COTI is the native cryptocurrency of Coti (Currency of the Internet), an open-source payment infrastructure project that offers payment systems and stablecoins. Primarily used for simple everyday payments, Coti was built as a more cost-effective, expandable blockchain system for making online payments.

COTI is a cryptocurrency built into the base layer of the Coti network used as a means of payments, including fees and staking within the Coti ecosystem. All COTI tokens were created at the project’s launch, meaning that it has a fixed supply. The project launched with a total supply of 2 billion COTI tokens with no possibility of destroying tokens or creating tokens via mining.

Thirty percent of COTI was sold during its pre-launch private token sale and subsequent public sale. The private sale offered COTI tokens for $0.08 to investors looking to allocate at least $50,000 in capital. The public sale occurred in June 2019, selling COTI for $0.065, raising a collective total of over $3 million for the project.

Following the launch, the tokens officially went live in May 2019; 15% of tokens were distributed to team members for their early involvement and 10% to Coti’s advisers. The remaining 45% of tokens are reserved for incentives and liquidity reserves. Incentive programs include COTI payments to partners, node operators, merchants and users in order to encourage early adopters to utilize the new payment system.

COTI was at an all-time low in November 2019 at $0.006266, falling just below its initial coin offering (ICO) price in its first six months of operating. By November 2021, the project was able to reclaim its ICO and further gain nearly 1,000% to an all-time high of $0.6826. The all-time high came after Coti announced a partnership with Cardano on the CardWallet project and became the lead issuer of the Cardano-based Djed stablecoin. By the end of November, Coti had fallen around 56%.

In addition to its all-time high, COTI additionally saw spikes to new highs back in March following the launch of Coti Staking 3.0, the integration of a Binance Smart Chain-based BEP20 token and a $500 million investment from the Cardano Fund (cFund).

COTI was created by the Coti Group in 2017, with the first product, COTI Pay, launching soon after. COTI was designed as a bridge between traditional payment methods and distributed ledger technologies. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Coti uses a distributed ledger technology known as directed acyclic graph (DAG) rather than a blockchain. DAG networks are designed to be more scalable than blockchains, enabling a higher rate of transactions and a quicker settlement time. While the Bitcoin network, a blockchain-based system, can handle around 5 transactions per second (tps), Coti can handle up to 10,000 tps.

Coti is additionally different from bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because it utilizes a Proof-of-Trust (PoT) consensus algorithm. PoT is a unique consensus algorithm created for Coti that combines Proof-of-Work (PoW) with its own Trustchain Algorithm. According to the white paper, Coti uses PoW to protect the network from spam and incentivize node operators to validate transactions and participate in the ecosystem. Unlike PoW in the Bitcoin network, Coti’s PoW is simply a protection mechanism that has no impact on consensus, except that transactions with higher difficulty are handled by full nodes.

The core infrastructure of the Coti consensus algorithm is the Trustchain protocol. The Trustchain protocol utilizes user trust scores to determine what amount of PoW is necessary to confirm a transaction. The higher a user’s trust score is, the less PoW is necessary and the faster a transaction can be confirmed. Nodes on the Coti network continuously monitor trust scores and update these scores for valid transactions between two parties.

When there is a disagreement among nodes and transacting parties, Coti utilizes an arbitration layer protocol that offers a fully moderated process that relies on game theory. This system is designed to fix both simple and complex disagreements by having a ‘jury’ of network participants vote on the decision and receive an incentive for correctly deciding on the outcome of the dispute.

Since the project’s launch, Coti has established several crypto and payment processing partnerships with other industry leaders. Coti and Celsius Network created a decentralized finance (DeFi) partnership in January 2020, which was quickly followed by partnerships with Fantom to contribute to the creation of a universal payment system. Through partnerships and internal development by the Coti team, the project was able to launch credit card processing on the Coti Network by February 2020.

In April 2021, the Cardano Venture Fund (cFund) made its first investment in Coti, providing $500,000 in capital to the project. Prior to the investment, Coti had offered support to Cardano’s ADA token in helping launch the first version of ADA Pay back in 2019. A few months later, Coti landed another partnership with crypto payment processor Simplex to launch COTI bank accounts and Visa debit cards. Simplex had been acquired by Canada-based payment processor Nuvei just a few months prior, which ultimately led to a partnership between Nuvei and Visa in December. Under the partnership between Nuvei and Visa, merchants on Coti’s blockchain network were given the increased benefit of being able to accept cryptocurrency as a payment method.