Bitcoin & Ethereum are the buzzwords we always hear about in the media but behind the scenes there are hundreds Blockchain projects in the works. Similar to the early days of the internet, these companies are competing for innovation and dominance. Fueling the force are the ICO’s (Initial Coin Offerings) that fund founders and team members and the frenzy like crowds chasing after the hope that these companies will one day become significant players in the space. Most of these Blockchain projects are still speculative because not much has actually launched on them besides more ICO’s and I am referring to Ethereum, which has seen hundreds of ICO’s launched across it’s platform. Now, we are seeing NEO also launching Dapps (Decentralized Applications) including market data (Red Pulse), AI (Deep Brain Chain), Identity (The Key VIP) Decentralized Exchanges (NEX) etc. We will see the same happening with competing Blockchains like Icon (ICX), and they may very well end up being regionally controlled and its safe to say that Icon is South Korea’s native Blockchain.
0chain is headed by Saswata Basu who is based in Silicon Valley, California, and we all know the incredible technological advances that have been born in that region. Saswata received his PHD from UCLA in Electrical Engineering. He has a background as both a developer and CTO of Guruhubb, a local company focusing on FinTech, IoT, Mobility, Security, Cloud, AI, and of course Blockchain.
“Our Blockchain is designed to execute a Smart Contract within a sub-second using and n-dimensial, deterministic, Byzantine, DPOS Blockchain system, so that one piece of Smart Contract does not have to wait minutes or an hour for the result of the next one. Our speed is the result of an efficient consensus set made up of just 3 primary miners, 6 secondary miners, with a bench pool to shuffle the miners in every n cycle. Such unparalleled efficiency and speed is achieved without compromising network disruption, malicious attacks, data withholding, and data manipulation.”
High Speed & Free
One of the most important aspects of a Blockchain is it’s speed. We have seen this issue arise in Bitcoin with long transaction times, causing the masses to question the uses of it. Ethereum, being much faster is still facing network congestion issues. 0chain is aiming to improve the block time and act in a sub-second depending on the application. Analytics or AI (Artificial Intelligence) application could take up to 2-minutes, so we see the focus on 0chain being speed of transactions. The chain can also be fine tuned when using bank grade chains. They will also have a feature called “self-forking” which will allow new chains to evolve decoupled from the native token value.
Another benefit that 0chain will bring is the free storage capability. Hence the name “0chain” meaning 0 cost. This is done through controlling the inflation rate of Tokens for Miners. The infrastructure is divided into CPU, RAM, and SSD designating different duties to the Miners, Sharders and Blobbers. (Generate Blocks, store Blocks, store data). DApps (Decentralized Apps) will be built on the 0chain platform allowing them to also have free storage which could be an incredibly massive draw if this works. This is done through token value of each DApp and is designed to control inflation over 100 years. I would not say that 0chain is necessarily competing with Ethereum per se, EOS, or Filecoin (similar project) they are offering different use cases and network incentives. 0chain will act as a compliment to DApps. Although it is very early stage, I think the project is incredibly ambitious and could be a game changer for the Blockchain space. We should begin to see some major developments happening Q4 2018. It’s too early to tell whether or not 0chain will reach these goals but there is no doubt that this is a very cool project.