Published on Feb 21, 2020
Jelurida, the company behind NXT, is building Ardor as a next-gen version of NXT. The platform will feature child chains as a service, the first of which will be Ignis which will se IGNIS for its operations. All of the existing and well tested Nxt blockchain features will be available on the Ignis child chain, with multiple Ardor platform specific enhancements being added.
This notion of a “child chain,” is considered a next-generation blockchain technology in which smaller blockchains are simultaneously independent in their features while continuing to exist on and imbuing the qualities of a larger, parent, blockchain.
The concept of child chains is expected to help bigger blockchains with scalability issues, which is one of the most pressing problems for blockchains that are now swarming with new developers, users, and use-cases. As blockchain platforms like Ethereum endure scalability problems, Ardor and Ignis represent a compelling possible solution to these issues.
In general, Ignis is considered a test coin for this blockchain model, so its release on a major crypto exchange is a significant milestone that the Ardor-faithful have been waiting on since it was announced in late December.
BittrexBittrex is one of the most prominent and highest-volume crypto exchanges. It gives crypto investors access to hundreds of digital currencies, and it completes more than $650 million in transactions each day.
The Ardor community has been waiting for the Bittrex airdrop for nearly a month. Jelurida announced plans to airdrop IGNIS token to Nxt holders on back in October, and Bittrex announced in December it would honor the airdrop several weeks later. so Presumably, Ignis’ price increase is, at least in part, attributed to Bittrex users finally gaining access to the digital currency.
Interestingly, there aren’t a lot of details about Ardor’s plan for Ignis, so it’s unclear how the digital currency will function in the future. Even so, early investors are excited about its presence on a mainstream crypto exchange, and they voiced their excitement by sending its price up on a day when prices were almost exclusively down.
The total amount of IGNIS coins issued will be equal to half of the amount of NXT coins existing on the Nxt blockchain at the time of the Ardor Genesis Snapshot, plus 500 M (five hundred million).
Half of the IGNIS coins will be reserved and distributed automatically to the NXT holders based on their account balances at the time of the Ardor Genesis Snapshot, at 1 NXT = 0.5 IGNIS ratio.
The other half of the IGNIS coin supply was partially used by Jelurida to conduct a successful IGNIS Token Sale over a period of three months (Aug 05 - Nov 04), collecting 167 M NXT, which were partially converted to fiat, Bitcoin, and Ardor. As of the end of the token sale, the total proceeds were over $15 000 000. These funds will be used for the further development, maintenance, advancement and world-wide promotion of the Nxt and Ardor blockchain platforms, as well as protecting the intellectual property of the code base.
The token sale was conducted on the Nxt blockchain platform, using a "controllable currency" called JLRDA. For 1 JLRDA token the participants in the ICO will receive 1 IGNIS coin at the time of the Ardor Genesis Snapshot. (See the IGNIS Token Sale Whitepaper for a detailed overview of the IGNIS crowdsale and the Ardor Platform.)
The Ardor Genesis Snapshot is planned for Dec 28th, 2017, at block height 1636363. The Ardor production software release will be done shortly after the snapshot, with the blockchain scheduled to start exactly on Jan 1, 2018, 00:00:00 UTC.
