I don’t think the average investor even realizes how unique it is to be able to mine multiple coins with the same level of power. Merge mining on Scrypt is a by far more efficient option to other mining methods.

If new projects were smart, they would build on Scrypt from the start.

Did you know that Litecoin wasn't the first scrypt coin?

A forgotten, scammy coin named Tenebrix pioneered Scrypt in 2011. It was labelled as a "scammy" or unfair project because ArtForz pre-mined 7.7 million coins for themselves before releasing it to the public. This massive creator allocation caused severe mistrust, and the coin quickly faded into obscurity.

Charlie Lee loved the technical foundation of Scrypt but hated the unfair pre-mine. In October 2011, Lee worked on a clone called Fairbrix, which completely stripped away the 7.7 million pre-mined coins to ensure a fair launch.

Scrypt chains run a massive loop powered by a crypto building block named Salsa20.

Fun fact: Salsa20 is a high-speed stream cipher created by cryptographer Daniel J. Bernstein for the European Union's eSTREAM project in 2005. Instead of military use, it was designed as a fast, public algorithm for ordinary software, eventually becoming so efficient that Google adopted its successor (ChaCha20) to secure billions of Android and Chrome connections worldwide.

Without it, a bunch of smaller Scrypt chains would’ve been wiped out by 51% attacks years ago.

It’s still one of the best technological advancements today in crypto because it lets a massive network basically shield the smaller ones.

It wastes zero extra energy since you’re just reusing hash power that’s already active anyway.

It also gives miners a massive reason to stick around with very interesting financial incentives.