The founders of cryptocurrency exchange Cobinhood are commissioning the development of a new blockchain capable of processing 1 million transactions per second, a massive undertaking given that Bitcoin transaction can take hours to complete and Ethereum transactions range from 1-5 minutes, with even Visa’s ~2000 tx/s being dwarfed in comparison.
The company behind the project is DEXON, which is focused on blockchain mass adoption within the banking industry and real-world application requirements.
DEXON reports that the new blockchain technology uses a blocklattice structure that meshes multiple chains together to form what the company claims to be an infinitely scalable, low-latency decentralized transaction processing engine. The company was launched by the executive team of the zero-fee crypto exchange Cobinhood, and the $20 million funding round that just closed was led by IDG Capital, a venture capital firm which manages over $20 billion in assets. The funding round also drew investments from various angel investors.
While it sounds far-fetched, the company claim to have already recorded test transaction speeds at 50 blocks per second or approximately 1 million transactions throughout 25 nodes, with each block being 2MB and each transaction being 100 bytes on average.
“Clearly, investors believe in DEXON’s ‘blocklattice’ protocol, which is underpinned by consensus algorithms that allow for transaction speeds competitive with major credit card companies,” said Popo Chen, founder of Cobinhood and co-founder of the non-profit DEXON Foundation. “In fact, we hope to partner with these institutions, as we’re now able to offer the same processing power without a need for centralization. Other than DEXON, current blockchain protocols can only process a few secure transactions per second, leaving them unable to keep pace with traditional solutions.”
Through the use of a blocklattice structure along with a total-ordering consensus algorithm, DEXON claims to be able to make decentralized transactions scalable. Unlike traditional blockchain systems that build encrypted blocks linearly, DEXON’ s blocklattice features multiple blockchains that work together in parallel, which DEXON execs say makes it easier to scale automatically and energy-efficiently.
“With its fundamentally new architecture, the DEXON network is poised to become the world’s first mainstream blockchain,” said Wei-Ning Huang, co-founder of DEXON. “Investors are recognizing that there is a problem with current blockchain technology, and that the protocol most focused on throughput and scalability will form the basis of Blockchain 4.0. These tests prove that the blocklattice works, and this funding is proof that investors trust DEXON’ s strategy over the long term.”
Launched earlier, the DEXON blockchain will be the fastest in the world by a long shot — if it works. The difficulties in scaling blockchains are well-documented at this stage, and with an enormous undertaking like DEXON it remains to be seen whether the block lattice structure can scale as advertised. However, if the design is as advertised, the blocklattice system may be about to make a major impact on the cryptocurrency and blockchain landscape.
Images from Shutterstock
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