nice article on VNL
http://alt.report/altcoins/item/314-vnl-vanilla-coin-not-as-plain-as-the-nexpanded report
"Vanilla coin was launched in December 2014, currently Being developed by John Connor. Vanillacoin is not a clone of Bitcoin or Peercoin, it was engineered from the ground up and is designed to be innovative and forward-thinking. It prevents eavesdropping and censorship and has security in mind. Vanilla has come a long way from launch, still mineable using the WhirlpoolX algo and has GPU/CPU support. You are are also able to mine Vanilla using FPGA's. Vanilla uses random ports at startup. This means your ISP doesn't know what you're doing just by monitoring your ports, like it can with bitcoin, peercoin or even darkcoin. All TCP network connections are secured using the Elliptic Curve Cryptography Cipher Suites for Transport Layer Security. So all your ISP sees is normal SSL traffic. Vanilla also uses a multitier architecture design that enable it to scale better than any crypto based on a single tier architecture like Bitcoin.
Just looking at their Bitcoin Talk ANN
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/unofficial-vnl-vanillacoin-041-instant-incentivized-innovative-977245 is very well laid out. Its not often you see a alt coin with such a detailed ANN, very professional and transparent with their tech and future plans. They have their typical road map, white paper, and 4 month plan which gives investors a good idea what is in store for Vanilla. According to John Connor this is his full time job and by the looks of the github I cannot dispute that statement.
Some of the features already released and or in the works:
ZERO TIME- Is already implemented, and was the first alt coin to do so. 1 second transactions, and respendable in 2-3 seconds, this is very impressive.
NODE Incentive- 10k VNL to support the network, this is already in place and Super Peers will get a percentage of POW running the Node.
Energy Efficient POS - mobile wallets to use close to 0% of cpu while staking
Miner ++ Is a high performance C++11 cryptographic currency library that is not a clone of the original Satoshi codebase. It is 100% backwards compatible with Peercoin or any derived cryptographic currency.
Dark ++ (Work in progress) A framework for building or extending decentralized DarkNet applicants.
John Connor states that this is just the beginning and to date the releases have not disappointed. I am looking forward to the tech that comes out of Vanilla and hopefully some more mainstream attention due to their groundbreaking updates and released features."