Syscoin provides the best of Bitcoin and Ethereum in a single coordinated platform. Bitcoin's proven L1 securing Ethereum's EVM Turing-complete programmability, elevated to true L2 scalability via ZK-Rollups.

Syscoin has broad use cases including metaverse, smart cities, and can serve millions or billions of users with affordable smart contracts, simple value transfer, and secure decentralized settlement.

Syscoin is a unique and important alternative to Ethereum. Yes, every capability offered by Ethereum is supported by Syscoin’s fully EMV-compatible Network Enhanced Virtual Machine (NEVM). However, Syscoin's design keeps intact the "gold standard" security of the Bitcoin consensus model and merged-mining, while also providing all the best performance characteristics expected in Ethereum's 2.0 future by supporting L2 ZK-Rollup technology.

Syscoin is permissionless and censorship-resistant by default. Syscoin also provides opt-in features for projects that need regulatory compliance at scale for their asset's transactions, without involving custodians. This is unique, and can be used to enable securities like stocks to safely participate in a compliant way in DeFi, DEX, or other emerging fintech, using a public decentralized blockchain. Non-compliant projects that don’t need a permissioned layer don’t have to implement one - this is simply an option Syscoin’s platform provides.

Syscoin’s approach is coexistence. We consider Bitcoin the gold standard of decentralized secure settlement, and Ethereum’s EVM the gold standard of decentralized computation. We expect those communities will continue to contribute great innovation to the world. Where Syscoin comes in is contributing the ideal synergistic design necessary to properly coordinate those standards to function as a cohesive whole that makes them much more useful and cost-effective, while maintaining separation of technical concerns. This design is how Syscoin can provide platform characteristics that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. Things like being ideal for both simple value transfer + secure store-of-value, and also for complex Turing-complete computation. Also making value on either side able to quickly and trustlessly utilize either paradigm and their different scaling solutions like LN/Z-DAG (Bitcoin UTXO), and ZK-Rollups or Optimistic Rollups (EVM account-based). It opens a whole new world of possibilities for developers and for mass adoption. 

Our design keeps the gold standards intact. In other words, Syscoin doesn’t break Bitcoin’s or Ethereum’s models. Instead, Syscoin makes them far more useful by coordinating them to work together through protocol adaptation, and innovating to close gaps where Bitcoin and Ethereum are lacking.

All of Syscoin’s White Papers are available here, including the latest paper for Syscoin 4.

Our lead core developer Jagdeep Sidhu authored a Medium article covering this in-depth.
Go read “A Design for an Efficient Coordinated Financial Computing Platform”.

The tokenomics of SYS are based on EIP-1559 for an ideal utility-based economy that can operate indefinitely. In line with EIP-1559, same as ETH, SYS does not have a capped max supply. The supply of SYS is managed dynamically and programmatically through protocol emission and deflationary burning of fees paid for NEVM transactions.

Prior to the mainnet release of NEVM and the introduction of EIP-1559, SYS had a max supply cap of 888 million.

In short, yes.

There are several aspects one should consider when assessing a project’s degree of decentralization.

Network: The Syscoin network uses Bitcoin’s decentralized security model. Syscoin’s network is also open-participation. There is no governance process where individuals decide who can run what type of node. Anyone can operate an incentivized full node by simply collateralizing 100,000 SYS and meeting the hosting requirements.

Codebase: Syscoin is open source. Anyone can contribute and submit pull requests to our core GitHub repository.

Coin Distribution: Syscoin’s mainnet has been in existence since August 2014. As such, the distribution of SYS is broad. The majority of the largest wallets are those of centralized exchanges. Upon the introduction of NEVM, the Syscoin community determined by decentralized governance that funds in the amount of 100,000,000 SYS were to be minted to the Syscoin Foundation treasury for the designated purpose of advancing Syscoin’s ecosystem.

Validation & Finality: In Syscoin’s network, every full node (incentivized or not) validates every transaction before trusting, just like Bitcoin. The Syscoin protocol also provides a novel PoW security enhancement in the form of decentralized chainlocks. This utilizes a quorum of 400 randomly chosen incentivized full nodes (masternodes) which reach consensus to establish a chainlock on every block shortly after each block is mined. These add 51% attack resistance and secure DeFi against L1 MEV attacks. Should the situation arise where 400 masternodes are not available at that moment, the protocol will revert to standard Bitcoin behavior for that block - no chainlock. You can check here to see how many masternodes are operating on Syscoin’s network at any given time.

Governance: The Syscoin community participates in decentralized governance to propose and determine which initiatives to fund, along the same lines as that of DASH. Each Syscoin masternode can cast one vote, yay or nay, per proposal. ‍

Yes. NEVM is 100% compatible with EVM. ‍

SYS is available on many exchanges. For a list of the majors, refer to the ‘Markets’ section on the Syscoin pages at CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko. For a comprehensive list, refer to the [Exchange] panel on SysLinks, an independent community operated website. ‍

Trezor works with SYS via Pali Wallet, a native web 3.0 Syscoin wallet that is a browser extension and is non-custodial.

Also, any hardware wallet that works with Metamask, such as Ledger, can secure tokenized SYS that resides on the NEVM blockchain. ‍

Founded on December 11th, 2018, Syscoin Foundation is a registered nonprofit that represents the interests of Syscoin and its core development, secures the code repositories, and oversees public relations for the protocol. Board meetings are generally held on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Any board decisions related to project direction, foundation treasury expenses, and board member elections, are put to simple majority vote.