A paper outlining solutions to blockchain scalability
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Blockchain Camp (ID: blockchain_camp)
Blockchain Camp (ID: blockchain_camp)
, Author: Rohit Chatterjee, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
It turns out that scalability is the biggest obstacle to the adoption of blockchain technology today. While Bitcoin is impeccable in terms of security and decentralization, it's a different story when it comes to scalability (measured in TPS, or transactions per second). Compared with Visa's 1700 TPS, Bitcoin's 4 TPS is indeed pitiful.
A report by Deloitte (Deloitte) pointed out: For enterprises that rely on high-performance traditional transaction processing systems, the slow transaction speed of the blockchain is a serious problem that cannot be avoided.
Disasters such as these have forced blockchain developers to pay serious attention to the scalability issues plaguing existing blockchain networks, and to be fully prepared to face such issues in future blockchain projects.
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BTC's low TPS has been a concern for years
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Ethereum 2.0 - the savior
While Bitcoin has become the poster child for blockchain technology, Ethereum has also earned a reputation as "the world's most important decentralized supercomputer." DApp developers around the world regularly deploy new applications on Ethereum.
Eth 2.0：
Recently, the total value in the crypto DeFi market has crossed the $1 billion mark!
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Sharding in the blockchain
The total value of assets locked in the DeFi market even reached $1.2 billion
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Sharding in the blockchain
In addition to moving to PoS, Eth 2.0 developers have also integrated sharding, a popular technique used in centralized databases where entire datasets are split into smaller shards.
Ethereum is not the first blockchain project to implement sharding, the first using Zilliqa. Other projects such as Cardano, Harmony, and Elrond have also been working to integrate sharding into blockchain technology.
But unfortunately, the development team of Eth 2.0 has made many changes to the release time. From January 2020 to the so-called "internal date" Q2 2020, the deployment date for the first phase of Eth 2.0 has now been pushed back to July 2020.
These uncertainties make us wonder when we will see the full picture of Eth 2.0, but it is still worth looking forward to.
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Other Blockchain Scalability Solutions
Developers have been tinkering with the concept of "off-chain state channels" long before sharding became popular. A state channel is a two-way communication channel between network participants that enables them to conduct transactions outside of the blockchain and then broadcast the final state of the transaction to the blockchain.
DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) is another concept popular among blockchain developers looking for scalable solutions. In a DAG, each transaction can be connected to multiple transactions.
Therefore, in theory, the larger the transaction volume, the faster the DAG verification will be. Iota, Nano, and COTI are all encryption projects based on DAG technology.
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Iota's DAG (called Tangle) connects each transaction to multiple other transactions
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recent progress
Last month (February 2020), Harmony launched its mainnet and announced tokens ranging from ERC-20 (Ethereum) and BEP-2 (Binance Chain) tokens to native ONE (Harmony) tokens exchange.
While token swaps from public blockchains to local blockchains are very common, it is unique in that Harmony is the first project to implement a PoS sharded blockchain.
According to its blockchain explorer, Harmony has a block time of 8 seconds and has 4 active shards.
This is important for other PoS projects looking to implement sharding, such as Eth 2.0 and Cardano. For a long time, the symbiosis of PoS consensus and sharding was considered a purely theoretical concept.
The success of Harmony not only shows that it can be applied in practice, but also paves the way for Ethereum to implement a sharded, PoS-enabled blockchain, making blockchain enthusiasts believe that Eth 2.0 is expected to come out in the short term.
The Lightning Network acts as an ultra-fast payment layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing users to send and receive BTC quickly and cheaply. The network has also made significant progress over the past few months.
In the fourth quarter of 2019, its second layer scaling project reached 10,000 nodes. In December 2019, its development team announced that it would soon be possible to use the network for large bitcoin payments.
In terms of DAG, COTI has launched the token issuance protocol MultiDAG and integrated it into the mainnet node.
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glorious future
There are a lot of blockchain scalability projects out there, but few of them actually achieve their goals
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glorious future
Since 2017, we have been thinking "faster blockchain transaction speed leads to higher adoption and more real use cases". DeFi has grown into an important part of the blockchain space.
Greater scalability should lead to more DeFi use cases, including faster remittances and cross-border payments, among others.
