The Progress of 4 Major Scalability Solutions

Editor's Note: This article comes fromWanxiang Blockchain (ID: gh_1b8639a25429), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Wanxiang Blockchain (ID: gh_1b8639a25429)

Wanxiang Blockchain (ID: gh_1b8639a25429)

, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

In terms of security and decentralization, the blockchain is impeccable, but in terms of scalability (measured by TPS), it cannot be compared with the existing centralized system at all. When the Bitcoin blockchain achieves 4 TPS, VISA is 1700 TPS. Ethereum, which supports smart contracts and DApps, averages about 10 TPS per day and can reach up to 20 TPS.

In 2017, the blockchain game "Cryptokitty" incident sounded the alarm for the limitations of the Ethereum PoW (Proof of Work) consensus algorithm, and also made people in the industry realize our shortcomings in technical performance. But fortunately, this has made blockchain developers pay more attention to the scalability of blockchain, and has proposed many solutions for this.

Have these programs progressed? Let's take a look at the latest developments on a few of these major solutions.

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Ethereum 2.0, generally known as the Serenity version of Ethereum, is a chain developed independently of Ethereum 1.0. And the official said that Ethereum 2.0 will not functionally replace Ethereum 1.0 within 3-5 years.

Sharding is a popular technique used in centralized databases, where the entire dataset is divided into many small shards. In the blockchain network, fragmentation is used to decompose the transaction into small fragments and store them distributedly in the entire network, so that each node does not have to download and save the entire blockchain state. Through parallelization, sharding can significantly increase transaction processing speed.

According to the Ethereum disclosure, the deployment date for the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 is now set for July 2020.

off-chain state channel

Before sharding became popular, the philosophy of developers was to "patch" off-chain state channels. A state channel is a two-way communication channel between network participants, enabling them to conduct transactions outside the blockchain and then broadcast the final state of the transaction to the blockchain."Since all intermediate transactions happen off-chain, and only the final state is verified on the blockchain, state channels can reduce transaction times exponentially."Bitcoin's Lightning network, Ethereum's Raiden and Celer networks all use this method."secondary title"DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) is another scalability solution that is popular among blockchain developers.

Directed

It means that it is not enough to form a closed loop. In DAG, there is no concept of block, its constituent unit is a transaction, and each unit records the transaction of a single user, which saves the time for packaging and producing blocks. The verification method relies on the verification of the previous transaction by the latter transaction. In other words, if you want to conduct a transaction, you must verify the previous transaction, and verify several transactions according to different rules. This verification method enables DAG to write many transactions asynchronously and concurrently, and finally forms a topological tree structure, which can greatly improve scalability.

Compared with the traditional blockchain, there are no transaction blocks in the DAG network, and individual transactions are mutually verified with each other. So in theory, the larger the transaction volume, the faster the DAG verification speed will be.

COTI released the MultiDAG protocol and integrated it into its mainnet node, which is the first DAG-based protocol.

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lightning network

The Lightning Network, an ultra-fast payments layer on the bitcoin blockchain that allows users to conduct transactions quickly and cheaply, has also made significant progress in the past few months. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the scale on Layer-2 reached 10,000 nodes.

Bitcoin's blockchain mechanism provides good credibility assurance, but it is slow. From another point of view, for a large number of small transactions, is such a high reliability really necessary? The idea of ​​the Lightning Network is very simple: put a large number of transactions outside the Bitcoin blockchain, and use smart contracts to improve the transaction channels under the chain.

There are two core concepts of Lightning Network: RSMC (Recoverable Sequence Maturity Contract) and HTLC (Hashed Timelock Contract).

RSMC is similar to the reserve mechanism. It first assumes that there is a "micro-payment channel" (fund pool) between the two parties of the transaction. Both parties pre-deposit a part of the funds in the "micro-payment channel", and after each transaction, they will jointly confirm the fund distribution plan after the transaction, and sign to invalidate the old version at the same time. When withdrawal is required, the final transaction result is written to the blockchain network and finally confirmed. In other words, only when withdrawing money needs to go through the blockchain. Any version of the scheme needs to be signed and certified by both parties to be legal. Any party can propose a withdrawal at any time, and the withdrawal needs to provide a fund distribution plan signed by both parties.The micropayment channel is realized through HTLC. This is actually a time-limited transfer, which is very simple to understand. Through the smart contract, the two parties agree that the transfer party will first freeze a sum of money and provide a hash value. If someone can propose a string within a certain period of time, it will be hashed. matches the known value (actually means that the transferor authorized the recipient to withdraw cash), then the money is transferred to the recipient.

Solving scalability is only the basis for the widespread application of blockchain, and the progress of scalability solutions has also made the large-scale application of blockchain more and more a reality.Wanxiang blockchain has been sparing no effort to promote the application of blockchain. At present, projects in many fields have been implemented and good progress has been made:

supply chain finance:A new high! The amount of financing on the Wanxiang blockchain supply chain financial service platform exceeded 250 million!

Automobile vehicle logistics supply chain:

A number of enterprises have raised more than 10 million RMB through the "Yunlian Alliance"Every penny can be tracked! Wanxiang blockchain uses technology to help "anti-epidemic"

DAG

lightning network

BlockchainScalability Solutions [An Overview]