The DigiByte Platform was created with three fundamental pillars: decentralization, security, and fast transactions. With cybersecurity in mind, the first DigiByte block was mined on January 10, 2014. It included the headline from USA Today: "Target: Data stolen from up to 110M customers," hashed into the Genesis Block to mark the importance of security in digital transactions.

Decentralization is at the core of DigiByte, and it has over 100,000 servers, computers, phones, and nodes worldwide. DigiByte uses a multi-algorithm approach for mining and consensus, to make 51% attacks less potent.

DigiByte is mined with five different algorithms: Scrypt, SHA-256, Qubit, Skein, and Odocrypt. DigiByte transaction confirmations take a few seconds, on average, and new blocks are added to the blockchain every 15 seconds, on average. The DigiByte blockchain has executed five major hard forks: DigiShield (February 18, 2014), MultiAlgo (September 1, 2014), MultiShield (December 10, 2014), DigiSpeed (December 4, 2015) and Odocrypt (July 19, 2019).

DigiByte pioneered asymmetrical difficulty adjustment mining with DigiShield, which is now a widely used technology and utilized by many other networks. The difficulty re-targeting for DigiByte takes place continuously after every block, unlike other blockchains like Bitcoin, where the difficulty is recalculated every two weeks.

DigiByte employs the SegWit approach to achieve more efficient block usage. Segregated Witness or better known as SegWit, is a technique of separating transaction data in a way that fills in the block more efficiently. SegWit has been a feature added to a handful of blockchains, e.g., Bitcoin, and leads to significantly lowered fees and network load. DigiByte is considered to be one of the fastest public UTXO-based blockchains, with 15-second block timings.

Multi-Layer Ecosystem

The DigiByte ecosystem can be viewed as a three-layered network. The bottom layer is the protocol and communications layer of the blockchain. This is where nodes, i.e., desktops, laptops, and servers running the full DigiByte core client, communicate with each other. The communications layer represents the sending and receiving of transactions and blocks being relayed between nodes.

The second layer of DigiByte is the cryptocurrency layer, and this is where a DigiByte (DGB) serves its purpose as a digital asset.

The final layer is the applications layer, where, e.g., DigiAssets as a secondary protocol layer resides. It is DGB’s user-facing system, which enables users to build and host both decentralized applications and centralized applications on the DigiByte blockchain.

DigiAssets

DigiAssets is a secondary layer on top of the DigiByte blockchain that allows for the decentralized issuance of assets, tokens, and smart contracts, among other use cases.

DigiAssets can be used to securely and cryptographically represent anything in the real world. Any data and documents such as wills, deeds, or advertising data can be represented on the blockchain as a DigiAsset.

Digi-ID

Digi-ID is an open-source, community-driven Open Auth project based on the DigiByte blockchain. Digi-ID allows for fast, effortless sign-ups and sign-ins for users. It also prevents password re-use and the vulnerabilities associated with that, by simply signing a "challenge" message from a server, allowing users to pseudo-anonymously authenticate as themselves. No identifying information is ever included with this challenge/response, so the website will never know your name or wallet balance unless you were to outright tell them. This makes for an incredibly secure and private experience for end-users.

DigiByte has been envisioned as a fast digital currency for everyday payments. The long-term outlook for DigiByte is to become the network underpinning the Internet of Things economy. Furthermore, DigiByte is set to be used as a form of payment within Artificial Intelligence systems, according to the DigiByte team.

The DigiByte coin is currently used for fast global transactions, with negligible fees, and for powering applications built on top of the network.