1The coin and the network
DIVI is a cryptocurrency: digital money you can send to anyone in the world in about a minute, with no bank in between. Divi is the network that makes that work: thousands of copies of one shared ledger, the blockchain, kept by computers called nodes, every one of which checks every payment for itself.
The Divi blockchain started on 26 September 2018 and has added a new page, called a block, about once a minute ever since.
Like Bitcoin, Divi has no company that can freeze your coins or reverse a payment. Unlike Bitcoin, it does not need warehouses of mining hardware to stay secure. That difference is the next section.
2Proof of stake: how blocks get made
Someone has to write each new block, and the network has to agree on who. Bitcoin settles that with proof of work: a race to solve a puzzle that burns a lot of electricity. Divi used proof of work only for its first 100 blocks. Since then it has used proof of stake.
In proof of stake, every DIVI that is sitting in a wallet which is online and staking gets a chance, every minute, to win the right to write the next block. The more DIVI you stake, the more often you win. Winning costs nothing but keeping your wallet running; the coins never leave it. When your wallet wins, it writes the block and is paid a reward in new DIVI.
A payment is considered safe once a few more blocks have been written on top of the one that holds it. Divi's explorer counts them for you, from "Unconfirmed" to "Confirmed" at six blocks, about six minutes. Read a transaction walks through it.
3Where new DIVI comes from
Every block creates new DIVI. The amount started at 1,250 DIVI a block and falls by 100 DIVI each year from the third year on, until it reaches a floor of 250. Today a block creates 550 DIVI; the next step down comes at block 4,730,400, around September 2027.
Each block's new coins are shared out by rules written into the software:
| Who | What for | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The lottery pot | Saved up all week and paid to 11 winning stakers | 50 DIVI of every block |
| The staker who wrote the block | Keeping the network running | 38% of the rest |
| Masternodes | A legacy tier of servers, now retired (see Masternodes (legacy)) | 45% of the rest |
| The treasury | Paying for Divi's development, paid out once a week | 16% of the rest |
| Proposals | Community proposals | 1% of the rest |
The percentages are defaults that the network's operators can adjust with a signed setting called a spork, so treat them as the normal case rather than a promise.
4The lottery
The 50 DIVI set aside from every block goes into a pot. Every 10,080 blocks, which is one week, the chain picks 11 winners from the blocks staked that week: the first winner gets half the pot, and the other ten share the other half equally. With 50 DIVI a block, the weekly pot is 504,000 DIVI, so the top prize is 252,000 DIVI and each of the other ten is 25,200.
You get a ticket by staking: a block you win with a stake of more than 10,000 DIVI is a ticket. The lottery is what turns a slow, steady income from staking into the chance of a big week. The lottery explains the odds and Lottery winners shows how to look up past draws.
5Vaults
Staking needs a wallet that is online all the time. Many people would rather not keep a computer with their life savings on it switched on and connected 24 hours a day. Divi's answer is the staking vault.
A vault is a special kind of address with two keys. The owner key, which you keep safe and offline, is the only key that can spend the coins. The manager key, which you give to an always-on staking server (your own, or a service), can do exactly one thing: stake the coins and collect the rewards into the vault. The rule is enforced by the blockchain itself, not by trust: a transaction signed by the manager key is rejected unless it is a stake.
6Holding and using DIVI
You hold DIVI in a wallet: a program that keeps your keys and talks to the network. The wallet gives you addresses, strings starting with D that people send coins to. When you create a wallet it gives you a recovery phrase of 12 or 24 words that can rebuild the whole wallet anywhere, which is why those words are the most important thing you own and go straight into a password manager.
- Choose a wallet compares the IronDivi node, web wallet, browser extension and Telegram wallet, Divi Desktop and BoxWallet.
- Create a wallet, then encrypt it and back it up.
- Receive and send your first coins. Fees are a tiny fixed-size charge, not a percentage.
- Where to buy lists exchanges that trade DIVI.
7The software
Divi's network rules are implemented twice, and both programs agree on every block:
- IronDivi is the new node, written in Rust:
irondividruns the node and wallet,irondivi-clitalks to it. The same family includes the IronDivi web wallet, browser extension and Telegram wallet, and Explorer 2.0 on this site. Source: github.com/DiviDomains/IronDivi. - Divi 3.0.0 is the original node in C++ (
dividanddivi-cli). Divi Desktop wraps it in a window for Windows, Mac and Linux, and BoxWallet, a community tool, installs and runs it from the command line.
Both nodes take the same commands, so whatever you learn in one works in the other. The tutorials show IronDivi first and then the others.
8Where to go next
- Choose a wallet
- Create a wallet
- Get free testnet DIVI to practise with
- How staking works when you are ready to earn
Words you did not know are in the glossary.
Common questions
Is there a maximum supply? New DIVI is created with every block for ever, but the amount per block shrinks to a floor of 250 DIVI, so the supply keeps growing by a smaller and smaller percentage each year.
Do I need a lot of DIVI to stake? No. Any amount can stake; a small stake simply wins less often. The lottery ticket is the one thing with a threshold: a stake of more than 10,000 DIVI.
What happened to masternodes? They were an earlier tier of paid servers and are retired. Masternodes (legacy) tells the story.
Still stuck? Ask the Divi chatbot, or see all tutorials.