Ergo is a blockchain network that attempts to provide an alternative to bitcoin network. Bitcoin faces issues in terms of its block production, economy and applicability. Block production in bitcoin is through mining for proof of work, which now requires highly-specialised machine such as ASIC machines. This causes the network to be centralised to a few mining pools that acquired these machines. Ergo uses its own Autolykos proof of work which still uses proof of work for security, however the work is through memory-hard computation which removes the advantages that ASIC has. Ergo is also a proven Turing complete smart contract (called ErgoScript) which enables the development of dApps on its network, similar to ethereum. 

ERG is the native token in the Ergo network. It has utilities similar to that of BTC and ETH. It is used as transaction and gas fees when executing the Ergo smart contract, similar to that of ETH. In addition, it is also used for block reward similar to BTC, where miners get ERG for mining the blocks, which has an interval time of two minutes.The ERG emission from mining will last for eight years since genesis, and after that, block rewards will be from transaction and gas fees. Ergo solves the BTC circulation issue from lost keys by implementing a storage fee for wallets that have not moved their ERG for more than 4 years. Therefore, if any ERG is locked in a lost wallet, in can be recovered into circulation through this storage fee, preventing unnecessary deflation. There is a maximum supply of around 97 million ERG tokens.

Alexander Chepurnoy, Dmitry Meshkov.