SYS is the native coin of Syscoin, a fork of Litecoin (itself a fork of Bitcoin) that supports smart contracts.

Syscoin launched in 2014 at a price of $0.0025 following an initial coin offering (ICO) that raised 1,500 BTC for 120 million tokens. Syscoin lost half of these after the company that handled the ICO, commonly known as Moolah, went bankrupt and didn’t hand over the funds.

The coin’s price has peaked three times. First in January 2018, when SYS hit 98 cents, then in May 2021, when it reached 76 cents – and finally in January 2022, when SYS achieved its all-time high of $1.31. SYS crashed sharply following each peak. Six months after it reached $1.31, SYS had fallen to 13 cents.

Syscoin had a capped supply of 888 million before the mainnet launch of its virtual machine, the Network-Enhanced Virtual Machine (NEVM) in December 2021. Since then, its tokenomics have been based on EIP-1559, the Ethereum upgrade that burns fees paid for NEVM transactions instead of handing them to miners. Its supply is no longer fixed or capped but changes dynamically according to its usage.

Syscoin is a layer 1 blockchain that combines Bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism with Ethereum’s smart contracts.

The network is merge-mined with bitcoin, meaning that bitcoin miners can use 20% of their computational power to mine Syscoin at no extra cost. As a result, miners can secure both chains at the same time.

The smart contract layer Syscoin uses is powered by the NEVM. It claims to improve upon Bitcoin’s security model and Ethereum’s programmability.

Syscoin plans to offer a privacy-preserving technique called zero-knowledge proofs to help the blockchain scale. It also touts reduced lockup times for a data compression technique called optimistic rollups – on Ethereum, funds can be locked up in optimistic rollups for as long as two weeks, while on Syscoin these only take a few hours.

SYS is used for mining, voting and paying for transaction fees. Its native wallet is called Qt.

In October 2014, the British High Court ordered Ryan Kennedy (aka Alex Green), the former CEO of Moolah (aka MooPay LTD) to hand over 750 BTC to the developers of Syscoin.

Moolah had handled the ICO for Syscoin, and planned to stagger the release of the 750 BTC it had raised. But the company went bankrupt and had missed a deadline to hand over 250 BTC.

That, plus allegations of fraud from the developers of Dogecoin, prompted the team that developed Syscoin to ask the British court to force Moolah to release the remaining funds. Kennedy/Green denied the allegations of fraud. According to a 2015 blog post by Syscoin, he was arrested in the U.K.

In March 2016, Microsoft added Syscoin to Azure, its blockchain-as-a-service solution. Two months later, Syscoin launched Syscoin 2.0, which included a graphical interface and wallet. In April 2018, Syscoin launched Syscoin 3.0; this allowed for the creation of new assets on the Syscoin blockchain.

In July 2018, Binance paused trading of Syscoin after "odd trading behavior coupled with atypical blockchain activity." At one point, each Syscoin sold for a price of 96 BTC, Syscoin co-founder Sébastien DiMichele told CoinDesk, citing “massive bot activity.”

In December 2018, Syscoin’s developers founded the Syscoin Foundation, a nonprofit that stewards the protocol. The protocol is also governed by on-chain voting; anyone can submit a protocol but only masternodes – full nodes that operate 24/7 – can vote. Each masternode is entitled to one vote per proposal.