Ethereum has consistently been the number two cryptocurrency in terms of market cap and has seen an extraordinary amount of growth over the past couple of years with numerous projects built on the network. Yet despite all this success, there are many concerns regarding Ethereum and its scalability, decentralization, and security.
What is GoChain?
GoChain is a smart contract blockchain aimed at solving the present issues faced by the Ethereum platform, which are decentralization, energy consumption, and speed.
1. Decentralization: The Problems of POW and Benefits of POR
"About 4 companies in China account for 70-80% of all the mining activity for all the major coins/tokens including Ethereum." This effectively means that 70-80% of all the major coins/tokens including Ethereum are being controlled by China. Which makes it just about a little more decentralized when compared to JP morgan bank, but is still far from the ideal view of a truly decentralized cryptocurrency. This is one of the major problems faced by a proof-of-work (POW) cryptocurrency.
GoChain works on Proof of Reputation (POR), which is based off of proof-of-authority (POA). POR allows an organization to stake their reputation in order to validate blocks instead of staking computer power. Thus, POR will mitigate one sole entity from being able to own 70-80% (or even all) of the computer power, and thus effectively having complete control over a network. Additionally, "the companies chosen to play the roles of validators will be distributed across 50 different countries to ensure a form of decentralization that is not dependent on any given countries agenda or regulation policies. With this distribution system, the possibility of a 51% attack becomes highly unlikely."
2. Energy Consumption: The Cost of POW
In addition to the problems of manipulation through ownership faced by POW networks, POW networks are extremely energy inefficient. This is why energy consumption is one of the main problems faced by many POW networks.
A reasonable cost estimate of power is approximately 12.6 cents/kwh, which is the national average for retail power rates in the U.S.. So in order to run a mining rig, you will likely pay around 12.6 cents/1,000 watts for each hour. This means the average daily cost of mining for one rig will cost, on average, $3.02 in electricity alone in the United States.
However, keep in mind this cost is per rig. Therefore, as you can see the use of electricity and energy consumption grows exponentially as you will need more and more rigs as the difficulty of mining each block increases with time as shown on the graph. This is because block difficulty shares an inverse relationship with time. Consequently, each day, the mining difficulty gets harder, which requires more efficient mining machines and more energy in order to maintain profitability.
Since GoChain is based off a POR network it will be 1000 times more energy efficient, due to its ability to bypass the limitations faced by a POW based network.
3. GoChain: Benefits of 100x the transaction speed
"The Ethereum network can only handle 13 transactions per second." This is a major problem in terms of scalability. Imagine a system with millions of users and a system that is only able to handle 13 transactions a second. To put this into another perspective, VISA can handle on average around 1,700 transactions per second, whereas PayPal could handle around about 200 transactions per second.
GoChain "currently handles 1300-2400 transactions per second." Not only is this transaction speed in par with VISA but is also about 100x faster than that of Ethereum. As a result, transaction fees for GoChain will be lower compared to that of Ethereums'. In addition, to lower transaction fees, increased transaction speed will also help to improve existing services and enable new projects that were limited by Ethereums' slow transaction speed.
To make matters even better, GoChain is designed for immediate integration with Ethereum based networks, which will allow developers and existing Ethereum based projects to transition their projects from the Ethereum network to GoChain. This will help developers smoothly transition from one network to another without having to abandon their previous projects.
GoChain Token Sale
GoChain will be starting their ICO pre-sale on May 1st. The ICO pre-sale will run for two weeks, until May 15th, 2018. Then the ICO will be held the following two weeks from May 16th, 2018 to May 31st, 2018.
Taking a look at GoChain's Roadmap, its easy to see that GoChain is not only a proof-of-concept but also has a functioning system as their TestNet "has proven to be able to perform 1300 transactions per second," which you can read more about at the GoChain Test Result Publication.
Looking further down the road in Q4 of 2018, GoChain will be looking to implement some impressive features such as Next generation smart contracts and even faster transaction speeds reaching as fast as 13,000 transactions per second in Q2 of 2019.
With all of these great developments in the pipeline for the coming year, it's easy to see that GoChain has a lot to offer and will be looking to solve some of the biggest obstacles currently faced by the Ethereum platform.
This is definitely one ICO you should be excited about as the pre-sale ICO gets ready to launch!