Blakecoin is the first cryptocurrency to use the Blake-256 hashing algorithm. Blake-256 is faster than Scrypt, SHA-256D, Keccak and Groestl. This algorithm is fast and simple. The Blake-256 hash rate is three times faster than Bitcoin on GPU. It is currently merged-mined with Photon, BlakeBitcoin, Dirac, Electron and Universal Molecule. There are other coins that are planning to participate in the merge-mine.