Announcing 0chain Testnet Release
The dawn of a new era in cloud computing and transactions has just begun.
We have taken the first step towards building the “blockchain cloud”. The testnet showcases “sub-second” finality, which merely happens to be the FASTEST BLOCKCHAIN IN THE WORLD. Check out our demo at https://0chain.net/media.
Currently we have 6 miner nodes and 2 sharder nodes distributed equally among the AWS regions of California and Canada. In the coming weeks we will increase the profile of the number of miners and sharders, global presence of the nodes, and the number of transactions.
Our first release has a throughput of about 150 transactions per second (TPS) or about 10x that of Ethereum. The purpose of the initial release is to highlight the sub-second finality of our blockchain, which is a requirement for enterprise applications and for our distributed storage protocol. In addition, sub-second finality enhances capital efficiency of our economy — imagine credit card transactions, stock and derivative trading settlements, and wire transfers becoming near instantaneous. You can envision a point-of-sale credit card transaction, where the business gets credited instantly instead of waiting days for the funds to settle in their bank account.
While a lot of folks in our community has wanted to see an earlier release of our testnet, we think our testnet release is at a record pace, unparalled by any team in the history of blockchain development. Just to keep things in perspective, unlike most other testnets, we have written the code from scratch. If you look at other innovative projects such as Ethereum, Tezos, EOS, Filecoin, and Dfinity, they have either not released a public testnet or have taken longer than a year to develop the code. Implementation of a new protocol takes time.
Our consensus protocol is a variant of the Dfinity protocol. For example, we have the concept of sharders (nodes that store blocks), and a smaller set of miners (nodes that generate, verify, and finalize blocks). However, we are aligned with the concept of multiple block generators (producers) so that one generator is not vulnerable to a DDoS attack or network unavailability. We are also aligned in our thinking that verification needed to be done simultaneously, to have a faster throughput and finality. There are other variations which will be detailed in the upcoming white paper later this year.
Developers and Enterprises
The release of our testnet is to showcase the performance of our code, but it is not public yet, and will be made sometime before the mainnet. We will have SDK and APIs for developers to work with the blockchain. Our professional services team will work with enterprises and developers to help them set up an environment such as a cluster on AWS or on their private cloud to experiment with different applications. The plan for enterprises is to have them familiarize with our blockchain, and run applications internally, before they have the confidence to replicate it publicly by self-forking from our main chain.
But for now, enterprises, developers and crypto enthusiasts can try out our web wallet and block explorer, and be excited with how fast transactions get finalized, something that has never been seen before.
What’s next for 0chain?
As we communicated these past few months, this is a big day for 0chain, the team is in high spirits and extremely thrilled about this new stage. Stay tuned over the next several weeks and months, as we will release information on how our community can interact with the testnet, and how they can help test critical features. While we are working hard on delivering on our tough roadmap, we will share new partnerships over the coming weeks.
For more information about 0chain, visit our website, and join our community.
Warm regards,
The 0chain Team
More info on 0chain:
Website: 0chain.net
Email: zero@0chain.net
Twitter: @0costcloud
Telegram: https://t.me/Ochain
Medium: https://medium.com/0chain
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/yd2hm34q
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/0chain/
Facebook: https://facebook.com/0chain
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/0chain
