so these reads no longer go to a central server over plain HTTP.
skywire cxo daemon runs a standalone CXO node.
CXO
What runs where
A native visor carries the whole suite. A browser visor at skywire.dev carries the parts a page can run. The Skywire page has what it can do.
| Part | Native visor | Browser visor |
|---|---|---|
| Skywire visor, routing and apps | yes | yes |
| Exit for other visors | yes | no |
| Skywire network services | yes | no |
| CXO feeds, published and read | yes | yes |
| Skycoin web wallet | yes | yes |
| Skycoin node, CLI, explorer, newcoin | yes | no |
Fiber
Fiber runs many blockchains side by side. Each fiber coin is its own chain, with its own parameters, distribution and governance, so projects do not compete for the resources of one shared chain. skywire skycoin newcoin creates one from the Skycoin code.
- Fiber
Obelisk
Obelisk is Skycoin’s design for consensus without mining or staking, in which nodes weigh each other through a web of trust instead of through computing power or holdings. It was never deployed: Skycoin blocks come from one publisher, and every node checks them. The Obelisk page explains the design and what it would still need.
Obelisk
What is Skycoin?
Bitcoin set out to be money people trade with each other directly, with nobody in the middle. Skycoin keeps that aim and changes how the coin is made and how it spreads.
There is no mining. Mining gathers into a few large pools, and creating coins through it gives the most influence to whoever spends most on hardware and power. Skycoin’s supply is fixed at 100 million SKY, and coins are distributed to people who run Skywire visors that meet the reward rules.
The code was written from scratch rather than forked. It drops Bitcoin’s scripting language and the malleability of transactions and signatures, keeps wallets simple and deterministic, and settles a transaction in about ten seconds.
Skywire visors do not process Skycoin transactions or keep its blockchain. The two meet in the reward system, in the wallet that runs inside a visor, and in the single program that carries both.