Update: I spent a whole lot of jl777's time discussing how we would implement this and a lot of people have been asking so I would call this a big update 
AtomsAn explanation of how the coins on the ATOMIC network will work as well as information about the fees, rewards and profit to both miners and shareholders of ATOMIC assets
Coins:
As the ATOMIC network is making use of blockchain technology but is not just a typical altcoin we have decided to call the coins on the network Atoms. Atoms will be used first as a way to append transactions onto the ATOMIC ledger, and second they will be used to reward nodes on the network, or 'miners'.
I. Appending Transactions:
Atoms may or may not contain information related to ATOMIC exchanges. For example if a user pays to exchange NXT to BTCD, the Atoms used to facilitate the exchange will contain information to verify the exchange which will inherently be added to the ATOMIC Ledger in the next block on the chain. Adding this extra data will make the transactions larger (in bytes) and the more coins that are sent, the larger the transaction will be. Users will also be able to send Atoms directly between themselves without adding any of this extra data so the backbone of the network will not be strained, and the blockchain will not increase greatly in size for transactions between users that are not part of an exchange. This selective process will allow the coin to be used both as a regular coin with no additional functionality while at the same time allowing the network to append exchange information without any additional setup, delay, or any difference at all in how the coin functions as far as the end user can tell.
II. Reward miners:
The cost of mining ATOMIC is much lower by comparison than the cost of mining Bitcoin or Litecoin. Instead of setting up miners with expensive ASICs, crypto-currency enthusiasts may profit by running the ATOMIC software on just about any platform you could imagine from Raspberry Pi's and desktops to VPS instances. What this means for miners is much more steady as well as larger profit margins which are influenced more by participation in the network than the total hashrate of the network.
Fees:
The fees on the ATOMIC network will serve to reward both the miners and asset holders. The standard transaction fees required by blockchain technology will be rewarded directly to the miners (according to the Proof Of Gateway protocol described earlier).
The asset holders will receive dividends in the form of the accumulation of non-Atom transaction fees. For example if user A with Bitcoin wants to send money to user B who only wants Litecoin, user A will pay a tiny fee in Bitcoin to a special address that will initiate the exchange. Due to the nature of the ATOMIC network, the exchange requires that the user also have enough Atoms in their wallet to cover the transaction fee to the miners.
This process gives the power to set the price of Atoms to the nodes on the network while also rewarding asset holders directly with fees collected by the exchange process.
