Huobi is going to publish a new report about the status of the global blockchain industry. The report, entitled “Global Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects (2018 H1)”, has been produced by Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application (the R&D branch of Huobi). Such report has yet to be made public, it will be presented for the first time at the event called “Blockchain Festival Vietnam” in Ho Chi Min City on 24-25/05/2018. In this article we are allowed to give a short preview of the report which covers everything from the crypto-asset market and the blockchain industry to the technology itself and the market regulation. Specifically, we are going to present the fourth part of the report, “Blockchain Technology overview and prospects” (Part 4), which covers public/permissioned/private blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
The report.
The report starts by describing the life cycle of blockchain technology:
- Layer (Stage) 1, Distributed communication network
- Layer (Stage) 2, Distributed ledger
- Layer (Stage) 3, Decentralized and open economic ecosystem
According to the report we are now at Stage 3, trying to build mission critical applications (smart contracts/DAOs) using blockchains.
The report goes on describing the main obstacles that open blockchains face today, namely scalability issues (e.g. BTC 5/7 TPS vs VISA Thousands TPS), consensus algorithms (POW, POS, DPOS, PBFT), transaction verification mechanisms (sidechains and state-channels, Sharding, Sub-chains), privacy solutions (CoinJoin -Dash-, Ring signature –Monero-, Zero-Knowledge Proof –Zcash-, Invisible internet project –Verge-), interoperability issue (they present some new solution, e.g. Relay, Sidechains, Hash locking, distributed private key management).
Let’s take a look at the “Sharding” solutions for scalability. According to the report, Zilliqa (one of the best market performer of 2018) is testing (online under the name of “Red Shrimp” since March 31,2018) a sharding solution to clear transactions. The idea is to divide a blockchain network into many separate, independent areas, called "shards", and each shard is assigned to a small group of nodes whose job is to clear the transactions and secure that part of the network.
They are also developing a “state sharding” solution which should allow the nodes of a network to store different pieces of data in different nodes, so that a single node is only responsible for saving a portion of the database/blockchain/ledger and not the whole amount of data as usually happens for bitcoin nodes.
Currently, Rchain, Emotiq, Zilliqa and Ethereum etc. are all exploring compatibility solutions in state-sharding, cross-shard communications.
A great deal of importance is given to “The Emergence of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) other than Blockchain” and some of the best solutions in the industry are examined. We find “Directed Acyclic Graph” (DAG) used in IOTA, Byteball or Nano.
Lastly, they provide a description of Hashgraph, a new DLT based on a protocol called “Gossip about Gossip”. It is aimed at the enterprise sector and has already been able to handle 250 thousand transactions per second (TPS). Hashgraph technology can be used only in a permissioned environment (consortium blockchains) because of its vulnerability to network attack. The network can tolerate 1/3 of malicious nodes, if this threshold is passed the whole system would crash, this makes it incompatible with a public blockchain environment.
The full report will be made available for free (and exclusively) to the attendees of the Blockchain Festival Vietnam.
Event details.
Blockchain Festival Vietnam is organized by Huobi.pro and Kyber Network, the festival will host more than 30 speakers and 1600 participants (and more than $100,000 worth of airdrops!)
Date: 24 & 25 May 2018, 9am to 6pm
Venue address: Gem Centre, 08 Nguyen Binh Khiem St, 1 District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Blockchain Festival ticketing page: http://bit.ly/2HqPpwA
Blockchain Festival info: https://www.blockchainfestival.com/
Huobi.pro and Hadax info: www.huobi.pro www.hadax.com
Sign up for the tickets using the code “WRITE50” for a 50% discount.