MonaCoin is Japan’s first released cryptocurrency which was released in 2013 with the goal of providing payments while exist on a fully distributed system. They pride themselves on being unique thanks to their strong community which spends countless time developing the network and creating applications which can facilitate MonaCoin transactions. MonaCoin’s mining rewards have stayed consistent and the project was never influenced by pre-mining coins. The project originated as a hard fork of Litecoin and maintains the Lighting Network which Litecoin is recognized for. MonaCoin stays true to its original mining methods as it is ASIC resistant by utilization of  Lyra2REv2 mining algorithm. It is very similar to Vertcoin in this fashion and has a robust blockchain in that the mining difficulty is altered during each mined block. The project’s leaders have remained anonymous and do not issue much information regarding the project besides software updates. Despite these drawbacks, it remains as one of the used cryptocurrencies in Japan.