Slow blockchains is a big Issue, who will solve it first?
In the beginning of 2018, I saw the picture below on https://howmuch.net/articles/crypto-transaction-speeds-compared and was actually stunned by the speed, or should I say lack of it, when looking at the classic crypto currencies.
This made me realize even more than i already did, that Blockchains have a common problems, they are all slow, bitcoin does 5-7 Transfers per second(TPS) and the faster version BTCH, about 60, which is essentially nothing if you wish to compete with the likes of VISA. These currencies will only work as a store of value, never be used by companies like Amazon as payment method, that would not be practical due to the slow speeds. To add a possibility of scaling, Quarkchain and Zilliqa is trying out protocols that involves "shard technology" and Credits recently did 488,000 TPS in a alpha test with a new type of protocol and is moving along with the pre-beta stage. The numbers sure sounds great, and this might be what is needed for mass adoption!
QuarkChain
To make crypto currencies usable as payment methods we need to make them faster, much faster, and blow capacity like that of VISA with 40,000 transfers per second, out of the water. So far blockchains have failed at completing this massive task, even ripple struggles with 1,500 TPS, but two projects are just setting new records.
Quarkchain is about to do a public sale, no exact date is set, but late may or early June and have had a low speed test at 10,000 transfers per second but they are aiming at preforming 100,000 in the next testing and in the future scale to 1,000,000 transfers per second, which is 25 times that of VISA with only a maximum of 40,000 TPS.
So what is special about quarkchain ?
They use sharding technology which allows another layer of transactions, not just adding nodes which ultimately only enables linear growth, and would require huge amounts of computers to ever get close to the speed proposed by Quarkchain.
Sharding is a way to split large data bases into smaller and faster ones, called shards, which means "part of a bigger whole". It is a well known way of partitioning, which in it´s turn is a way to logically divide e.g. an hard drive into multiple devices, as seen by the file-system. Operating on smaller logical devices enables much higher speeds, then to search all of the one big hard drive!
Credits
I have bought some credits by now, ever since they hit the markets in early mars and I am still buying more with my KuCoin bonus, Credits is in the perfect price range to buy with my bonus every few days. They did an alpha test I heard about with 400,000+ transfers per second and jumped on the wagon directly.
Credits have since performed stable in both bear and bull markets, making it an excellent store of value, even though speed is its primary focus.
Now they are doing an Beta test and they hope to reach 1,000,000 transfers per second. Now this is something completely else, look at the speed of existing blockchains:
There are 130,000,000 Credits Issued to date so just having a 1000 or 2, might be huge when they go out of beta mode into full release and adaptation starts.
So how do they do it? what is special with Credits?
They did a news post on 12th of April with 7 main reasons why credits is so fast!
- Credits platform is built for fast transfer, it use assembler language for the time consuming or memory intensive program parts, renders them subprograms and then merge them with higher level code.
Speed is raised through the optimization of a computing algorithm and more sound core memory access, data redistribution, spreadsheet calculations of functions.
- Making data packages smaller by dividing the bigger transactions or pool of transactions into smaller datagrams of ~65,000b
- And much more, read the full post above!
The credits team is very active on social media and often post for many days in a row, updating and taking feedback from the community.
There were some controversy early on, where they used timestamps and MD5 when generating keys, but this was addressed and top algorithms are now deployed going in to pre beta.
I think if you want to fake something, why go so far as almost 500,000 TPS ? and why the specific 488,000 which was "proved" with a video. The activity and transparency on social media also points to the dedication and perhaps honesty of the credits team.
Zilliqa
Just a quick mention of another coin on KuCoin exchange that also uses sharding technology just like Quarkchain and that is Zilliqa. Zilliqa have also had a great performed during the slow market periods recently. Sadly, I haven't had the time to stack many of these, so I am focusing on Credits and Quarkchain. Zilliqa did a few thousand TPS and are working with technology capable of exponential scaling according to the team.
Node technology alone do not allow for scaling on the same level as it does with shard tech, according to the Zilliqa team. This sure will help when talking to financial institutes and e-commerce companies or any retail really, about adopting blockchain payment methods.
Availability
Credits and Zilliqa is lsited at KuCoin exchange, my favorite exchange alongside with Binance exchange which also has Zilliqa listed. The pre sale of Quarkchain is about to start soom, which is great and I hope to get in.
Will cover some other type of platforms of interest that is in ICO mode right now, if you can't wait, check out The Abyss or LocalCoinSwap a gaming platform on blockchain and a P2P crypto exchange, paying out 100% of the income to token holders.
Hope you enjoyed the post and learned a thing or two, if you did, feel free to use my referral link when signing up on KuCoin exchange
Thanks!
Disclaimer: This is not investment tips and ALWAYS do you own research. I would never invest in something I do not understand the purpose of. Lastly, it is wise to never use money you can't afford to lose when investing.