What is vertcoin?
Vertcoin is a cryptocurrency very similar to bitcoin and litecoin.
Vertcon has been around since January 2014. Like litecoin, vertcoin has a maximum supply of 84 million and block times of two and a half minutes. Vertcoin also enabled segregated witness (SegWit) in May 2017, a few months before bitcoin and a week before litecoin. For those of you who don't know, SegWit enables activation of the lightning network.
Atomic swaps
SegWit activation alone amounts to a a fairly insignificant reduction in block size (around 61%), enabling cheaper transactions for the notoriously expensive bitcoin.
The real breakthrough, however, is the possibility of the lightning network. The lightning network allows for a type of transaction called an atomic swap.
Sounds a bit like a nuclear weapon, right?
What this means is you can trade, e.g. litecoin for bitcoin, without going through an exchange. In this regard atomic swaps are a true Silicon Valley-style disruptive technology.
While the technology is not built into wallets yet, it will surely not take long for the ecosystem to catch up. In the future, everyone will be able to perform cross-chain swaps without too many issues.
Bitcoin
Lightning network adoption is by no means universal among cryptos, only a handful can enable this tech. As such, vertcoin stands to gain massively if and when bitcoin atomic swaps start to happen.
Assuming that the SegWit 2x fork peters out å la BCash, the main bitcoin chain after November will remain the core one we use today, with 1MB blocks. As bitcoin adoption continues to grow, regular transactions on the blockchain will become increasingly expensive. Some have speculated that this could be fatal for bitcoin and indeed this was the rationale used for the BCash and B2X hard forks.
Atomic swaps on the lightning network offers the scalability solution that bitcoin needs without requiring bitcoin itself to be a daily currency.
It is often said that litecoin is the silver to bitcoin's gold. Well vertcoin could very well be the bronze.
The future
The future I see is one in which bitcoin becomes a major store of wealth, like gold. Nobody buys a coffee with gold though and similarly nobody would ever buy a coffee with bitcoin.
Imagine that you have a stash of bitcoin, worth thousands of dollars. All you would have to do is occasionally top up your spending wallet in your spending currency, say, vertcoin.
In summary, vertcoin's similarity to bitcoin and litecoin is what offers so much upside potential. It seems the markets have been slow to catch on to this potential, but sitting at 90k satoshis and $5.60 at the time of writing, or a market cap of $228M, there is still a lot of room to grow.
Add to this that the difficulty is set to double in December and the long term future looks very rosy for vertcoin indeed.