Yes DigiByte is a fork of the Bitcoin protocol and changes some of the core components of Bitcoin to achieve faster transaction processing and a unique mining framework.
Moreover, DigiByte underwent four separate hard forks in the early years of its existence, primarily to optimize the mining system. All of the following hard forks below occurred between 2014 and 2015. The four hard forks and their general upgrades include:
- DigiShield
- MultiAlgo
- MultiShield
- DigiSpeed
DigiShield recalculates the mining difficulty between each block, which was designed to mitigate low difficulty mining across ‘multi-pools’ of miners.
MultiAlgo added the multi-algorithm mining of DigiByte designed to accommodate the various forms of mining including GPU, CPU, and specialized hardware such as ASICs. The goal is that by using more mining algorithms, more users are capable of mining on the network, increasing decentralization. The original single mining algorithm on DigiByte was Scrypt but now includes SHA-256, Qubit, Groestl, and Skein.
MultiShield activated DigiShield across all five of the mining algorithms in December 2014.
DigiSpeed reduced the block times by 50 percent — to 15 seconds — and also doubles the block size every two years. Currently, DigitByte can process roughly 560 transactions per second, which is set to increase every two years but will come at the expense of more cumbersome block storage for smaller nodes in the network.