Among many other interesting things that happened at Consensus 2018, a lot of new projects and product announcements were made. One of which was that of Metronome; a new cryptocurrency that works off the limitations of the ones that came before. The announcement was made on the second day of Consensus.

What is Metronome?

Metronome is a new cryptocurrency. Its coin is called MET. The aim of this new cryptocurrency is to take all that they think was and is wrong with previously existing coins and tokens and fix them in theirs.

How Does it Work?

The founders of Metronome have taken pages out of all the failures in the leading coins that dominate the market right now, devised a solution for each one and incorporated it into one coin and made a new cryptocurrency. The problem statements that Metronome is solving by adapting its coin are:

• Mintage All major coins in the market right now have little to no mintage. In the sense, there is a hard cap to their market and after a certain number is reached there will no longer be any more that is created. Like BTC has a market hard cap of 21 million, so after 21 million there will be no new bitcoin that is created.
  
  This particular feature that most of the coins have to limit their longevity in the market. To tackle this particular problem, Metronome plans to incorporate a mintage schedule for the cryptocurrency making it available in abundance and in turn increase its chances at lasting longer than most cryptocurrencies.

• Distribution The team at Metronome believe that the cryptocurrency market and coin sales should become more egalitarian and believes that more than 1% of the world’s population should have access to cryptocurrencies. To that effect, Metronome has decided to abolish the typical ICO mould by doing away with pre-sales, private sales, whitelists, and bonuses. Making it as available to everyone and in turn, expelling the possibilities of monopolies created by people who own a larger stake of the coin.
• Autonomy Metronome is against the hyper-inflation and deflation of coin values in the market due to human involvement. They believe that a lot of the volatility that is faced by the crypto market is because a lot of it is caused by large buy-ins and sell-offs.
  
  In order to reduce the likelihood of this happening, Metronome has implemented self-governing contracts and has taken self-regulatory measures for the coin making its functioning completely autonomous and independent of human manipulation.

Blockchain Aspect

The Metronome coin will be harnessing and using the blockchain in the same way and for the same purposes that all tokens and coins use them; for book-keeping. One of the many things problems Metronome believes that other cryptocurrencies face is their blockchain exclusivity or the fact that they can only work, be mined and used on a certain blockchain. For example, BTC has a specific Bitcoin Blockchain, ETH an Ethereum Blockchain and so on.

To solve this problem that Metronome perceived, they have made their coin compatible with all blockchains. Which essentially means, that it does not need a particular blockchain to function, which increases interoperability between the blockchains. This particular feature has not been attempted before.

Not ICO, but an Initial Supply Auction

The token sale is scheduled to commence on the 18th of June. And 20% of the initial supply of the MET token will be retained by its creators. The ‘ICO’ will be held as an automated auction and will be available immediately to the public.

According to the presentation that was backing up the announcement, the Metronome team is not calling the token sale an ICO, instead they are calling it an Initial Supply Auction. The initial supply auction will last for 7 days and the buy-in is set at 2 ETH. The price will also descend every minute and the auction will end when all the tokens have been sold.

The Verdict

The Metronome project is attempting to add practices that are employed in the distribution and mintage of fiat currencies into cryptocurrencies with a tinge of modern technology. It takes the three main problems of leading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin and solves them in their cryptocurrency.

Metronome as a product was founded by Jeff Garzik, who is more popularly known for his work at Bloq as the founder, who is also the current CEO. Garzik is also known to have worked directly with Satoshi and was also a large contributor to Bitcoin Core until recently. So it is safe to say that the team is under good leadership and is made up of people who are experts in their own right.

By far the most interesting feature of Metronome is the blockchain interoperability, which as a feature in a crypto coin will be a first. And is going to be interesting to see how that plays out.

Overall, quite an ambitious project, but interesting features that could stand to change the world of cryptocurrency once more. According to their timeline, the first MET should be available and fully in use by the end of the second quarter of 2018.

Ramaa Mohan