By The smartest academic minds in the USA are collectively joining forces and brain power in an effort to create a new cryptocurrency which will essentially do what Bitcoin has failed to do so far and that is process thousands of transactions per second.
Professors from seven USA-based universities including Stanford, University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have teamed up to build a digital asset in hopes of achieving new speeds that Bitcoin and other crypto token users can have always dreamed of.
Dubbed the Unit-e, it will be the first project of Distributed Technology Research, which is a non-profit foundation formed by the academics from the seven universities which is backed by Pantera Capital Management LP, a hedge fund.
As we all know, Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and goes down in history as the very first payment network which allows users to carry out direct transactions on a trustless system without having to rely on a central authority as is the case with traditional fiat-based financial institutions.
While bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do have their own niche followings, due to the lack of scalability currently found, mainstream adoption is yet to happen. This is where our academic minds come in. They are said to be designing a new virtual asset which is expected to be able to process transactions even faster than that of Visa or Mastercard.
Joey Krug, co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital stated:
“The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale. We are on the cusp of something where if this doesn’t scale relatively soon, it may be relegated to ideas that were nice but didn’t work in practice: more like 3D printing than the internet.’’
DTR has claimed that they will launch Unit-e during the second half of 2019 with the ambitious goal of processing as many as 10,000 transactions per second. That is a massive jump up from the current average of between 3.3 and 7 seconds for Bitcoin and 10 to 30 for the Ethereum network. Unit-e is also set to be even quicker that Visa, which is a centralised network, currently capable of processing up to 1700 transactions per second.
The issue with Bitcoin’s scalability is a function of how it was designer. The frequency found within how fast new blocks can be created and their maximum size is capped.
How Can Faster Speeds Be Achieved?
In order to achieve the dream that is faster speeds and scalability, DTR set out to completely reverse engineer the blockchain technology upon which most cryptocurrencies are built upon in an effort to improve every aspect of it claimed Pramod Viswanath, a researcher working on the initiative and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. DTR ‘s first port of call was to understand the fundamentals of blockchain technology’s performance and limitations so that they could design improved technologies which operate within these limitations as closely as possible.
The academics working with DTR at this point have already published a myriad of papers pertaining to all aspects of blockchain technology and are relying on fresh mechanisms which they created for reaching consesnsu. They’ve also explored new ways of sharding, which is a process where each node maintains only part of a blockchain thus, effectively increasing speeds and new payment channel networks so that they can achieve the desired transactions speeds.
That’s not to say that the crypto community doesn’t have other parties who are making moves to improve upon Bitcoins scalability issues, there are a number of other initiatives in play to find ways to increase transactions speeds. Notable efforts include the Lightning Network, which was designed to increase the speeds of crypto payments as well as make it cheaper through the removal of recording every transaction taking place on the blockchain. Another company known as Segregated Witness or SegWit are also exploring avenues to create faster transactions.
Of course, success for the Unit-e project is not set in stone. In the long-term, the most innovative technology will win but the short-term poses the risk that the new currency might fail to gain the traction it needs, according to Andrew Miller, head of Unit-e’s independent technical steering committee.
This Swiss-based foundation has assembled professionals in the fields of economics, computer science and cryptography and is comprised of members from Carnegie Mellon University as well as the University of Washington and Southern California. Funded by Pantera and private entities according to Chairman Babak Dastmaltschi who declined to provide any further details.
While Unit-e is the group’s first project, their future work could possibly include smart contracts, stated Viswanath:
“Bitcoin has shown us that distributed trust is possible but its just not scaling at a dimension that could make it a truly global everyday money,” said Viswanath. “It was a breakthrough that has the capacity to change human lives but that won’t happen unless the technology can be scaled up.
Could these academic minds truly be creating the next step for transaction speeds for cryptocurrencies? Let us know your thoughts by commenting below.
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