A computer professor from Cornell known for his work on the fundamentals of distributed systems will soon launch a new blockchain project.
Announced today at the annual conference of etheric developers, Devcon3, Elaine Shi explains that the upcoming work will be based on the thunderella protocol – a paper that She co-wrote with Professor Rafael Pass this year. Called thunder token, the effort aims to solve a problem common to blockchains, their inability to accommodate a significant number of users.
In today 's speech, Shi proclaimed that the Thunder Token could be capable of reaching speeds 1000 times greater than the technologies available today. In addition, just like other projects that have emerged recently, they do not rely on a chain of blocks, at least not entirely.
While in more traditional blockchain systems, blocks must be validated for transactions to occur, it is a time-consuming process, about 10 minutes per block in bitcoin, for example .
In this way, Shi sought to represent the thunder token as a quick and evolutionary protocol – the "dream of a large-scale consensus" – one that she believes could be viable for banks and businesses.
Shi explained:
"With cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum, we now have empirical evidence that distributed consensus is now possible on a very large scale on the Internet, we want to replicate that success."
Currently, Shi has stated that blockchain consortia such as R3 and Hyperledger are creating systems suited to these large scale formats, but that there is not enough of it. efforts to rework or improve the boundaries of the underlying protocols. ]
In the thunder token, the protocol proposes a split-set so that the transactions are confirmed very quickly, the blockchain being used only in case of emergency. The rest of the time, the thunder token will use something a little less familiar – a system of agents that follows the direction of a "leader" to vote on transactions that are made according to the rules.
Shi argues that this design is "as simple and robust as a blockchain", but with transaction confirmations in less than a second and built-in security because users can always " falling back into the blockchain [on a] in the worst … case scenario.
Still, he is at the beginning of the idea. Shi said t that the company has just incorporated, and it is not clear if the protocol will be purely private, or open to the public. Today, a website is not even online, and there is no mention of a roadmap for the project.
But while the concept may seem a bit chilly, Shi has advanced a compelling argument that the job might be the one to watch as it evolves towards maturity.
And as Shi reminded the audience:
"Simplicity is your good friend, especially for large-scale distributed systems."
Image of Elaine Shi by Rachel Rose O 'Leary
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