US academics are working together to create a new and improved cryptocurrency in a bid to rival Bitcoin.
According to Bloomberg, professors from seven US colleges (including MIT, University of California, Standford University, and Berkely) are looking to create a digital currency capable of processing thousands of transactions a second without sacrificing the basic principle of decentralization.
The project is run by Distributed Technology Research (DTR), a non-profit organization established by academics with support from Pantera Capital Management LP to develop decentralized technologies.
Unit-e, the digital currency currently in the works, is the DTR’s first initiative.Bitcoin’s problems
Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology’s processing capability is limited by an average block creation time of 10 minutes, and the block size limit. Despite various proposed and active solutions, Bitcoin’s transaction processing capacity is estimated to be between 3.3 and 7 transactions per second. In contrast, Ethereum is able to support 10 to 30 transactions per second.
Despite the emergence of many altcoins over the years, Bitcoin is credited with being the first digital currency and trustless peer-to-peer payment network. It’s built up somewhat of a cult following among anarchists, developers, and speculators but has failed to gain mainstream adoption.
Joey Krug, co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital in San Francisco and a member of the DTR council, told Bloomberg:
The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale. We are on the cusp of something where if this doesn’t scale relatively soon, it may be relegated to ideas that were nice but didn’t work in practice: more like 3D printing than the internet.
Conscious that they’re up against a complex issue, the academics working on Unit-e are leveraging new instruments for reaching consensus.
They are relying on sharding – a process used to ensure that each node will only hold a part of the data on the blockchain, and not the entire set of information – and new payment channel networks to increase speed.
Pramod Viswanath, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign working on the project, said:
Bitcoin has shown us that distributed trust is possible but it’s just not scaling at a dimension that could make it a truly global everyday money. It was a breakthrough that has the capacity to change human lives but that won’t happen unless the technology can be scaled up.
Unit-e is expected to launch in the second half of this year and its proponents hope it will be able to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second, which far surpasses Visa’s capability to process around 1,700.https://www.itechnologyupdates.com/us-academics-say-their-shardy-blockchain-will-be-10x-faster-than-visa.html ....
Here we have yet another ambitious blockchain startup claiming to have solved the "scaling" issue!
Will their claims pan out in terms of producing a viable real world application with tangible advantages over existing infrastructure or platforms? We will see!
I haven't looked into "sharding processes" and have no idea what they are or whether they could conceivably be utilized to produce a crypto currency with a transaction per second rate superior to credit cards. The concept originates from a consortium of college professors which could give it a little more credibility than the average ICO being promoted by Floyd Mayweather. Its nice to see crypto may still has some excitement to offer.
They're claiming an upper theoretical limit of 10,000 transactions per second, we can see if it pans out.